Reappropriating Cunt

'Cunt' may be the most offensive word in the English language, though there have been many attempts to reappropriate it. This ideology, which was originally termed cunt-power, sought to invert the word's injurious potential: to prevent men using it as a misogynist insult, women assertively employed it themselves. The feminist Cunt-Art movement incorporated the word into paintings and performances, and several female writers have campaigned for its transvaluation. In my evaluation of the ideology of cunt-power, I discuss the extent of its practicality, popularity, and longevity.

Words As Weapons

Children are taught this traditional mantra:

'Sticks and stones
May break my bones
But words can never hurt me'.

However, words do hurt us, and they can be used as weapons. Walter Kirn has called 'cunt' "the A-bomb of the English language [...] my verbal fragmentation bomb" (2005), Lucas M McWilliams calls it "the c-bomb" (2006), and Germaine Greer sees it as a word that "men throw at one another [...] you can use it like a torpedo" (Deborah Lee, 2006). Verbal weapons cause intense emotional pain. GQ has noted that "No word is more hurtful or destructive than the C-word" (2005). Catherine MacKinnon cites numerous examples of abusive language provoking distress and resulting in litigation. Asserting that "A woman worker who was referred to by a [presumed male] co-worker as a 'cunt' could present a strong case for sexual harassment" (1994), she quotes "Cavern Cunt", "stupid cunt", "fucking cunt", and "repeated use of the word 'cunt'" as phrases resulting in convictions for sexual harassment. Just as 'cunt' can be a violent word, its use can also have violent repercussions: it is "a word so offensive that it would earn you a slap if you called someone it in a bar" (Adam Renton, 2008).

By contrast, however, a more recent case was dismissed when it was ruled that the word 'cunt' did not constitute sexual harassment: the court concluded that the word, while being "one of the most derogatory terms for a woman", could also be regarded as complementary (Kevin Vaughan, 2004). A female student at Colorado University had alleged that another student called her a 'cunt'. Meanwhile, the University's President, Betsy Hoffman, citing Geoffrey Chaucer, defended the word as "a term of endearment" (John C Ensslin, 2004). Hoffman was ridiculed by the press, not least because the name of her university is commonly abbreviated to 'CU': "In CU President Betsy Hoffman's world [...] CU is halfway to CU**, which is just so CUte" (Mike Littwin, 2004; the article was headlined To Hoffman CU Halfway To A New Meaning).

When men use the word 'cunt' to insult women, courts have deemed the act to be unlawful. When men use it to insult other men, as Julia Penelope demonstrates, their usage is still inherently insulting to women: "[words] used by men to insult other men, motherfucker, son-of-a-bitch, bastard, sissy, and cunt insult men because they're female words" (1990). 'Cunt' insults men because it acts as a verbal castration, removing their masculinity by denying them their penis, implying that having a cunt is inferior to having a cock: Signe Hammer explained that to call a man a 'cunt' "is to call him a woman: castrated" (1977).

The other male insults cited by Penelope are also tangential insults to women: to call a man a 'motherfucker' implicates both him and his mother, 'bastard' implies a man's mother is a slut, 'sissy' insults a man by likening him to a woman, and 'son-of-a-bitch' can be seen as an indirect insult to a man though a direct insult to his mother.

Walter Kirn wrote The Forbidden Word (2005), a lengthy article for GQ exploring the emotional impact of 'cunt'. He calls it "the four-letter word a man can use to destroy everything with a woman [...] and possibly the last word in the English language that keeps on hurting even after it's spoken". Kirn explains the offensiveness of 'cunt' with reference to its plosive phonetics and its semantic reductionism: "The word is an ugly sonic package, as compact as a stone [...] The word obliterates individuality. It strips away any aura of uniqueness". (A character in the Hungarian film Taxidermia also notes the ugliness of the word, or rather its Hungarian equivalent.)

Somewhat insensitively, Kirn feels that women over-react to the word when it is used against them: "It doesn't bruise. It doesn't leave a mark. Yet women treat its deployment as tantamount to an act of nonphysical domestic violence". He also ignores the word's feminist reclamation, stating incorrectly: "you'll never hear someone call herself a cunt, let alone call another woman one. [...] The only time it's acceptable for a woman to speak such vileness is when she's quoting a man and seeking empathy for the wounds he has caused her". Essentially, Kirn's article is a macho defence of what he sees as the male privilege to call women cunts: "I'm grateful for the C-bomb, and thankful that women have nothing with which to match it. When a man has already lost the argument and his girl is headed out the door [we] have one last, lethal grenade to throw".

Unsurprisingly, women wrote to GQ to take issue with Kirn's article. Kim Andrew stressed that Kirn's definition of 'cunt' as "the A-bomb of the English language" does not apply to the UK, where it is used more freely than in America: "The word cunt is only an "A-bomb" in American English. [...] My many British friends and I toss the word around so frequently that our American friends have begun to use it in the same silly fashion" (2005). M Restrepo's reaction was that, provided 'cunt' is not used insultingly (as Kirn employs it), it should not be tabooed: "What era is Walter Kirn living in? Cunt is no longer taboo. [...] Perhaps his woman is insulted not at being called a cunt but at the thought that he would deem it such an insult" (2005).

In welcome contrast to Kirn's article, Jonathon Green criticises the inherent patriarchy of the slang lexicon: "Slang is the essence of 'man-made language', created by men and largely spoken by him too" (1993). This is a trend which has noticeably increased over time, as Germaine Greer explains: "The more body-hatred grows, so that the sexual function is hated and feared by those unable to renounce it, the more abusive terms we find in the language" (1970[a]).

Specifically, the status and deployment of 'cunt' as "The worst name anyone can be called [and] the most degrading epithet" (Germaine Greer, 1970[a]), and especially as the worst name a woman can be called, serves to reinforce the tradition of cultural patriarchy, as Jane Mills points out: "the use of 'cunt' as the worst swearword that anyone can think of says a great deal about misogyny in our society, and I think it reveals fear, disgust, and also [a] denial of female sexuality" (Kerry Richardson, 1994). Joan Smith agrees: "It is impossible not to make a link, as lexicographers and feminist writers have done, between the [...] decline [of 'cunt'] into obscenity and illegality, and fearful attitudes towards women and their sexuality" (1998).

Smith calls 'cunt' "the worst possible thing - much worse than ['prick'] - one human being can say to another" (1998) and Simon Carr calls it "the worst thing you can say about anyone" (2001). As Deborah Cameron notes, "taboo words tend to refer to women's bodies rather than men's. Thus for example cunt is a more strongly tabooed word than prick, and has more tabooed synonyms" (1985). Jonathon Green concurs that "the slang terms for the vagina outstrip any rivals, and certainly those for the penis [...] They encompass what is generally acknowledged as the most injurious of monosyllabic epithets [and] that ultimate in four-letter words" (1993), by which, of course, he means 'cunt'. William Leith notes that "We may have equality of the sexes but we do not have equality of sexual organs [...] Female sexual organs carry a powerful taboo. I can print the words prick, cock and dick as much as I like", adding coyly: "but I know I have to be careful with the c-word" (2000). Ed Vulliamy makes the same point: "the c-word is different. 'Cock', 'dick' and 'prick', and elaborations thereof, are fine - but not the female equivalent" (1999).

The inequality of 'prick' and 'cunt' is also explored in the HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm (David Steinberg, 2001), after the central character uses 'cunt' as an insult towards another man:

"They think you're a misogynist."
"Why, cos I called the guy a cunt? So what!
"Cos you called the guy a cunt."
"Big deal, I call men pricks all the time" [...]
"Well, cunt's worse."
"Cunt's not worse. Pricks and cunts, they're equal." [...]
"No, cunt is worse. Cunt's much heavier."

According to Brigid McConville and John Shearlaw, 'cunt' "reflects the deep fear and hatred of the female by the male in our culture. It is a far nastier and more violent insult than 'prick' which tends to mean foolish rather than evil. This violent usage is a constant and disturbing reminder to women of the hatred associated with female sexuality and leaves women with few positive words to name their own organs" (1984). The 'cunt' taboo is but the most extreme example of a general taboo surrounding the lexicon of the female genitals: "Mild, non-specific [...] euphemisms are employed to not name that part of women's bodies" (Virginia Braun and Sue Wilkinson, 2001).

The word 'vagina' is also subject to this taboo: "Even the word vagina has not easily entered public space". Braun and Wilkinson cite examples of the term being banned from billboards ("the London Underground banned a birth control advertisement - deeming it 'offensive' for including the word 'vagina'") and theatrical posters ("Promotional material for theatrical pieces whose titles contained the word vagina has been censored [...] so that the word vagina need not be on public display"). In such example, The Vagina Monologues was renamed "The Hoohaa Monologues" in Florida (No Vaginas Please We're Floridian, 2007), following a complaint from a female resident. Indeed, after surveying women's own attitudes, Sophie Laws discovered that they even felt obligated to self-censor their own discourse: "[women do not] refer to their sexual and reproductive organs in any way except in the most private of interactions" (1990). Virginia Braun and Celia Kitzinger published a 'survey of surveys', revealing the extent to which 'vagina' is a tabooed word: "Many people appear to consider women's genitalia to be unmentionable. In one study, only 7% of respondents (10% of men, 5% of women) considered the vagina a body part that is freely mentionable [...] A more recent survey found that 53% of women "felt some discomfort using the word vagina" [...] Women and gynecologists have been shown to rarely mention the word vagina (or even a synonym) during gynecological consultations [...] Female participants in focus groups looking at sexually explicit magazines "avoided referring to the genitals of the models" [...] Despite public debate and discussion about sex and sexuality, the vagina remains a taboo or private topic" (2001[a]).

'Cunt' has a long history of abuse, though the standard terms 'vagina' and 'pudendum' themselves are far from neutral. 'Pudendum' is derived from the Latin 'pudere', meaning 'to be ashamed', thus 'pudendum' describes the vagina as a shameful organ. 'Vagina' is Latin for 'sheath', 'scabbard', and 'quiver', protective coverings into which one slides swords or arrows, and is thus closely linked to pejorative conceptions of sex as a violent, male stabbing act: "In fact, "vagina" is the nastiest kind of name for the female genitalia [...] There is more to the female sex than accommodation of a male weapon" (Germaine Greer, 2002). The German equivalent is even more demeaning: 'Schamscheide' ('vagina') translates literally as 'sheath of shame'.

Eve Ensler has said that 'vagina' "sounds like an infection at best, maybe a medical instrument [...] Doesn't matter how many times you say it, it never sounds like a word you want to say" (2001). Similarly, in Cunt: A Declaration Of Independence, Inga Muscio begins by denouncing the word 'vagina': "etymolog[ically] "vagina" originates from a word meaning sheath for a sword. Ain't got no vagina" (1998), and Jayne Air calls 'vagina' "too darn clinical" (199-). Joan Larkin's Vagina Sonnet encapsulates her dislike of the word:

"Is 'vagina' suitable for use
in a sonnet? I don't suppose so.
A famous poet told me, 'Vagina's ugly.'
Meaning, of course, the sound of it [...]
This whole thing is unfortunate, but petty [...]
a waste of brains - to be concerned about
this minor issue of my cunt's good name" (1975).

