Sade delighted in writing the most extreme, deviant pornography and his repeated use of cunt, rather than the twee euphemisms seen in Fanny Hill, is testament to the cunt’s ascension to being regarded as the most offensive word in the Western world.
Despite their reputation for being sexually repressed, pornography flowed beneath the upper crust of Victorian prudery like the river of slime in Ghostbusters II. There is no doubt that cunt was a thoroughly obscene word. But precisely because of this, Victorian erotica is simply groaning under the weight of cunts. Erotic novels such as The Lustful Turk (1828), The Romance of Lust (1873), Early Experiences of a Young Flagellant (1876) by Rosa Coote, Miss Bellasis Birched for Thieving (1882) by Etonensis, The Autobiography of a Flea (1887) and Venus in India (1889) by ‘Captain Charles Devereaux’ are a veritable blitzkrieg of C-bombs. The Pearl was a pornographic magazine that was published in London from 1879 to 1880, when it was closed down for publishing obscene material. Most editions contained a collection of limericks, or ‘Nursery Rhymes’, that have a lot of fun with cunt.
And it is in the nineteenth century that cunt starts to be used as a general term of abuse. The Oxford English Dictionary places the first known use of cunt as an insult at 1860: ‘And when they got to Charleston, they had to, as is wont/ Look around to find a chairman, and so they took a Cunt’.{38}
Perhaps one of the most significant cunt moments in the twentieth century was the banning and subsequent obscenity trial of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), which contains fourteen cunts (and forty fucks). When Gerald Gould reviewed an edited version in 1932, he noted that ‘passages are necessarily omitted to which the author undoubtedly attached supreme psychological importance – importance so great, that he was willing to face obloquy and misunderstanding and censorship because of them’.{39} The book caused a sensation not only because of its graphic descriptions of sex and women’s sexual pleasure, but because it uses sex to smash down class boundaries. Sex is one of the supreme levellers, and for all her titles, money and privilege, Lady Constance Chatterley has a cunt: she is a sexual being. Sexual desire and pleasure have no understanding of the class system. Lawrence uses the word cunt throughout because it is the only word that can express the yearning, primal sexuality of Constance and subvert the pretensions of a society that viewed women as sexless wives and mothers. Lawrence’s use of cunt is shocking, but also incredibly tender and passionate; for Lawrence, cunt is a truly wonderful thing. One of the pivotal scenes in the novel is where Mellors teaches Constance the difference between cunt and fuck:
‘Th’art good cunt, though, aren’t ter? Best bit o’ cunt left on earth. When ter likes! When tha’rt willin’!’
‘What is cunt?’ she said.
‘An’ doesn’t ter know? Cunt! It’s thee down theer; an’ what I get when I’m i’side thee, and what tha gets when I’m i’side thee; it’s a’ as it is, all on’t.’
‘All on’t,’ she teased. ‘Cunt! It’s like fuck then.’
‘Nay nay! Fuck’s only what you do. Animals fuck. But cunt’s a lot more than that. It’s thee, dost see: an’ tha’rt a lot besides an animal, aren’t ter? – even ter fuck? Cunt! Eh, that’s the beauty o’ thee, lass!’{40}
Cunt: ‘that’s the beauty of thee, lass’ – I don’t think I have heard a more marvellous definition of cunt. Sadly, despite Lawrence’s best efforts and a jury that agreed a work stuffed with cunts does have artistic merit, cunt has yet to be welcomed back to polite society. James Joyce uses one cunt in Ulysses (1922) and calls the Holy Land ‘the grey sunken cunt of the world’.{41} (Though he freely uses cunt in his private erotic letters to his wife, Nora, whom he delightfully calls ‘fuck bird’.) The American Beat poets like the shock of the cunt. In ‘Howl’ (1956) Ginsberg writes about a ‘vision of the ultimate cunt’.{42} But cunt is there to shock. Cunt didn’t make it into mainstream cinema until 1971, in Carnal Knowledge, starring Jack Nicholson and Ann-Margret. Jonathan Fuerst, Nicholson’s character, screams at Bobbie (Ann-Margret): ‘Is this an ultimatum? Answer me, you ball-busting, castrating, son of a cunt bitch!’{43} The Exorcist (1973) uses ‘cunting’ as an adjective twice (i.e. ‘cunting daughter’). There is a third cunt that was cut from the final edit where the troubled Regan tells her doctor he must keep his fingers away from her cunt.{44} Notice that the only cunt that was cut was the one that actually means vulva? This has been true of most cinematic uses of cunt – it is far more often used as an insult than it is to mean the genitals.
As the twentieth century wore on, cunt settled into its role as a powerful insult. The Oxford English Dictionary did not admit cunt until the seventies. But in 2014 the OED added ‘cunty, cuntish, cunted, and cunting’ to the entry under cunt; ‘cunty’ is defined as ‘highly objectionable or unpleasant’; ‘cuntish’ means an ‘objectionable person or behaviour’; ‘cunted’ means to be drunk and ‘cunting’ is an intensifier that means ‘very much’.{45} There is no doubt that cunt is a very versatile word (noun, adjective, verb), but it still shocks. In 2016, Ofcom (the regulator for UK communications) ranked swear words in order of offensiveness, and cunt came out on top.{46} The British Board of Film Classification’s guidelines state that the word cunt can only be used frequently in films that are rated 18+.
Cunt maintains an uneasy relationship with feminists, who are undecided if the word is empowering or demeaning. Various feminist movements have tried to reclaim cunt. Judy Chicago led the ‘Cunt art’ movement of the 1970s and created works of art that aggressively used ‘cunt’ to cut through prudish attitudes around female sexuality. Inga Muscio’s 1998 Cunt: A Declaration of Independence inspired a movement called ‘Cuntfest’ – ‘a celebration of women’. In 1996, Eva Ensler premiered a new play called The Vagina Monologues at the HERE Arts Centre. The play features different characters talking about their sense of self, their sexuality and how they feel about their vaginas. One monologue is entitled ‘Reclaiming Cunt’ and is a tour de force of cunt: