This week’s Word Suitcase is sexually explicit. Or perhaps I should say “more sexually explicit than usual.”
CUNT, n. It was inevitable that I’d write about this word eventually, I think. This time last year, I was writing about “pudendum” and “the obscenest picture the world possesses,” so now we’re revisiting the vagina even more shamelessly. I avoided writing about “cunt” for a while because the Green’s Dictionary of Slang entry is already perfect, and I am not a lexicographer, so what could I possibly add to Green’s withering comment on the OED’s cowardice?
Not until its supplement of 1972 did the OED (albeit unfazed by prick n. (1) since the late 19C) list the term, and other, lesser dictionaries, on both sides of the Atlantic, showed themselves equally coy.
The etymological origin of “cunt” is not entirely clear. Probably English gets this word from some Germanic ancestor, since there are many cognates in Frisian (kunte), Middle Low German (kunte), Middle Dutch (conte), and others. There’s a similar group of Romance words, like French con—same definition, very different usage—that go back to Latin cunnus, which means vagina and can also be a derogatory term for a woman. As to whether the Romance words and the Germanic words are descended from the same Indo-European root, the OED evinces skepticism, as does Wiktionary, but Green’s Dictionary remains open to the possibility.
We do know for sure, based on usage in medieval texts, that “cunt” was not always taboo in English. It was merely descriptive in the beginning. Its slide into notoriety came later. Green writes:
But by the end of the 15C cunt was unacceptable and two centuries later it was deemed legally obscene, and to print the word in full rendered one liable to prosecution. Its most notorious appearance in the dock came in 1960 in the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It has yet, if ever, to return to grace.
Here we arrive at something I do know a lot about: novels that get put trial for obscenity, whether in actual courtrooms or public opinion. I haven’t read Lady Chatterley’s Lover, nor will I, but I have read a lot of books that print all four letters of the word “cunt.”
Most recently, I read the fantastic small-r romance novel A Restless Truth by Freya Marske, which is a sapphic historical fantasy set at the turn of the twentieth century on a cruise ship heading from New York across the Atlantic to Southampton. It stars Maud Blyth, a committed truth-teller, do-gooder, and the little sister of Robin Blyth of A Marvellous Light, the first book the series (previously discussed). She’s traveling undercover with the elderly magician Mrs. Navenby, a keeper of a powerful magical artifact, and within the first chapter Mrs. Navenby is murdered and the artifact stolen, leaving Maud alone on a boat with two massively important, secret crimes to solve.
Enter Violet Debenham, a disgraced heiress turned actress. Magician, thrill-seeker, sower of chaos, and accomplished bisexual flirt, Violet is bored as hell on the cruise ship and delighted to get involved in a murder investigation.
Whew. It was a huge effort to write all those actual sentences describing A Restless Truth when all my initial notes said was “WHAT THE FUCK THIS BOOK IS PERFECT.” I said this last time I wrote about a Freya Marske book, but I truly cannot fathom how every sentence is a delicate confection of perfect prose, and yet it’s not unbearably rich to read several thousand in a row, because the plot races along, and I genuinely love these people and want to hang out with them (and also want very much for them not to get murdered or grievously injured, which seemed like a real possibility at several points), and the historical details feel just right, and the magic is complicated enough to be fascinating and generate cool twists in the plot, but not so complicated that I feel like I’m reading instructions for a strategy board game. That is so many things at once. Hence: WHAT THE FUCK THIS BOOK IS PERFECT.
As is now evident, I can’t talk about this book in its entirety with any sort of coherence, so let’s narrow it down a little and look at one brief excerpt. A sexy bit—because for once in my life I’ve managed to keep the “word” and “book” parts of this newsletter aligned.
Despite this book being paced in a way that invites staying up all night, I took my time because I had to highlight every metaphor and then stare into space for a while (what the fuck this book etc etc). I have no idea if other people read like this. It seems counterintuitive to stop at all the really good parts, but I’ve done it for as long as I can remember. Maybe it’s like the beat of silence before the applause at a performance of classical music. Maybe it’s like a computer freezing because it’s running too many programs at once.