Linguistic Reappropriation

Word-meanings are dictated by consensus and contemporary usage, thus negative meanings can be reversed when pejorative terms are systematically reappropriated: "There have been several recent instances of a particular group explicitly reclaiming a taboo word previously used against them" (Susie Dent, 2004). Melinda Yuen-Ching Chen and Robin Brontsema have both described the specific reappropriation of 'queer', though they also discuss the concept of reappropriation in general. Brontsema provides a succinct definition of the terminology: "Linguistic reclamation, also known as linguistic resignification or reappropriation, refers to the appropriation of a pejorative epithet by its target(s)" (2004). He views the process as a harnessing and reversal of the original invective: "[the] injurious power is the same fuel that feeds the fire of its counter-appropriation. Laying claim to the forbidden, the word as weapon is taken up and taken back by those it seeks to shackle - a self-emancipation that defies hegemonic linguistic ownership and the (a)buse of power". Chen defines reclamation as "an array of theoretical and conventional interpretations of both linguistic and non-linguistic collective acts in which a derogatory sign or signifier is consciously employed by the 'original' target of the derogation, often in a positive or oppositional sense" (1998).

The focus here is primarily on feminist reappropriations, specifically on feminist attempts to reclaim 'cunt' and other abusive terms: "Girls and women can thus reclaim the words in our language that have been used against us" (Gloria Bertonis, 2003). The mainstream success of reappropriations, however, depend upon the consensus of the population as a whole: "you cannot demand the word ['cunt'] be used only as a hallelujah to the flower of your womanhood; like all words, its meaning had been decided through collective use" (Andrew Billen, 2007). The commonest derogative term for a woman - 'bitch' - is on the road to reclamation. The BITCH Manifesto (written by Jo Freeman under the pseudonym Joreen) prompted a positive reassessment of the word: "BITCH does not use this word in the negative sense. A woman should be proud to declare she is a Bitch, because Bitch is Beautiful. It should be an act of affirmation by self and not negation by others" (1968). Casey Miller and Kate Smith discuss this transvaluation of 'bitch' and also cite "Groups of feminists who choose to call themselves witches [...] to rehabilitate that word in the same way" (1976). 'Bitch' has also been converted into positive acronyms: 'Babe In Total Control of Herself' and 'Being In Total Control of Him', as seen on badges, t-shirts, and other items; in this way, not only the meaning of the term has been changed but even its constituent letters are appropriated to positive effect.

Other formerly derogatory terms for women have also been reclaimed: "The feminist spirit has reclaimed some words with defiance and humor. Witch, bitch, dyke, and other formerly pejorative epithets turned up in the brave names of small feminist groups" (Gloria Steinem, 1979). Mary Daly has attempted to reverse the negative associations of words such as 'spinster', 'witch', 'harpy', 'hag', and 'crone'. Where she is able to demonstrate non-pejorative etymological origins of these terms, she advocates a reversal of their current definitions. Daly does readily admit that not every modern negative term was originally positive ('crone', for example, has always implied old age), though in these cases she assert that negative connotations are a patriarchal perception: "ageism is a feature of phallic society. For women who have transvalued this, a Crone is one who should be an example of strength, courage and wisdom" (1978).

'Dyke' was used in the title of the New York lesbian newspaper Big Apple Dyke News, demonstrating that a word can be reclaimed when it is used consciously by the group to which its vehemence was previously directed. Later, 'lesbian' was also reappropriated: "radical feminist groups reclaimed the word 'lesbian'. Regularly used as a pejorative term [...] the word was rehabilitated as both an accurate descriptive term and as a source of pride" (Will Barton and Andrew Beck, 2005). As Roz Wobarsht wrote in a letter to the feminist magazine Ms: "I think a female's use of words abusive to females defuses them. Our use takes away the power of the words to damage us" (1977). Jane Mills adds that "crumpet has recently been appropriated by women to refer to men [and] women today are making a conscious attempt to reform the English language [including] the reclamation and rehabilitation of words and meanings" (1989). Maureen Dowd (2006) notes the "different coloration" of 'pimp' and charts the transition of 'girl' "from an insult in early feminist days to a word embraced by young women".

A less likely pioneer of reclamation is the self-styled 'battle-axe' Christine Hamilton, though her celebratory Book Of British Battle-Axes nevertheless marked a re-evaluation of the term. Julie Bindel cites 'bird' and 'ho' as "blatant insults [...] co-opted by the recipients of those insults and turned into ironic terms of endearment and empowerment" (2006). Patrick Strudwick praises Bint Magazine for "reclaiming the term "bint" from the huge slag heap of misogynist smears and turning it into something fabulous" (2004). The offensive term 'slut' has also been reclaimed as an epithet of empowerment: Kate Spicer suggests that 'slut' is "a term of abuse that has been redefined by fashion to mean something cool [...] A fashionable woman can take those phallocentric terms of abuse like slut and slag and nasty girl and turn them into labels of postfeminist fabulousness" (2003).

Here, the principal is the same as that pioneered by Madonna: sexual aggression, feared by men and characterised by them in disrespectful terms such as 'slut', can be redefined as an assertive and positive attribute. It is not simply the word 'slut' that is being redefined, it is the lifestyle that the word represents - the meaning of the term 'slut' has stayed the same, though the cultural acceptance of its characteristics has increased.

It is important to note the distinction between changing a word's definition and changing its connotation. Women have sought not to change the definitions of (for example) 'cunt' or 'slut', but instead to alter the cultural connotations of the terms. Thus, the reclaimed word 'cunt' is still defined as 'vagina' and the reclaimed 'slut' still means 'sexual predator'. What have been reclaimed are the social attitudes towards the concepts of vaginas and sexual predators: whereas these once attracted negative connotations, they have been transvalued into positive concepts. In a sense, this is true of a large number of terms which are regarded as positive by some yet as negative by others: for example, 'liberal' is used as an insult by conservatives, and 'conservative' is used as an insult by liberals. Salman Rushdie gives examples of older political terms which have also been reclaimed: "To turn insults into strengths, Whigs [and] Tories [both] chose to wear with pride the names they were given in scorn" (1988).

Richard Herring notes the paradox that, while the vagina should be celebrated, 'cunt' is an inexplicably offensive term: "it describes quite a nice thing. If you give words the power then they are nasty. But you can turn things around and use them in a different way" (Anthony Barnes, 2006). Thus, reclaiming abusive language requires a change not in meaning but in attitude. Whereas Madonna is perhaps the most significant embodiment of this transvaluation - female sexual empowerment being asserted as liberating and subversive - the theory behind it has been articulated most dramatically by Germaine Greer in her essay for Suck on the word 'whore'.

Germaine Greer - who instigated the cunt-power movement, of which more later - wrote I Am A Whore, in which she consciously identified herself with the word 'whore', attempting to show that it can be positive rather than negative: "Whore is a dirty word - so we'll call everybody whore and get people uptight; whereas really you've got to come out the other way around and make whore a sacred word like it used to be and it still can be" (1971[b]). (In the same issue as I Am A Whore, on the opposite page, was an article titled Dry Cunt.)

Greer's biographer fundamentally misjudged her suggestion, calling it "a direct betrayal of what feminism was supposed to be about [...] it takes a truly eccentric and bizarre kind of feminism for one to identify as a prostitute" (Christine Wallace, 1997). In fact, far from identifying as a prostitute, Greer was implying that the word 'whore' could be removed from its pejorative associations. More recently, Karen Savage produced t-shirts with the slogans 'WHORE' and 'BITCH', encouraging women to make an instant visual statement of reclamation.

A term with similar status is the racially abusive 'nigger', which has been reclaimed (or 'flipped') by African-Americans (such as Richard Pryor's Supernigger), and is used in this context as a term of endearment. 'Nigger' has been reclaimed by the group against which it was used as a means of subjugation and oppression, and its reappropriation serves to dilute its potential to offend. Jonathon Green suggests that this use "as a binding, unifying, positive word" dates from as early as the 1940s (Jennifer Higgie, 1998). Its reappropriation is not universally accepted, however: Spike Lee has criticised what he perceives as Samuel L Jackson's insensitivity towards the word's history. Similar attempts to reclaim other racially abusive terms such as 'paki' (notably the PAK1 clothing brand) have been equally contentious: "even now this "flipping", as it is called, has not been totally successful" (Sarfraz Manzoor, 2004). In his article A Bad Word Made Good (2005), Andrew Clark notes the reappropriation of 'wog', formerly a term of racist abuse though later used self-referentially amongst Australia's Greek community: "the term has metamorphosed in the Antipodes. Greek[s] happily refer to themselves as wogs [...] Some time during the [19]80s, the word was adopted as a badge of pride by the people to whom it referred". Furthermore, Todd Anten cites the increasing transvaluation of 'chink', noting that "Virtually any word that is or has been a slur can be reappropriated by the target group" (2006).

Lenny Bruce made the point that the social suppression of taboo words such as 'cunt' and 'nigger' serves to perpetuate and increase their power: "the word's suppression gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness" (1970). He argued that only through repetition can we remove the abusive powers of taboo words: "If [you said] niggerniggerniggernigger [...] till nigger lost its meaning - you'd never make any four-year-old nigger cry when [they] came home from school".

In Monty Python's Life Of Brian, the eponymous character reclaims a whole host of anti-Semitic epithets: "I'm a kike, a Yid, a hebe, a hooknose [...] and proud of it!" (Terry Jones, 1979). The film's director later explained that he was consciously attempting to "take everything that's negative in the language and turn it into a positive thing" (Criterion, 1997). The editor of the Jewish magazine Heeb intended its title as a transvaluation of the term, a variant of 'hebe': "We're reappropriating it, but with a twist of pride" (Peg Tyre, 2002). Annie Goldflam self-identified as both a 'kike' and a 'dyke', in Queerer Than Queer: Reflections Of A Kike Dyke: "I am both a kike and a dyke, derogatory terms for Jews and lesbians, respectively, but which I here reclaim as proud markers of my identity" (1999)

The homophobic term 'queer' has also been positively - yet contentiously - reappropriated, for example by Queer Nation: "In recent years 'queer' has come to be used differently [and this] once pejorative term [is] a positive self-description [...] Proponents of the new terminology argue that to redeploy the term queer as a figure of pride is a powerful act of cultural reclamation" (Annamarie Jagose, 1996). Ratna Kapur and Tayyab Mahmud cite 'fruit' amongst other terms "appropriated by the gay community as words denoting pride, self-awareness, and self-acceptance" (2000). The gay-oriented cosmetics brand FAG: Fabulous And Gay has helped to reclaim 'fag', and Todd Anten cites the company's mission statement: "to abolish the negative connotation of the word fag and reposition it [...] We all have the power to change the perspective of this word and transform it into a positive vision" (2006). Larry Kramer's book Faggots began the transvaluation of another homophobic term. (Another book title, Christopher Frayling's Spaghetti Westerns, was also intended as a positive reappropriation of a negative term: "The book's title was deliberately polemical, seeking to turn what had initially been a put-down into a badge of honour" (Edward Buscombe, 2005). The similar film term 'chop-socky' has also been "repurposed" (David Kamp and Lawrence Levi, 2006).)

The various epithets used to insult mentally handicapped people represent a further lexicon of reclaimed pejoratives. Mark Radcliffe profiles "people with mental health problems tak[ing] the sting out of stigma by reclaiming pejoratives" (2003), citing 'Crazy Folks' and 'Mad Pride' as groups whose names "reclaim some of the stigmatising language". This consciously humorous appropriation of 'crazy' and 'mad' must, however, avoid being misinterpreted as a trivialisation of those whom it seeks to empower.

The term 'punk' has become associated with a musical genre, though it also has an insulting definition, as it is used to describe men who are raped by fellow prisoners in jail. Robert Martin, who was repeatedly gang-raped in prison, has now spoken out against jail-rape while also celebrating the term 'punk': "He has taken the word "punk," which in its nonmusical context has always been a term of derision, and turned it into an emblem of honor. He has performed the same etymological magic trick that others have done with [...] "white trash." [He] even wears a "PUNK" belt buckle" (Jim Goad, 1994[f]).

Finally, we should consider 'otaku', 'geek', and 'nerd', all of which are negative terms implying anti-social obsessive behaviour. Increasingly, people are self-identifying as geeks, otakus, and nerds, using the terms proudly: a computing magazine called Otaku was launched in 2005, David Bell cites 'geek' as "Originally a term of abuse for people overly-obsessed with computers - though now reappropriated as a badge of pride" (2001), and 'nerd' t-shirts are on sale.

It is clear that "The conversion of a derogatory term into a battle cry by radicals is not uncommon" (Hugh Rawson, 1989), though 'cunt' itself has yet to emerge as a fully reclaimed term. Presently, the initial stages of its reappropriation are more contentious and complex than those of the epithets dicussed above.

Todd Anten (2006) categorises slurs into two types, to distinguish between words in different positions along the road to reclamation: 'close' words "which are at the end stages of reappropriation", and 'clear' words "which are at the beginning stages". He also notes that it is not only words that can be reclaimed: "The power of reappropriation is not limited to textual slurs; visual slurs may also be reappropriated". He cites as an example the pink triangle used by the Nazis to identify homosexuals: "[it] evolved from a mark of Nazi hatred into a symbol of gay pride".

An especially intriguing aspect of reappropriation is that of trademark applications. Aware that potentially disparaging words are denied trademark status, Todd Anten argues that such restrictions should be lifted for "self-disparaging" terms: "The reappropriation of former slurs is an integral part of the fostering of individual and group identity [...] it not only removes a slur, but it also cultivates self-definition in the target group - the recipients of the label actively choose to incorporate it into their identities rather than having it passively thrust upon them". He also cites Joe Garofoli's comment that "[S]elf-labeling defuses the impact of derisive terms by making them more commonplace". Anten notes trademark applications for various contentious terms, all intended to be reappropriated as positive acronyms: 'spic' ("SPANISH PEOPLE IN CONTROL"), 'nigga' ("NATURALLY INTELLIGENT GOD GIFTED AFRICAN"), and 'jap' ("JEWISH AMERICAN PRINCESS"). In the latter case, 'jap', Anten notes that the term "may disparage multiple groups": it was intended as a reclaimed term in a Jewish context, though it may still offend Japanese people. Reappropriation is indeed a minefield.

Linguistic And Cultural Genital Inequality

The marginalisation of the feminine is apparent not only in relation to language but also in cultural attitudes towards the sexual organs themselves. A large penis is equated with potency and sexual prowess: 'size matters' has become a cliche, though it is still perceived as an index of masculinity by men. Phrases such as 'well hung' maintain the male obsession with penis size, and John Holmes became one of the world's most famous porn stars thanks to his fourteen-inch erection.

Size and the female reproductive organs, however, have a reversed relationship: "while men want their pivotal organ to be as big as possible, women want theirs to be small" (Arusa Pisuthipan, 2005). A large vagina is seen as indicative of copious copulation, prompting accusations of prostitution or nymphomania. Or, as Germaine Greer puts it: "The best thing a cunt can be is small and unobtrusive: the anxiety about the bigness of the penis is only equalled by the anxiety about the smallness of the cunt. No woman wants to find out that she has a twat like a horse-collar" (1970[a]). Corrective surgery - namely a laser vaginal rejuvenation operation - is available in such circumstances, to make "the vaginal canal smaller and the opening of the vagina smaller" (Nicola Black, 2002), whereas male genital surgery serves to enlarge the organ rather than reduce it.

Crude terms such as 'big cunt', 'bushel cunt', 'bucket cunt', 'bucket fanny', 'butcher's dustbin', 'spunk dustbin', 'bargain bucket', 'billposter's bucket', 'Big Daddy's sleeping bag', 'ragman's trumpet', 'ragman's coat', 'turkey's wattle', 'raggy blart', 'pound of liver', 'club sandwich', 'ripped sofa', 'badly-packed kebab', 'stamped bat', 'wizard's sleeve', 'clown's pocket', 'Yaris fanny', 'fanny like a easyjet seat pocket', 'a fanny like Sunderland's trophy cabinet', 'cow-cunt', 'double-cunted', 'sluice-cunted', and "canyon-cunted" (Jim Goad, 1994[b]), equate dilation with repulsion: "Here, the rule is to imply the owner of the vulva is unhygienic; that it has sustained so much sex it has lost its shape" (Matthew DeAbaitua, 1998). Thus, alongside the linguistic suppression of 'cunt', the vagina is also physically suppressed: "The importance of [vaginal] size is evident in contexts as diverse as slang, comedy, and surgical practices to tighten the vagina" (Virginia Braun and Celia Kitzinger, 2001[b]). The penis is an external organ whereas the vagina is an internal one, therefore the penis is naturally the more visible of the two; there is, however, a cultural emphasis placed upon this difference that acts to reinforce and extend it.

The bulging male groin ('lunchbox') is identified as sexually attractive, whereas women are encouraged not to emphasise their groins but to camouflage them: "the vagina is a culturally obscure little organ. Phallic references and penis jokes litter daily discourse, whereas vulval imagery is seemingly limited to pornography" (Joanna Briscoe, 2003). The (venerated) male 'lunchbox' can be directly contrasted with the (condemned) female equivalent, the 'cameltoe'. The female group Fannypack released a single called Cameltoe in which they criticised women for "grossin' people out with your cameltoe[s]" (2003):

"Take these words of advice
'Cos it's not very nice [...]
Watch out for the cameltoe".

Similarly, the male codpiece's exaggeration of penile protrusion can be contrasted with female chastity belts that lock away the vagina. Also, excessive female pubic hair (the 'bikini line') is shaved to render the area indistinguishable from any other part of the body: "If we do receive any information about the triangle between our legs, it is almost entirely negative; the [...] beauty industry encourages us to remove it for aesthetic reasons [because] it draws attention to the unremarkable-looking female genital area, making it stand out [...] Almost all sexualised images of women show them totally shaved, from pornography to paintings of Venus in high art" (Dea Birkett, 2003). Oliver Maitland contrasts artistic representations of the vagina with those of the penis: "For thousands of years, the vulva in art was sculpturally, graphically and pictorially erased [whereas] the male member [...] is well proportioned, if not downright outsized" (2000).

The physical differences between the male and female sexual organs are central to Sigmund Freud's theory of penis envy. This is the notion that a girl perceives her clitoris to be the result of her castration, and, faced with what Freud terms an "inferiority" (1924), develops a desire for the visible, external symbols of virility possessed by men. Joan Smith answers this with the proposition that "it's time to start talking, pace Freud, about the terrible problems men have in overcoming their cunt envy" (1998), a timely riposte to Freudian phallocentricity.

Germaine Greer's key feminist text is titled The Female Eunuch, though accusations of penis envy serve merely to trivialise the feminist feeling of physical and linguistic marginalisation. The 'female eunuch' is symbolic of the desexed representation of the female sexual experience, rather than representing a literal desire for a male organ. Patriarchal marginalisation is not, therefore, a literal neutering of women, though it does generate this metaphorical effect; while the penis is exaggerated, the vagina is rendered subordinate. This is graphically illustrated by Tom Cruise's character in Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, whose mantra is: "Respect the cock and tame the cunt" (1999).

Male attempts to marginalise the vagina (lexically, physically, and pictorially) can be seen as symbolic attempts to suppress female sexuality. The myth of the vagina dentata (discussed in more detail later) is appropriate in this regard, as there are many mythological instances of toothed vaginas being blunted by male weapons: "Gruesomely, it is the removal of vaginal teeth (symbolising the devouring aspect of female sexuality) by brave male heroes that is a core component of many dentata stories. [...] rocks and rods that are as thick or long as a penis, are all used as excision tools in a bid to tame the toothed vagina and create a compliant woman. [...] In this sense, pulling vaginal teeth is a metaphor for how some men would like to make women meek and biddable, remoulded in a shape defined by them" (Catherine Blackledge, 2003). A Mimbres bowl drawn by Pat Carr from a Zuni Pueblo original depicts a man's club-like penis inside a vagina dentata to illustrate a myth involving two men who meet eight women with vagina dentatas: "their grandmother warned them specifically to stay away [...] saying, "Don't go there. They have teeth in their vaginas. They will cut you and you will die." Of course, the twins decide to visit the girls despite the warning, and in preparation make themselves false penises of oak and hickory. [...] They broke the teeth from the women's vaginas. The blood ran. When the oak members were worn out, they put them aside and took the hickory ones. By daylight the teeth of these women were all worn out" (Pat Carr and Willard Gingerich, 1983). Symbolically, this male domination over female sexuality - using a tool to cut vaginal teeth - clearly represents the power of the phallus and the weakness of the vagina, or, in other words, the Magnolia mantra quoted above. According to Pueblo mythology, the Ahaiyute would "break girls' toothed vaginas with false wooden penises" (Marta Weigle, 1992). A Jicarilla Apache Indian myth describes four 'vagina girls' who swallow men with their vaginas, until a medicine administered by the male 'Killer-of-Enemies' neutralises their power: "When Killer-of-Enemies had come to them, they had had strong teeth with which they had eaten their victims. But this medicine destroyed their teeth entirely" (Catherine Blackledge, 2003). In a similar example, "There was a Rakshasa's [demon's] daughter who had teeth in her vagina. When she saw a man, she would turn into a pretty girl, seduce him, [and] cut off his penis" - the only way to neuter her was to "make an iron tube, put it into her vagina and break her teeth". Pueblo Indian artwork depicts "efforts to remove a woman's vaginal teeth with a false penis made out of oak and hickory", and this ceremony is now symbolically re-enacted: "Re-enactments of vagina tooth smashing can be found in some culture's rituals. [...] the Pueblo and other native North Americans use a carved wooden phallus to symbolically break a vagina woman's teeth".

Our environment is becoming increasingly saturated with sexual images, justified by the maxim 'sex sells'. This situation, which Brian McNair terms "The sexualization of the public sphere" (2002), predominantly involves images of women, appealing to heterosexual male desires at the expense of heterosexual female ones. Significantly, however, they represent a "tit-and-arse landscape" (Barbara Ellen, 2001), with the breasts and buttocks over-exposed and the genital area airbrushed away.

As Germaine Greer notes, these images are "poses which minimize the genital area" and "The vagina is obliterated from the imagery of femininity" (1970[a]): the imagery may be sexualised yet it de-emphasises the vagina as an erogenous zone. Greer returned to the subject in The Whole Woman, her sequel to The Female Eunuch: "Male genitals are drawn on every wall, female genitals only on doctor's blotters [...] Though Freud makes much of the fact that boys' genitalia are visible and little girls' are not, mere invisibility cannot account for the absence of any imagery of the womb from our general culture [...] wombs are out of sight and out of mind" (1999). Catherine Blackledge ascribes this prejudice to Christian misogyny: "the emphasis in the western world post the advent of Christianity has mainly been on hiding or veiling the vagina, rather than revealing or celebrating it" (2003).

Albert Ellis explains that our culture's obsessive interest in breasts and buttocks and disinterest in the vagina is the result of subconscious displacement: "Males in our culture are so afraid of direct contact with female genitalia, and are even afraid of referring to these genitalia themselves; they largely displace their feelings to the accessory sex organs - the hips, legs, breasts, buttocks, etc. - and they give these accessory organs an exaggerated interest and desirability" (1951). Germaine Greer's explanation is more direct: she blames the linguistic and cultural marginalisation of the vagina on "centuries of womb-fear" (1970[a]). She has actually incorporated a drawing of female ovaries into her signature, in a personal attempt to increase their visual representation.