Anyway, let’s contextualize this passage a little bit.
(1) Maud is nineteen or twenty years old and has, upon meeting Violet, finally seen the sun peek over the horizon in her slow-dawning realization that she’s a lesbian.
(2) Maud has always wanted to be daring enough to swear. This is what happens when she finds Mrs. Navenby’s corpse:
“Oh my heavens,” Maud heard herself squeak, and sagged back against the door.
She felt a ludicrous pang of disappointment. Firstly, that she had squeaked. Secondly, that she hadn’t seized the opportunity to say Fuck. She’d never been game enough on any lesser occasion, and surely this was the most obscenity-deserving situation she would ever find herself in.
(Narrator voice-over: It wasn’t.)
“Fuck” is both capitalized and italicized; it’s really important to Maud. It’s bold and transgressive, two qualities she wants for herself and admires in Violet. Saying “fuck” is also something she longs for and, at the beginning of the book, hasn’t yet figured out how to get, which, see point (1) above.
(3) When Maud wants something, she goes after it hard. She gets interested in sex, soon acquires a suitcase full of pornography, reads all of it, decides what she would like to try, and then propositions Violet. Initially Violet declines, not because she doesn’t like Maud, but in classic romance novel fashion, because she likes Maud too much and is afraid of falling in love. But Maud is irrepressible and irresistible, so they end up in bed.
All of that brings us to my chosen excerpt:
Maud’s courage had taken her this far, but it gave out when her right hand touched Violet’s. Now Maud was almost touching Violet’s—cunt. The word curled in the mind with a satisfying crudity. Her fingers lay over Violet’s own as if resting on the keys of a piano, not yet daring to press down and hear the chord.
Oh hell yes.
Sometimes romance readers complain that there are no good words for vagina. To get around this supposed lack of good words, some romance writers resort to gender essentialist euphemisms like “feminine core.” This complaint about words always feels to me a little like distaste for the thing itself, especially when paired with the assertion that “dick” and “cock” are sexy, as it sometimes is. Sure, the words dick and cock are sexy—they have nice hard consonants—but so is the thing they refer to. As someone who likes vagina by any name, I don’t get it. I do have more sympathy when the complaint happens in the context of “every slang word for vagina also has a history of use as misogynist slang,” but that’s what motivates me to take ‘em back.
The shocking, taboo nature of “cunt” is part of its appeal. Just like saying “fuck,” it’s transgressive. In the passage above, Maud hesitates physically. Violet is touching herself and Maud touches her hand, but cannot bring herself to touch Violet’s vagina. Maud also hesitates mentally, as evidenced by the em-dash: “Now Maud was almost touching Violet’s—cunt.” Like many romance readers, writers, and doers before her, Maud isn’t quite sure what to call Violet’s sex. She pauses before naming it. When she finally decides, she makes a bold choice. “Cunt” is italicized in addition to being separated from the rest of the sentence by the em-dash, so we can’t possibly miss it. While the text continues to linger over Maud’s pause before touching Violet, the moment of her decision is signaled right here. She doesn’t blush or look away or think of it as Violet’s feminine core. When Maud Blyth decides to do something, she commits. She is going to touch Violet—fuck Violet—and she is looking at Violet’s cunt. (Violet, by the way, identifies as a woman, but sometimes acts in “trouser roles” and the book includes a little bit of magical genderbending, so to call her vagina “the center of her femininity” or whatever euphemism would be especially nonsensical in her case.) Maud’s courage hasn’t failed her. She’s choosing the bravest possible word.