Cunt-Hatred: Fear And Loathing

Germaine Greer's term 'womb-fear' highlights the underlying reason for both the cultural suppression of the vagina and the linguistic suppression of 'cunt'. At the heart of the abusive impact of 'cunt', and the paranoid marginalisation of the vagina, is the implication that the female genitals are disgusting and fearsome: Mark Morton describes the vagina as "a part of the female body that has traditionally been considered shameful or menacing" (2003). Andrea Dworkin writes despairingly of the "repulsion for women [...] directed especially against her genitals [...] It is a goose-stepping hatred of cunt. [...] For the male, the repulsion is sexually intense, genitally focused" (1987). Indeed, such is the level of disgust with the "monstrous female genitals" that, as Eric Partridge notes, the abusive term 'cunt face' is "even more insulting than the synonymous shit face" (1961) - the vagina is regarded as even more disgusting than excrement. The clinical sterility of tampon advertising, for example, paradoxically demonstrates a profound disgust for the vagina: "The conception of women's genitals as dirty - indeed untouchable - is reinforced by tampon advertisements which advocate an 'applicator' on the basis that fingers do not need to touch the vagina" (Virginia Braun and Sue Wilkinson, 2001).

In their paper Socio-Cultural Representations Of The Vagina (2001), Virginia Braun and Sue Wilkinson identify several "persistent negative representations of the vagina", dividing them into categories such as The Vagina As Disgusting ("The vagina is often represented as part of the female body that is shameful, unclean, disgusting") and The Vagina As Dangerous ("The (Western) construction of women's bodies as a source of horror, fear, and danger [...] is manifested in the (mythological) concept of the dangerous vagina"). After many conversations with women, Betty Dodson reported that a great number of them viewed their own genitals in negative terms: "[women] feel that their genitals are ugly, funny looking, disgusting, smelly, and not at all desirable" (1974). This attitude is instilled during childhood, as David Delvin notes: "many women are brought up to believe that the vagina is "nasty", "dirty" or "not nice"" (1983). Jane Ussher describes the cyclical process whereby childhood confusion leads to cultural phobia: "girls mainly develop a sense of shame, disgust and humiliation about [their vaginas]. In this way, social stereotypes which define women's genitals as unpleasant, [mal]odorous and unattractive, are internalized by the female child" (1989). Judith Seifer suggests that the prejudice is actively instilled at a very early age: "girl babies are given a constant message of contamination, that what you have down there is dark, it's dirty" (Nancy Friday, 1996). Even a scientific programme on the Discovery Channel demonstrates cultural womb-fear: their Human Mutants series included an episode about foetal cyclopia titled The Dangerous Womb, though cyclopia is a genetic condition unrelated to the womb itself.

The reductive usage of 'cunt' as a term of unparalleled abuse reflects both a fear of the vagina and a misogynist hatred of it. This hatred manifests itself in ingrained cultural representations of the vagina as an abject organ: "Given representations of the vagina as smelly, dirty, and potentially diseased, it is not surprising that women's genitals are a source of shame or embarrassment [and are] a part of their bodies many women can't bear to even look at" (Virginia Braun and Sue Wilkinson, 2001). Slang terms such as 'dirtbox', 'claptrap'/'clap-trap', 'siffed-up cunt-hole', 'pox-ridden cunt', 'burning bower', 'burning passage', 'dirty lolly', 'firelock', 'fireplace', and 'cemetary gates' also reflect this, equating the vagina with disease (as 'clap', 'siff', and 'fire' refer to venereal infections), as does this example of underground pornographic prose: "I kept licking and sucking on her cunt even though I knew it was riddled with the deadly curse of syphilis [as] I buried myself in Ilena's stinky snatch" (Ramona, 1998). The t-shirt slogan 'salty yoni sweet dick' unfavourably contrasts the tastes of the vagina and penis. [Screw challenged male perceptions of cunnilingus, and promoted it as a form of non-procreative sex, with the headline Is Cunt-Lapping Better Than The Pill? (22/3/1970).] Thomas Strohm has written Stinky Coochie, a song about a girl with a dirty vagina: "Girl, you got a stinky coochie" (2004). Stanley Kubrick's film Full Metal Jacket (1987) uses "Mary-Jane Rottencrotch" as a typical girl's name. The film Souffrances D'Un Oeuf Meutri depicts "[a] girl's pudenda seething with maggots" (Mike Wallington, 1970). The slang terms 'site box', 'fanny like a rabid dog', 'gorilla's armpit' and, especially, 'gorilla autopsy', present the vagina as an abject organ. The slang phrase 'smells like a pile of dead fannies' is used as a similie for something malodorous, and the barrack-room ballad The Ballad Of Lupe (also known as Down In Cunt Valley) is equally unpleasant in its imagery:

"Down in Cunt Valley where the Red Rivers flow, [...]
maggots crawl out of [the] decomposed womb" (19--).

Also, compare this monologue by Jim Goad, from his morally ambiguous and provocative zine Answer Me! (1994[a]):

"Cunt.
Cunt, fucking cunt.
Filthy fucking cunt, rotten diseased fucking cunt".

The issue of Answer Me! quoted here, the Rape issue, was seized as obscene in the UK, a rare example of contemporary literature being legally suppressed. It was felt that many of the articles in Goad's zine condoned and even encouraged the rape of women. More poetic than Answer Me!, though no less misogynist, is this monologue from King Lear, described by Pauline Kiernan as "one of the most shocking and harrowing invectives against the female vulva in all literature" (2006):

"Down from the waist they are Centaurs,
Though women all above:
But to the girdle do the Gods inherit,
Beneath is all the fiends':
There's hell, there's darkness, there is the sulphurous pit,
Burning, scalding" (William Shakespeare, 1605).

John Weir divides attitudes towards the vagina into two opposing viewpoints: "It's smelly, it's bottomless, it's devouring; or it's mystic, it's divine, it's nirvana" (1997). It is the former of Weir's two categories that is reflected in slang terms such as 'nasty', 'stink', 'stinkhole', 'stench trench', 'smelly cunt', 'smelly pussy', 'slime hole', 'smell-hole', 'stinky cunt', 'stink-pit', 'something crawled in and died', 'dirty cunt', 'rotten crotch', and 'scabby cunt'. Similarly, a traditional Chinese insult has been translated as "I WILL FUCK YOUR MOTHER'S BROKEN-DOWN STINKING CUNT" (Guerrilla Girls, 2003). These words and phrases all equate the vagina with filth and dirt: "Inescapably, a woman's body incarnates shame, her genitals especially signifying dirt and death" (Andrea Dworkin, 1987). One of the interviewees in Shere Hite's sex survey described how her male partner "thinks the vulva area smells ghastly", and Oliver Maitland even cites a female comment that vaginas are "Dirty, smelly things" (2000). Boyd Rice (1994) cites a quotation (usually attributed to the Latin writer Tertullian) which defines 'woman' as "a temple... built over a sewer". A scene in the film The Shawshank Redemption, in which a man emerges from a sewage pipe, has been interpreted as a metaphorical rebirth, with the sewage pipe symbolising a birth canal: "going through the sewage pipe [represents] a new birth" (Andrew Abbott, 2001). In On Mrs Willis, John Wilmot wrote of the eponymous prostitute that "her cunt [is] a common shore" (1680). It is this viewpoint that seemingly inspired many traditional limericks, drawing their imagery from "[the] filth down there, between the legs, in the hole" (Boyd Rice, 1994):

'There was an old hooker from Grotten
Who plugged her diseased cunt with cotton';

'A scrofulous woman from Chester,
Said [her] front is beginning to fester';
'There was a young girl called Dolores,
Whose cunt was all covered in sores';

'There was a young novice called Bell
Who didn't like cunt all that well [...]
He just couldn't get used to the smell';

'An unwashed girl from the Klondike
[has] never been had,
'Cos her cunt has a smell very cod-like'.

Comic strips such as It's Jemima And Her Smelly Vagina (in Gutter, 199-) and Dirty Annie And Her Smelly Fanny (in The Trout, 199-) position the vagina as an organ of abjection, an attitude exemplified by the slang phrase 'Billingsgate box', which compares the vagina's odour with that of a fishmarket. This long-standing belief, that the vagina smells of fish, is the commonest example of what was described in 1996 as the "historical cultural connection between women's genitals and filth and disease" (Celia Roberts, Susan Kippax, Mary Spongberg, and June Crawford). The connection is evoked in these song lyrics:

"ass gin and cunt juice
How about a fishy drink?
Ughhhhhhh" (XXX Maniak, 2005).

In a slight variation, Jim Goad smeared a dead squid over his magazine Chocolate Impulse: "we "stink-wrapped" each copy, allegedly with Faith Impulse's acrid vaginal juices. We used a [...] squid instead, smearing malodorous sea creatures onto the editorial page, making our zine smell like a CUNT" (1994[g]).

Criticising these attitudes, Alix Olson (2001) reminds us how advertising distorts reality, creating 'feminine intimate hygiene' products that are completely un-necessary:

"We'd carry passports made from a giant Cunt Mold
In all pubic colors: Gray, Auburn, Ebony, Gold.
We'd ban commercials of:
Are you not so fresh?
Is your vag repulsive? Do you stink of fish?
And instead, we'd conduct a Cunt Taste-Testing Session,
Get used to the smells of Blood, Yeast, and the Ocean".

Not only are vaginas "continually denigrated" (Laura Kipnis, 2006) as dirty and diseased, they are also literally demonised, regarded as a 'chamber of horrors', as "the deadly genitals of woman" (Barbara Creed, 1993), and as hellish 'cunnus diaboli': "the womb is still represented in cultural discourses as an object of horror". "The myth about woman as castrator", explains Barbara Creed, "clearly points to male fears and phantasies [sic.] about the female genitals as a trap, a black hole which threatens to swallow them up and cut them into pieces. The vagina dentata is the mouth of hell - a terrifying symbol of woman as the 'devil's gateway'". Indeed, Jonathan Prown and Richard Miller cite "Gate of Hell" and "Mouth of Hell" as two "widely understood allegories for female genitalia" (1996). The title of Catherine Breillat's film Anatomy Of Hell is a reference to the vagina, and Breillat's objective in making the film was to confront viewers with vaginal images: "if hell has an anatomy, it is surely a woman's genitalia. [...] genitalia shot in close-up provokes a kind of horror in all of society, though society can't explain why. In the end, who is horrified by women's genitalia? Traditionally, men. Yet they slowly get used to this horrific vision" (Lisa Ades, 2007). (Breillat's observations are confirmed anecdotally by Stephanie Zacharek: "a lot of people that I've talked to just can't deal with it. Particularly a friend of mine, a critic, wrote: "Ew!". He just, like, didn't wanna look at that".) Furthermore, the vagina is also known as the 'devil's kitchen', the clitoris as the 'devil's doorbell', and the cervix as the 'seal of Hades'. Pauline Kiernan writes that "Hell is a term frequently used [...] for female genitals" (2006). Barbara G Walker's feminist interpretation of classical mythology - The Woman's Encyclopedia Of Myths And Secrets - gives a detailed account of this: "women's genitals [were likened] to the "yawning" mouth of hell, though this was hardly original; the underworld gate had always been the yoni of Mother Hel [...] To Christian ascetics, Hell-mouth and the vagina drew upon the same ancient symbolism[,] as if [one] was being drawn into the womb and destroyed there" (1983). Andre Schwarz-Bart cites the expression "Wash your devil" ('wash your cunt') and young Ifaluk women at puberty are traditionally told of "the "devil" beneath [the] skirt" (Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove, 1978). An illustration by Eugene LePoitevin (Les Diableries Erotiques, 1832) depicts a group of (seductive) female devils, with skulls on their chests, inside a vagina. Slang terms for 'vagina' such as 'mark-of-the-beast' perpetuate this association, as in the drama Witchcraze: "you have the devil's mark on your cunt!" (James Kent, 2003). Barbara Creed, in a chapter titled Woman As Monstrous Womb, asserts that "From classical to Renaissance times the uterus was frequently drawn with horns to demonstrate its supposed association with the devil" (1993). Ruth Wajnryb links this association of femininity with monstrosity directly to 'cunt' itself: "CUNT remains the closest synonym for evil in the modern world. It is part of [...] 'the feminisation of the monstrous'" (2004).

Medusa, the female demon, is also evoked in vagina mythology, leading Orlan to display images of her vagina "[alongside Sigmund] Freud's text on the head of Medusa [which] read: 'At the sight of the vulva the devil himself flees[']" (1995). Barbara Creed's book The Monstrous-Feminine includes a chapter titled Medusa's Head: The Vagina Dentata And Freudian Theory (which itself features a section called The Castrating Female Genitals). Elaine Showalter also cites Freud's equation of Medusa with a deadly vagina: "According to Freud, the decapitated head of Medusa with its snaky locks is a "genitalized head," an upward displacement of the sexual organs, so that the mouth stands for the vagina dentata, and the snakes for pubic hair. For men to unveil the Medusa is to confront the dread of looking at the female sexual organs" (1992). Freud's equation of Medusa with the vagina is significant as it presents the vagina as an organ capable of castrating the male penis: "in its horrifying aspect [Medusa] would resemble [...] the castrating genitals, the terrifying vagina dentata" (Barbara Creed, 1993).

Thus, the "fearsome female genitals" (Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove, 1978) are repeatedly associated with diseases and foul smells, regarded as abject, disgusting organs, stinking and pox-ridden - "that disgusting sick hole down there", as Jim Goad puts it (1994[a]). Furthermore, they are also equated with demonic and Satanic figures such as Medusa and the devil, damned as a "daemonic womb" (Camille Paglia, 1990). Such imagery can be found in contemporary popular culture, for instance The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring includes the fiery Eye of Sauron, which has been interpreted as a vaginal symbol representing "ultimate evil" (Duncan Tucker, 2005). Another film with an evil entity interpreted as vaginal is Kiss Me Deadly; its apocalyptic atom bomb, a reference to Pandora's Box, can be seen as "an atomic female orgasm" (Graham Fuller, 2006), a reading initially proposed by Carol Flinn: "women's sexuality (her own 'hot box') is constructed as the film's final object of inquiry and ultimate source of terror" (1986).

These misguided male associations perpetuate male anxiety about women's genitals, and thus also perpetuate the avoidance of them in male-dominated language and culture: "Men desire access to the vagina, but also fear it and are disgusted by it. They see it as a gaping maw, at times toothed, frighteningly insatiable. [...] It is when vaginas are accessible that they evoke disgust and horror in their own right. It is then that male fears make them monstrous, hellish, and vile, disgust-evoking places" (William Ian Miller, 1997).

We have seen how the word 'cunt' and the vagina itself - the signifier and the signified - are both suppressed in language and culture. They are associated with uncleanness ('cunt' as a 'dirty word' and the vagina as 'smelly'), and this false projection of abject qualities is rooted in a fear of "the demonic bodies of women" (Edward Shorter, 1982). Fundamentally, fear of the vagina leads to its symbolic and linguistic representations being suppressed and its physical characteristics being demonised. Censorship of 'cunt', obliteration of vaginal imagery, and association of vaginas with disease all stem from a primal fear of the vagina itself.

It Won't Bite: The Vagina Dentata

Central to the discussion of male cunt-hatred and womb-fear is the myth of the vagina dentata, "a motif occurring in certain primitive mythologies, as well as in modern surrealist painting and neurotic dream, which is known to folklore as 'the toothed vagina' - the vagina that castrates" (Joseph Campbell, 1976). The vagina dentata evokes the male castration complex, which in this instance is the fear that, once it has entered the vagina, the penis will be bitten off and consumed - the fear of "witches stealing men's penises with their vaginal teeth", as Catherine Blackledge puts it (2003). The vagina dentata myth is the most potent symbol of male "dread of the female genital" (HR Hays, 1964).

There are several possible explanations for the persistence of the vagina dentata myth, all of which relate to male fears of (symbolic) post-coital death: "man's fear of sexual intercourse with woman is based on irrational fears about the deadly powers of the vagina" (Barbara Creed, 1993). An illustration by Alfred Kubin is a clear example of this fear, depicting a man with an erection diving into an oversized vagina as if it were a swimming pool. Kubin's title, Todessprung (1902), suggests that the male figure is leaping to his death. Semen can be said to symbolise life, thus the release of semen into the vagina may represent the transference of life from the penis to the vagina. Likewise, when the penis has ejaculated and withdrawn from the vagina, its flaccid state is perhaps symbolic of death when contrasted with its pre-penetration tumescence. The connection between sex and death is a well-established one: 'die' was an Elizabethan synonym for 'orgasm', 'go' was a Victorian colloquialism meaning 'orgasm' and 'die', and an orgasm is known as 'la petite mort' in France. Also relevant here is the previously discussed notion of the vagina as a harbinger of disease: perceived infections contracted from the vagina are perhaps symbolic of death. The central fear, however, is that of castration, that the vagina will bite off the penis during intercourse: "In the sexual act, the phallus is 'endangered' by the vagina. [...] The amorous act is the castration of the man" (Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, 1995). Stephen King (1988) admitted that his greatest sexual fear was "making love to a woman and it just slammed shut and cut your penis off". Exploiting the vaginal slang term 'beaver', Stewart Ferris notes that both beavers and vaginas can "bite your fingers off" (2004), with the finger here being a clear substitution for the penis. Basic Instinct, Body Of Evidence, and GoldenEye all exploit these fears, depicting women (played respectively by Sharon Stone, Madonna, and Famke Janssen) who either murder their partners during sex or literally fuck them to death. Such behaviour amongst widow and redback spiders, praying mantises, midges, horned nudibranchs, and Photuris fireflies, is well-documented, and male honey bees are prone to sudden death shortly after ejaculation. (Such coital cannibalism actually has evolutionary advantages, as the body of the male, if eaten, provides nutrition for the gestating offspring.)

The fact that the vagina extracts semen, induces penile flaccidity, and is perceived as a source of disease, contributes to the vagina dentata myth, the fear of the vagina as a murderous, violent demon. More potent than any of these explanations, however, is the male castration complex, the fear that the penis will be removed during intercourse: "The boy discovers the fear of castration [...] through the disappearance of his penis in coition" (Juliet Mitchell, 1974). Closely related is the penis captivus complex, the fear that the penis cannot be withdrawn from the vagina after penetration: "the penis captivus myth [...] reflects the fear that, during coitus, the penis will get lost or captured, and removal will be impossible" (Virginia Braun and Sue Wilkinson, 2001). There are documented cases of penis captivus, though these all result from men suffering a cardiac arrest during intercourse, with rigor mortis preventing the extrication of the penis. During redback spider reproduction, the male is willingly consumed by the female, as his death ensures that he remains stuck inside her, thus preventing impregnation by other males: "In death, its sexual organ becomes stuck in the female's receptacle. Even if she feeds on the rest of his body, the organ remains, preventing her from receiving more sperm" (Carl Zimmer, 2006).

The reason men feel threatened inside the vagina is that they regard the vagina as a displaced mouth, poised to eat their penis: "myths and cults attest to the fact that the vagina has and retains (for both sexes) connotations of a devouring mouth" (Erik H Erikson, 1968). Jonathan Prown and Richard Miller (1996) note that "female genitalia [are] associated with death or consumption", citing the mythological Greek lamiae, who were "lustful she-demons whose name meant both mouth and vagina". There is an undated mediaeval French tale of a talking vagina, Du Chevalier Qui Fist Parler Les Cons, which also equates the functions of the two organs. Vaginas and mouths are both denoted by lips, thus, by extension, men fear that they also share teeth: "Vulvas have labiae, "lips," and many men believed that behind the lips lie teeth" (Barbara G Walker, 1983). As the vagina is considered a displaced mouth, fears of the penis being bitten, eaten, or swallowed manifest themselves. Susan Lurie cites the male perception of vagina as a "devouring mouth", into which the penis disappears (1981). Indeed, as Barbara Creed notes, the connection is so entrenched in the male psyche that even without references to teeth or consumption, the castration fear is still evoked: "Reference to other teeth is not necessary in order to construct the vagina as a place of castration. The image of a mouth - the gaping maw of nightmares and horror scenarios - is probably enough on its own to instil[l] dread" (1993). There are many illustrations which visually link mouths and vaginas, such as the many "vaginal mouths" in Pablo Picasso's paintings (Hilary Spurling, 2007); the most famous example is Rene Magritte's 1934 Surrealist painting Le Viol, in which a woman's body becomes her face. The effect is most readily achieved by rotating the female mouth into a vertical position - this motif has been used as the cover image of Barbara Creed's book The Monstrous-Feminine and a reprint of Louis Aragon's Irene's Cunt. In the animated series Family Guy (the Stewie Loves Lois episode, 2006), a character feels his son's mouth and assumes it to be his wife's vagina.

Barbara G Walker calls the vagina dentata "the classic symbol of men's fear of sex, expressing the unconscious belief that a woman may eat or castrate her partner during intercourse" (1983) and HR Hays explains that "the cleft between a woman's thigh is felt to be a castrating scissors" (1964). Andrea Dworkin evocatively encapsulates male apprehensions: "the death connected with sex is held to be the death of the penis, trapped in the castrating cave, the vagina" (1987).

There are several journal articles and papers exploring the concept of the vagina dentata. Pat Carr and Willard Gingerich conducted an illustrated (though limited) study of vagina dentata mythology: The Vagina Dentata Motif In Nahuatl And Pubelo Mythic Narratives: A Comparative Study (in Smoothing The Ground, 1983). Jill Rait has anaylsed The Vagina Dentata And The Immaculatus Uretus Divini Fontis (Journal Of The American Academy Of Religion, 1980). Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi discusses the Dangers Of The Vagina (British Journal Of Medical Psychology, 1985). Solimar Otero's Fearing Our Mothers provides An Overview Of Psychoanalytic Theories Concerning The Vagina Dentata Motif (American Journal Of Psychoanalysis, 1996). An article in the Journal Of Reproductive And Infant Psychology (Sue Wilkinson and Virginia Braun, 2001) explores the various positive and negative Socio-Cultural Representations Of The Vagina.

The vagina dentata is an all-pervasive image of terror, occurring throughout ancient mythology: "Vagina dentata - the vagina with teeth - is an ancient anxious image that flows through folklore, mythology, literature, art and humankind's dreamworld. [...] Snapping and snarling, emasculating and mutilating men, the myth of the vagina dentata is to be found from North to South America, across Africa, and in India and Europe too. The omnipotence of this motif of the devouring vagina has also survived millennia, with many cultures' creation mythology imbued with castrating and deadly images" (Catherine Blackledge, 2003).