“The word curled in the mind with a satisfying crudity” is the next sentence. Like many dirty words in English—dick, cock, fuck—“cunt” ends with a stop consonant, the tongue clicking against the alveolar ridge (behind your top teeth, basically) to block the flow of air and make [t]. It’s loaded with more stops, too, starting with velar [k], which happens between the back of the tongue and the soft palate, and moving forward through that grunt of a vowel toward nasal [n], which many English speakers articulate in the same place as [t], by touching the tip of the tongue to the ridge behind the teeth. So there is, in “cunt,” not merely a curl in the mind but a more literal curl in the mouth, from the back of the tongue to the tip. This movement and the sound it produces are, at least in part, the source of the satisfaction. All those stops are decisive, definitive. The rest of the satisfaction comes from the “crudity,” a word that echoes the [k] and [t] of “cunt” itself. Marske could have written lewdness, rudeness, vulgarity, obscenity, but instead “crudity” doubles back on the sound. It also introduces the connotation of raw, a fitting note for this moment of nakedness and vulnerability, of Maud finally deciding to say and do the things she’s always wanted to.
We move, in the next sentence, from the mental, unspoken sound of the word back to the touch that has not yet happened and another metaphor of anticipated sound, this one musical rather than linguistic:
Her fingers lay over Violet’s own as if resting on the keys of a piano, not yet daring to press down and hear the chord.
How good is that comparison? I already did my loading-screen, staring-into-space thing while reading the book the first time, and I’m doing it again now. Metaphor is risky: you ask the reader to think about something else for a second, and if your chosen “something else” isn’t close enough to what you’re actually talking about, then you’ve led them astray and now they’re lost. Worse, they’re thinking about how shitty you are at metaphors.
This is not that.
In my professional and queer opinion, it’s never a bad idea to focus on hands in a sex scene, but the real brilliance here lies in simultaneously illustrating the parallel lengths of their fingers (a visual) while evoking an as-yet unheard sound. “Piano” is doing a lot of the work here, of course, but don’t discount “chord.” It’s not “note” because if you hit more than one piano key at once, you’ll end up with a chord. But it’s also not “note” because “note” doesn’t have the [k] we’ve been hearing. “Chord” has an initial [k] like “cunt,” but it also has [ɹ] and [d] to echo “crudity,” and there’s initial [k] and [ɹ] in “curl,” too. Maud might not yet dare to press down and hear the chord, but for those of us who “hear” words while we read silently, there is already harmony in these sentences. And even if you’re a reader who doesn’t hear, there is a visual pattern—the International Phonetic Alphabet transcribes this sound as [k], but it’s no accident that Marske has chosen words spelled with c: cunt, curl, crudity, chord. All this repetition is building toward something.
The chord is the orgasm. It feels almost silly to write that down, but in the service of [k]larity, I’m doing it. It’s the thing Maud wants to hear from Violet, the sound Maud wants Violet to make. And it’s an even lovelier metaphor because a chord, being made up of multiple notes, requires multiple fingers in the case of a piano (or a cunt, lol), and multiple humans in the case of a voice. To hear a chord made by people, you need at least two. Violet is not merely Maud’s instrument here, but a fellow musician, and it shows in the rest of the sex scene, which is about exploring and sharing and making something together.
So anyway. That’s my two thousand words on those three sentences. A Restless Truth is a great time. If you need me, I’ll be staring into space for a while.
I wanted to put an image in this newsletter, and obviously the image would be Gustave Courbet’s 1866 painting L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World), but since you might be reading this email on your phone while sitting next to your kid or your coworker or a stranger on public transit, and images are bigger and easier to see than words, I thought maybe I’d link it and give you the choice about whether your present moment is propitious for looking at a nineteenth-century oil painting of a vulva.
(A dear friend from grad school, who wrote about this painting and who I texted as I was writing this, just called it “the Mona Lisa of pussy,” in case that influences your choice.)
In other news, I’ve also recently been over at book recommendation website Shepherd talking about fantasy novels with polyamory in them. They have a whole shelf on polyamory if that’s of interest.
Thank you so, so much to everybody who wrote to me to share examples of words in your familects. As predicted, I did get distracted from that essay, but I am going to return to it. In the mean time, if your family or friend group has a word or phrase you all say that nobody else understands, I would love to hear about it. If you want to share with me, you can reply to this email.
I’ll be back in your inbox in two weeks!