In New Zealand Mauri mythology, Hine Nui Te Po, the goddess of death, is a clear manifestation of the vagina dentata: "in the place where men enter her she has sharp teeth of obsidian and greenstone" (Antony Alpers, 1964). The Witchita Indians of North America described witches who "had teeth in their vaginas which would cut off [the] penis. [...] You will hear the gritting of the teeth in their vaginas" (Elaine Showalter, 1992). The Toba Indians spoke of an equally fearsome woman who "cut off [a] penis and testicles with her vagina". The Yanomamo equivalent of Eve was a woman whose vagina "became a toothed mouth and bit off her consort's penis" (Barbara G Walker, 1983). Early Christians believed that witches used magic spells to "grow fangs in their vaginas". A sultan of Damascus was struck blind by "the dread powers [of] a vulva". There was a Malekula yonic spirit that "[drew others] near to it so that it may devour [them]" (Erich Neumann, 1963). According to Hindu mythology, "the demon Adi assumes the form of Parvati and attempts to kill Shiva with the teeth inside "her" vagina", and Shiva in turn "created a horrible woman with a mouth like a great cavern, with teeth and eyes in her vagina" (Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, 1980). The Navajo Indian monster Heaped Vagina, created by Snapping Vagina, would "throw her vagina over [her victims] and kill them" (Marta Weigle, 1992). Philip Rawson cites the ancient Chinese belief that vaginas were "executioners of men" (1968). An Indian myth describes "a young man trying to seduce a faithful wife. However, to his dismay, the man discovers that the woman has a saw above her vagina, with which she cuts off his penis" (Catherine Blackledge, 2003). The Polynesian goddess Hine-Nui-Te-Po "uses her vagina to slay Maui, the Polynesian hero. [...] he is bitten in two by her vagina's snapping, lightning-generating flint edges". A Mehinaku tale describes "a woman [who] took many shells - they looked just like teeth - and put them in her inner labia. Later, when it got dark, [a] man wanted to have sex. [...] The vagina cut his penis right off, and he died right there". In Navajo and Apache folk takes, vaginas "are describes as detached organs, walking around independently and biting as they go". Elaine Showalter (1992) quotes the diary of Edmund DeGoncourt, in which he describes his surreal fantasy/nightmare: "I dreamt last night that I [...] saw a woman [who] was completely naked [...] Then she started to dance, and while she was dancing took steps that showed her private parts armed with the most terrible jaws one could imagine, opening and closing, exposing a set of teeth".

The mythology of the fatal vagina is not only limited to castrating teeth, however: "teeth are not the only terrifying object to be found in woman's extra orifice". Symbolically, a Muslim belief attests that "the vagina can 'bite off' a man's eye-beam, resulting in blindness for the man who is brave enough to look deep into its depths" (Catherine Blackledge, 2003). Deadly vaginal snakes, eels, and dragons have also been described: "vagina snakes, so these stories relate, can bite off a man's penis, poison it, or kill the man. [...] In Polynesia, where there are no snakes, voracious vagina eels come into play. In one tale from the Tuamotos Islands, the eels in a woman called Faumea's vagina kill all men. [...] Men of Malekula talk mysteriously of a vagina spirit, called 'that which draws us to it so that it may devour us'. Hungry dragons too are often to be found inside the vagina of folklore and myth". In William Shakespeare's description of a woman "whose tongue more poisons than the adders" (1592), "tongue" has been interpreted as 'clitoris', translating as: "whose clitoris is more poisonous than the adder's tooth" (Pauline Kiernan, 2006). The goddess Scylla is represented as a beautiful woman above the waist though "[her] lower parts consist of three snapping hellhounds" (Barbara Creed, 1993). A North American Indian myth describes "a meat-eating fish inhabit[ing] the vagina of the Terrible Mother", Salvador Dali has depicted the vagina as a lobster with sharp claws, a cartoon by Michael Leunig shows the vagina as a dog's head with sharp teeth, and the Angmagsalik Inuits feared "a dangerous woman who carries a dog's head between her legs which bites off male organs" (Elaine Showalter, 1992).

Catherine Blackledge discusses the vagina dentata at length in her book The Story Of V: "For many the most powerful of all vaginal myths and superstitions, the vagina dentata is also, perhaps, the most common. Its prevalence around the globe is stunning. [...] sexual folklore seethes with stories of snapping vaginal teeth" (2003). She defines the vagina dentata as "an emasculating, castrating fearsome toothed organ [...] A hungry maw. A gluttonous gullet. A toothed, varoacious, ravenous, greedy chasm". She refers to 'cunt' both directly ("The catalytic cunt") and indirectly ("A cunning stunt") in subtitles, though ignores significant cultural landmarks such as Cuntpower Oz and The Vagina Monologues thus her book cannot be viewed as quite the definitive study it was proclaimed to be by some initial reviews. The most extensive study of the vagina dentata is the German book Die Vagina Dentata In Mythos Und Erzaehlung by Sonja Brigitte Ross. The Dangerous Sex, by HR Hays, is a fascinating study of the negative attitudes towards women embodied in ancient mythology, and Barabara Creed wrote a similar study concerning modern visual culture titled The Monstrous-Feminine.

The vagina dentata myth has been appropriated in contemporary cinema by the film Teeth, in which the central character discovers teeth in her vagina. Yoju Toshi includes a female character "with a chomping, teeth-filled vagina" (Matt Coyte, 2004) who is capable of "spin[ning] webs out of her fanged vagina" (Todd Tjersland, 1995). Gokudo Sengokushi: Fudoh features "a high-school girl shooting poison darts from her vagina" (Howard Hampton, 2005). Rabid features "a porn star with a man-eating vagina in her armpit" (Duncan Bell, 2005[a]). Zuma features "[a] horrible creature that has a vagina dentata instead of a face" (Pete Tombs, 1997). In Blue Velvet, a carved sculpture of a vagina dentata was used as a set decoration. There is a "vagina monster" in the film Schramm (David Kerekes, 1994). Kekko Kamen III features "Nude lady superheroes [who] fly through the air with kung-fu glowing vaginas! They land on your face and kill you!" (Todd Tjersland, 1995). A tooth is placed inside a vagina during a scene in Novo.

There are also vagina dentatas throughout contemporary popular culture. There is a band, for example, called VaggieMonsters. In the animated television series Drawn Together, Princess Clara has "a monster for a vagina" (Dwayne Carey-Hill, 2004). The novel Riddley Walker features a character with "teef be twean her legs" [sic.] (Russell Hoban, 1980). The Blue Noses Group's video Sex Art II includes an image of a woman wearing knickers featuring an image of a tiger's mouth. To promote safe sex, SuperSom magazine photographed a naked woman holding a mousetrap in front of her vagina. The Illustrated Book Of 'Country Matters' includes a Photoshopped image of a vagina with teeth. The sexist comic Smut has a strip titled Guillo Tina, the name equating the female character with a deadly blade, as in the figure of Mme Guillotine during the French Revolution: "SHE HAD A GUILLOTINE FOR A VAG" (200-). Colette Thurlow's zine Taxidermy includes the ode Vaginas Don't Bite (in issue #2, Bitches With Brains, 2007). Photographer Andres Serrano (who specialises in provocative and taboo-breaking images) has photographed a vagina with teeth (from a shark) stuck inside it, in a literal interpretation of the photograph's title Vagina Dentata: Vagina With Teeth: "The fears of the Other from a male perspective have been crystallised in Serrano's staged photograph of a vagina with teeth, the vagina that bites off and swallows the (erect and penetrating) penis. The vagina is the hidden orifice that castrates 'post-coitus' [...] female sexuality is constructed as an untamed and uncanny site of danger and horror not least as it is hidden from sight [...] it drastically shouts out 'cunt-hate' and 'womb-fear'" (Kerstin Mey, 2007).

In Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash (1992), a character wears "a very small hypodermic needle" in her vagina as an anti-rape device. By affixing a spike to a tampon, Leif Lindell created a prototype model she called Femdefence (2003). Ira D Sherman's Impenetrable Devices series includes several similar rape-prevention mechanisms, including Intimate Electric Fence (capable of giving an electric shock to a rapist's penis), and the self-explanatory Saber Tooth Speculum and Bear Trap Corset. Sonette Ehlers actually mass-produced a similar product, called Rapex (2005), which was a female condom containing fish-hooks "that embed themselves in the penis in the event of penetration" (Duncan Bell, 2005[b]).

The motif has also been represented in more abstract manifestations. It is indirectly personified by the Etruscan demoness Culsu (who carries scissors) and the Alawan goddess Kunapipi (who swallows men with her womb), both of whom have names etymologically related to 'cunt'. Pablo Picasso painted a woman holding a tray of sea urchins, with the creatures as representations of the vagina dentata. A sea urchin in Un Chien Andalou has also been interpreted as a vagina dentata symbol. In L'Etoile De Mer, a vagina dentata is represented by a starfish which wraps itself around a sea urchin. Barbara Creed (1986) identifies the "monstrous vagina" in a diversity of film images: "the gaping, cannibalistic bird's mouth in The Giant Claw; the terrifying spider of The Invisible Man; the toothed vagina/womb of Jaws; and the fleshy, pulsating womb of The Thing and the [sic.] Poltergeist. What is common to all of these images of horror is the voracious maw, the mysterious black hole which signifies female genitalia as a monstrous sign which threatens to give birth to equally horrific offspring as well as threatening to incorporate everything in its path". Creed also notes the "malevolent womb" and "the all-devouring vagina, the toothed vagina, the vagina as Pandora's box" symbolised in Alien, and the "evil womb" suggested by witches' grottoes in Inferno and Suspiria.

Just as the iconography of the vagina dentata is still present in contemporary culture, the myth itself also survives. During the Vietnam War, for example, Vietcong prostitutes were rumoured to construct their own vagina dentatas: "American servicemen in Vietnam recounted hearing tales of prostitutes with razors, sharp glass, or even grenades in the vagina" (Virginia Braun and Sue Wilkinson, 2001). A fictional short story by Emily Prager, The Lincoln-Pruitt Anti-Rape Device, reverses this military urban myth, describing "an American servicewoman in Vietnam who engaged the 'enemy' in coitus and killed them with an intra-vaginal spike".

There have also been several positive appropriations of vagina dentata mythology by women, such as that of the Dragon Ladies performance group. The Dragon Ladies wear costumes with gaping, fanged mouths over their crotches, "exaggerat[ing] and mutat[ing] the ordinary into something fantastic and mythological" (David Kerekes, 1998). One of the most direct, and most positive, appropriations of the myth is that of the post-feminist Riot Grrrl zine titled Vaginal Teeth. There is also a feminist group in Denmark called Vagina Dentata.

The spectre of the vagina dentata is also evident in much of our contemporary slang vocabulary. Tim Healey cites 'fool's trap', 'venus fly trap', 'pencil sharpener', 'suck and swallow', 'fly cage', 'mousetrap', and 'cat' "that catches the mouse" (1980), a lexicon of metaphors which presents the vagina as a place of no escape. Similarly, James McDonald cites 'dumb glutton', 'biter', and 'vicious circle' as "expressions which humorously disguise an element of male apprehension about the vagina" (1988). Jonathon Green writes that "male fear and even hatred of the vagina persists unabated: emotions that are faithfully reflected in slang" (1993), citing examples such as 'snatch', 'snatch-blatch', 'snatch box'/'snatch-box', 'vacuum', 'sperm-sucker', 'wastepipe', 'fool trap', 'fly-catcher', 'bite', 'snapper', 'snapping turtle', 'carnal-trap', 'mangle', 'manhole', 'man-trap', 'prick-skinner', 'eel-skinner', 'eel-trap', 'mouse-trap', and 'skin-the-pizzle'. The perception here is of the vagina as an organ with "hidden dangers lurking within" (Erica Jong, 1973), ready to trap, snap, swallow, skin, or otherwise incapacitate the penis. Other examples include 'bite', 'pig's bite', 'Bermuda Triangle', 'beaver-trap', 'bear trap', 'paper cut', 'serpent socket', 'shark's nose', 'predator's face', and 'man-entrapment'. Jane Mills cites 'snatch' as "at first meaning bite [thus associating] the vagina with a snapping jaw" (1989), and Mark Morton notes that it "implies that a woman's genitals will grab hold of a man and devour him" (2003). The slang word 'clacker' compares to the vagina to a children's snapping toy. Barbara Creed (1993) finds the influence of the vagina dentata in the language used to describe women in general: "The vagina dentata also points to the duplicitous nature of woman, who promises paradise in order to ensnare her victims. The notion of the devouring female genitals continues to exist in the modern world; it is apparent in popular derogatory terms for women such as 'man-eater' and 'castrating bitch'" (however, she is perhaps too broad in her assessment, as she implies that any representation of women juxtaposed with teeth, - or, indeed, any representation of teeth at all - is also an allusion to the vagina dentata).

Cunt Shows And Cunt-Power

Cunt-hatred is prevalent in vagina dentata mythology, popular culture, and slang, as we have seen, and these negative representations must be reversed: "the vagina has commonly and persistently been represented as [...] dirty, smelly, shameful, and even dangerous. These representations could be seen as encapsulating (Western) society's attitudes towards, and responses to, the vagina, as well as attitudes to women more broadly. It is a depressing portrayal, and one that needs to be challenged" (Virginia Braun and Sue Wilkinson, 2001). A feminist movement promoting positive exhibitionism and celebration of the vagina, and positive usage of the word 'cunt', is attempting to challenge negative attitudes towards femininity.

Male abuse of the word 'cunt' is compounded by male control of the reproduction of cunts in visual form, namely the pornography industry. Inspired by feminist critiques of pornography, some women have become proactive in creating and distributing pro-feminist porn, and are confounding male expectations by turning full-frontal exhibitions of the vagina into acts of empowerment. More traditional feminists, who cannot bring themselves to use either the vagina or the word 'cunt' as positive tools of empowerment, do not share these attitudes.

The most outspoken anti-porn feminist is Andrea Dworkin, who views 'cunt' as "the most reductive word" and sees porn as "the debasing of women" (1981). By contrast, Deborah Orr contends that "exposure of female bodies has been transmogrified into an expression of female freedom and power" (2000).

Female sexual assertiveness has a long history, though perhaps its most influential personification is Madonna, who appropriates the conventional tropes of male fantasy (posing naked for her book Sex and wearing a conical bra) yet does so for her own pleasure, subverting the expectations of her straight male audience: "In our society, a woman who is overtly sexual is considered a venomous bitch, or someone to be feared. So what I like to do is [to] take the traditional [...] overtly sexual [...] image and turn it around, and say, 'Well, yes, I can dress this way, or I can behave this way, but I'm in charge'" (Omnibus, 1990). With the names of her 'Slutco' video company and 'Siren' film company, Madonna also reappropriated two negative feminine terms, and her What It Feels Like For A Girl video features an "OL KUNTZ" sign punning on 'old cunts' (2000). (As in Madonna's "KUNTZ", 'cunt' is also occasionally spelt with a 'k' - 'kunt' - in graffiti, and Private Eye (Those All-Time Great Alastair Campbell Advertising Campaigns, 2005) spelt 'cunts' with a 'z' in "Beanz Meanz C[u]ntz!", a pun on 'Beanz Meanz Heinz'.)

This post-feminist sexual provocation, analysed by Brian McNair in Striptease Culture, has specifically increased the cultural visibility of the vagina, counteracting the sexist tits-and-ass landscape discussed earlier: "Whatever the reasons for its concealment (and male fear could underlie it), feminists think that it is symptomatic of the way women themselves are disregarded and undervalued. It follows that by making the vagina visible, by defying the taboos, a woman can reaffirm her identity" (Lynn Holden, 2000).

Annie Sprinkle, in a performance entitled Public Cervix Announcement, allowed members of the public to crouch between her open legs and view her vulva. Sprinkle was attempting to remove the stigmas of fear and ignorance attached to the vagina: "One reason why I show my cervix is to assure the misinformed, who seem to be primarily of the male population, that neither the vagina nor the cervix contains any teeth [...] Lots of folks, both men and women, know very little about female anatomy and so we are ashamed and/or afraid of the cervix. That's sad, so I do my best to lift that veil of ignorance" (1998). (The lecture Cunt: The Facts at the 2006 Stockholm Pride festival was a similar, though less sensational, attempt at vaginal demystification.)

Heavily influenced by the Public Cervix Announcement were Orlan and Diamond Lil, who also presented their vaginas as performance art. Whereas Sprinkle's performance constituted a series of intimate and interactive moments in which each audience-member would encounter her cunt on an individual basis, Orlan and Lil used mirrors and magnification to display their cunts to audiences collectively. For her Amazing Cunt Show (2001), Lil used a mirrored box to give audiences a view of her cunt, and Orlan used a magnifying glass to display her vagina.

In the 1960s, Fluxus artist Shigeko Kubota performed Vaginal Painting, for which she held a paintbrush between the lips of her vagina and painted whilst squatting over a canvas. A decade later, Carolee Schneemann unravelled a scroll of paper from her vagina and read from it, in a performance titled Interior Scroll. This directly inspired Babe, during her concerts with Rockbitch, to pull a rolled-up sheet from her vagina on which was written a speech celebrating 'cunt': "it's not disgusting. It's not shameful. It's fucking beautiful" (Hull, 2003).

The sole male equivalent of these performances is Puppetry Of The Penis, in which penises are manipulated into unusual shapes. This genital origami is clearly a comedy act, however, whereas Annie Sprinkle and the others had a serious agenda. This division between comedy and seriousness applies not just to the performances mentioned here but also to general attitudes towards male and female genitalia. Whereas male genitals are seen as mildly amusing (with jokes about one-eyed trouser-snakes, for instance), vaginas inspire only loathing and fear, with any jokes about them confined to misogynist references to disease or dirt.

Directly confronting this loathing and fear, Germaine Greer edited an issue of Oz in which she extolled the virtues of cunt-power, her manifesto of female sexual empowerment. The issue was introduced with the words "Welcome to Cuntpower Oz" (1970[b]), though its title was officially Female Energy Oz. It included light-hearted elements, such as a "cunt-thatch woollen bikini" (1970[d]), though its most important feature was Greer's editorial, The Politics Of Female Sexuality.

Greer exposed the systematic cultural sublimation of female sexuality, and specifically the sublimation of the vagina: "One of the chief mechanisms in the suppression of female humanity is the obliteration of female sexuality. [...] In order that the pork sword might be seen to rule the world unchallenged, women obligingly hid their sex, at first with a hand [though later the] devices for minimising the organs of femaleness became more sophisticated; women began to wear knickers, then to deodorise their genitals, douche them, shave them, pluck them. Modesty rotted their innocence. They learned to prize smallness, inaccessibility. Their rich juices were prevented from flowing" (1970[c]).

Greer's solution was to foster an awareness of the positive power and significance of 'cunt', the word and the organ: "Revolutionary women may join Women's Liberation Groups [...] but did you ever hear of one of them marching the public street with her skirt high crying 'Can you dig it? Cunt is beautiful!' The walled garden of Eden was CUNT. The mandorla of the beatified saints was CUNT. The mystical rose is CUNT. The Ark of Gold, the Gate of Heaven. Cunt is a channel drawing all towards it. Cunt is knowledge. Knowledge is receptivity, which is activity. Cunt is the symbol of erotic science, the necessary corrective of the maniacal conquest of technology. Skirts must be lifted, knickers (which women have only worn for a century) must come off forever. It is time to dig CUNT and women must dig it first. [...] The only [words women] may employ have been deformed by centuries of sadistic male use. You CUNT, gash, slit, crack, slot... Women have no names of their own for what is most surely their own. It ought to be possible to establish a women's vocabulary of cunt, prideful, affectionate, accurate and bold".

Honing her theme in an essay titled Lady Love Your Cunt (1971[a]), Greer further clarified the problem of vaginal oppression: "Primitive man feared the vagina [...] It looks bad. Shave it. Pluck it. Cover it with your hand [...] It smells bad. Wash it. Scour it. Douche it. DEODORIZE it. It tastes bad. Wash it some more. It's sloppy. Mop it. It's dry. Lubricate it. The language of pornography is full of cunt-hatred. [...] If you doubt that the cunt is hated and feared by most of the population, how will you explain the hundreds of pounds spent in persuading women that they have an intimate deodorant problem? [Women are told] that cunts smell bad, not just when dirty or menstruating, but all the time".

As The Politics Of Female Sexuality had called for "a women's vocabulary of cunt" (1970[c]), Lady Love Your Cunt likewise demanded: "we must regain the power of the cunt. CUNT IS BEAUTIFUL. [...] Give it your own loving names, not the fictions of anatomy books, or the condescending diminutives that men use [...] or the epithets of hate [...] What we need is a genuinely descriptive terminology of cunt".

Cunt-power as a feminist movement was initiated by Germaine Greer in 1969. In her "first-ever cunt-power piece" (1986), an open letter to John Gorton, she wrote: "cunt power is black, baby, black, and it's my cunt is telling me to write this letter, white man. [...] One day the women of the world will fill their cunts with razor blades for the likes of you". Many years later, she memorably persuaded an embarrassed Jonathan Dimbleby to say 'cunt' on live television: "try to say it! It'll do you good!" (Sheree Folkston, 1991), a tactic later employed by Whoopi Goldberg in Boys On The Side.

Greer also co-edited the porn magazine Suck in the early 1970s, and asked of her female readers: "WHY NOT SEND US A PHOTOGRAPH OF YOUR OWN CUNT, WITH YOUR NAME LABELED ON?" (1971[a]), thus she can be credited not only with the origination of cunt-power (both the term itself and its philosophy) but also as one of the inspirations for the liberating exhibitionism of Annie Sprinkle, Orlan, and Diamond Lil. The ultimate origin of vagina exhibitionism, however, is the ancient custom of skirt-raising - the display of the vagina as an act of aggression.

Bellerophon, for instance, "fled in terror from Lycian women advancing on him with genitals exposed, and even the sea god Poseidon retreated, for fear they might swallow him" (Barbara G Walker, 1983), or, as Catherine Blackledge succinctly puts it: "Bellerophon retreats in shame, vanquished by vulvas" (2003). Blackledge cites several examples of "the power of the exposed vagina to repel foes", and female genital displays warding off evil: "Driving out devils, averting vicious spirits, frightening carnivores and scaring opposing warriors and threatening deities away - all these heroic and dangerous deeds are reputed to form part of a woman's genital might. [Pliny and Plutarch] described how great heroes and gods will flee in the face of female genitalia. Elsewhere, the report of a sixteenth-century traveller in North Africa records the belief that lions will turn tail and run from this sexual sight. At funerals, women were hired as mourners, with the express aim of exorcising demons via vaginal display. Delightfully, Russian folklore relates how when a bear appears out of the woods, it can be put to flight by a woman raising her skirt at it". Blackledge describes (and reproduces) an engraving by Charles Eisen which depicts "a young woman [...] displaying her sexual centre for Satan to see. And in the face of her naked womanhood, the devil reels back in fear". She argues that when the vagina is employed to repel foes it is demonstrating its inherent feminine power. However, she also problematises this position, recognising that if enemies flee from the vagina then it must be perceived as an object of terror and/or revulsion. This perception is clearly apparent in illustrations by Charles Eisen (Le Diable De Papafiguiere 1674) and Thomas Rowlandson (Le Regard Du Diable, 1817), both of which depict a devil recoiling in horror from a woman exposing her genitals.

Cuntlovin': Reclaiming Cunt

The embracing of pornographic imagery by liberal feminists such as Germaine Greer was fundamentally an attempt to utilise the vagina as a symbol of female empowerment ('cunt-power' or 'pussy-power'), to reverse the cultural position of the vagina as a repulsive and frightening organ. The vagina is marginalised by social phallocentricity, and this is subverted by feminist attempts to increase its visibility in such a way that control is maintained of both the organ itself and the reproduction of its image - a shift from "phallocentrism to gynaecentrism" (Graham Fuller, 2006).

The vagina is also, in the form of the word 'cunt', employed as a tool of linguistic misogyny, and it is here that radical feminists such as Andrea Dworkin reveal their truly illiberal ideology. Dworkin employs male terminology by referring to porn models as 'cunts' and 'whores', whilst simultaneously noting the reductivist implications of the words. This reminds us of the cruelty inherent in male usage of the terms, though it also appears defeatist, seeming to wallow in the injustice of the status quo. Jeanette Winterson even equates pornographic modelling with "being turned into a stupid cunt" (2000); she seemingly feels so betrayed by such women that, startlingly and regressively for a feminist writer, she resorts to unironic and abusive usage of the ne plus ultra of linguistic misogyny.

Robin Brontsema, who views 'cunt' as "an unrivalled misogynist epithet" (2004), provides a detailed explanation of the function of reclamation, both in a general sense and also in direct relation to 'cunt': "value reversal is the transformation of a negative value into a positive one. To reverse a word's value is to completely turn it around 180 degrees to its opposite, to steal it from its injurious trajectory to send it on the opposite path - to reverse value is to exchange opposites. Value reversal is largely assumed to be the goal of linguistic reclamation. Certainly, it is a - even if not the only - goal of many movements to reclaim a word. This value reversal, for example, is at the heart of the contemporary feminist movement to reclaim cunt. Today cunt could be considered the most abusive, misogynist epithet used against women, derogatively signifying not only female genitalia but women in general [...] to reclaim cunt is to reverse its value, to replace its negative connotative value with a positive one. This value reversal channels the power that the word already contains, tapping this source of energy in order to create its very opposite. It is nothing less than a revolutionary reversal of opposites".

'Cunt', deemed a "vile insult" by Joan Smith (1998), unequivocally "tops the tree [of offence]" according to Matthew DeAbaitua (1998), and, while radical feminists cling to its abusive male sense, an increasingly influential liberal feminist campaign, gathering momentum since the cunt-power days of the 1970s, seeks to reclaim it as a term of endearment. Thus, Minnie Bruce Pratt sees 'cunt' as "the universe reduced to one part of a woman's body, cursed on the street" though also as "[a] word caught and caged" (1995), implying that reappropriation of the word will remove its reductivism and simultaneously uncage it. Deborah Orr outlines the respective positions of liberal and radical feminists, though ultimately lends her own support to the radical position: "Maybe it's time to wake up to the fact that the radical feminists were the ones who got it right" (2006).

Ruth Wajnryb, in her essay A Cunt Of A Word (2004), argues that usage of 'cunt' must shift from its implicit negative associations to a clear and neutral descriptive function: "The way to win this battle is to use the word denotatively and so over time defuse its connotative message. We are urged to 'begin to like the word. It's a good word... It doesn't have to describe people you don't like, jobs you hate, cars that won't go... Use it gladly, rather than shamefully'" (2004). She stresses that reappropriation of the word 'cunt' is necessary in order to eradicate the negative childhood and cultural attitudes towards the organ it represents: "If women reclaim the word as part of 'womenspeak', they can subvert the male-endowed perniciousness of the word. Some feminists argue that 'the way to change some of the false and undermining messages is to change the usage of the word... Defuse it, and in doing so we subvert the culture that prescribes negative meanings to words that don't deserve or need them'. [...] Some women actively cultivate a use of CUNT that they hope will shift usage and attitudes, most especially so that girls don't grow up 'believing they possess something disgusting in their bodies and young boys... believing that what they were born from is the most offensive thing they can call another person".

The earliest recorded female reappropriation of 'cunt' is surely that of the Wife of Bath in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: "she is certainly remarkably free in thought and speech, given the general constraints on women of her status in the Middle Ages. Indeed, the broadness of her language makes her virtually unique as a literary figure in her times" (Geoffrey Hughes, 1991). A bawdy and down-to-earth character who espouses the power women can gain over men through sex, she assures her betrothed that he will 'get his oats' (Geoffrey Chaucer, 1400):

"For certeyn, olde dotard, by youre leve,
Ye shul have queynte right y-nough at eve".

'Queynte' should be seen not as a 'cunt' euphemism but rather as a phonetic variant, retaining the bluntness of its source. It can be contrasted with the Wife's coy euphemism 'quoniam':

"And trewely, as myne housbondes tolde me,
I had the beste quoniam mighte be".

'Quoniam' is Latin for 'whereas', and is used here euphemistically (due to its phonetic similarity to 'queynte') to mean 'thingy': she is boasting that she has the best 'thingy' ('cunt') in Bath. As James Winny writes, "The Wife is understandably pleased to repeat this basic complement. Her Latin euphemism quoniam [...] is probably used for its alliterative likeness to the blunter term she has previously used" (1965).

Several contemporary feminists have followed the Wife's example, challenging male monopolisation of sexual discourse and seeking specifically to reappropriate the word 'cunt' itself, "reinvesting [it] with a more positive meaning" (Deborah Cameron, 1985) to counteract its "anachronistic slur on female sexuality" (Joan Smith, 1998). For example, 'A CUNT IS A USEFUL THING' was used as a placard slogan at lesbian-rights marches. (In Cunt, a chapter from their 1996 book Nothing But The Girl, Susie Bright and Jill Posener write that "Lesbians have actually made the world a safer place to say cunt".) 'Cunt positive' writer Jane Mills explains that she is keen to reclaim the word: "to use the word 'cunt' in a positive way, to say 'Right, this is a sexual organ, and we're proud of it', would be no bad thing" (Kerry Richardson, 1994). Whoopi Goldberg's character in Boys On The Side also advocates reappropriation: "I have to hear you say it! Oh, come on. C-u-n-t, go on, please! Please! It'll free you!" (Herbert Ross, 1995). This encouragement prompts Mary-Louise Parker's character first to whisper "Cunt" and then to shout and sing it aloud.

Eve Ensler, who has said that "c[unt] has the possibility to be a great word" (Andrew Goldman, 1999), wrote The Vagina Monologues, adapted from interviews she conducted with women about their vaginas. The Monologues include a poem called Reclaiming Cunt (1996) that "play[s] around with [the word,] tak[ing] the different letters of the word and break[ing] down the sound of it with colours and images" (Richard Brooks, 1999). Her aim was to encourage women "to re-appropriate 'cunt' in order to empower both the word and themselves" (Susie Dent, 2004). Ensler has certainly turned 'vagina' and 'cunt' into buzzwords, though this begs the question: why celebrate the word 'vagina' when, as discussed earlier, it is a word she so dislikes? (Perhaps she should call it 'The Cunt Monologues' instead?)

Ensler's ability to encourage an entire audience to chant 'Cunt!' makes for an entertaining evening at the theatre: "The entire auditorium conjoins in a mass chant, reclaiming 'cunt' [which is] a detested word in most female vocabulary. [Ensler] demonstrated how it was only vulgar because of the way we associated it largely due to male usage of the term. As a result of this re-education, most of the audience were not embarrassed when they were asked to shout it out" (Natalie Ingham and Jonathan Haynes, 2002). The Monologues have been performed at universities around the world, performed with 'Cunt' flash-cards and advertised with 'Cunt' flyers.

However, many women have problems with the central message of the Monologues. Ensler seems to feel that women should be defined solely by their vaginas ("Your vagina is the story of your life", 2001), yet this is, unwittingly, dangerously close to the sexist, reductivist notion that the vagina is the only significant part of a woman: "by talking about their vaginas as if they were defined by them alone, women are in danger of objectifying and fetishising their bodies as much as men" (Barbara Ellen, 2001). Thus, Ensler's concentration on the vagina has been interpreted as regressive: "Actually, the struggles of the past 40 years have been an attempt to show that we are so much more than just cunts" (Lynn Gardner, 2001). This highlights the key distinction between the word 'cunt' in its literal, insulting, and reductivist senses - it is increasingly acceptable to use 'cunt' as a synonym for 'vagina', though it remains unacceptable to use the word as a pejorative: "calling a woman a cunt is far more taboo than talking about her cunt" (Mark Morton, 2003).

The Reclaiming Cunt poem itself is flawed because, in it, Ensler seeks to extract a non-existent erotic potential from the phonetic components of the word. 'Cunt' sounds fundamentally abrasive: "The harsh, unsibilant C, then the grunt of the U and that N, finished off with the contemptuous spit of the final T" (Deborah Orr, 2006). The title of Martin Samuel's article From The Hard 'C' To The Sharp 'T' It's A Sensational Word (2007) neatly encapsultes the word's abrasive phonetics. In Reclaiming Cunt, Ensler energetically attempts to soften the word's inherently harsh phonemes: "C C, Ca Ca [...] ugh, ugh, u [...] n-, cun, cun, then t [...] tell me, tell me "Cunt cunt," say it" (1996). Her moans of pleasure when enunciating the individual letters do not convince: "The attempt to reclaim and beautify the word 'cunt' is embarrassing" (Kate Kellaway, 2001[b]). This problematic beautification is redeemed, however, by Ensler's subsequent conversational examples of reclamation ("did you just call me a cunt? Thank you so much!", 1996), which are far more persuasive.

The most grating element of the Monologues is Ensler's self-congratulatory hyperbole regarding the show's impact. It seems as if she "believes she has been mystically called upon to enlighten us" (Catherine Bennett, 2001), as, for example, when she begins her introduction to the show by saying "I am not sure why I was chosen" (2001). Gillian Anderson's comment, "Eve Ensler is the Pied Piper. She's leading women and the world to a different consciousness of the essence of women" (Kate Kellaway, 2001[a]), is the apogee of this vagina hyperbole.

Perhaps more provocatively, Inga Muscio has written Cunt: A Declaration Of Independence, in which she calls 'cunt' "a venerable ally in my war against oppression" (1998). Writing 'cunt' with a capital 'C' as a mark of status and respect, she foresees an end to the word's negative connotations: "When viewed as a positive force in the language of women - as well as a reference to the power of the anatomical jewel which unites us all - the negative power of Cunt falls in upon itself". She sees it as a source of unity for womankind: "we are suddenly equipped with a word that brings all women together [...] besides global subjugation, Cunts are the only common denominators I can think of which women irrefutably share".

Cunt: A Declaration Of Independence is a personal account, drawing on Riot Grrrl influences, of issues relating to women's bodies (menstruation, contraception, prostitution, and rape). Thus, chapters include Blood And Cunts, Reproductive Control For Cunts, Orgasms From Cunts, Acrimony Of Cunts, Rape Not Cunts, Cuntlovin' Guide To The Universe, and, in the second edition (2002), Women With Dicks Men With Cunts. Muscio also devotes sections to topics such as Cuntlovin' Ovulation Alert, Cuntjuices, Misc. Cuntlovin' Enterprises, Cuntlovin' Consumerism, and Cuntlovin' Investment Portfolio. Furthermore, she coins terms such as "Cuntlovin' Public Retaliation", "Cuntlovin' Women's Art Movement", "Cuntlovin' Women's Economic System", "cuntdreams", and "cuntlove".

Clearly, 'cuntlovin'', namely women's respect for their own bodies, is Muscio's major theme. She proclaims herself to be "the Cuntlovin' Ruler of My Sexual Universe", and is eager to reclaim 'cunt' (she has fun imagining it as a "Raging Cunt" monster-truck, and distributes 'Cunt' stickers and t-shirts), though unfortunately she devotes very little space to the word itself. Instead, she uses it merely as a segue into a long account of her sexual self-exploration. Her discussion of 'cunt' is too brief to justify her book's attention-grabbing title, and is too generalised to be of serious interest.

Muscio's cuntlovin' philosophy and Germaine Greer's Lady Love Your Cunt essay (a title punned by Sleeper in 1995 for their track Lady Love Your Countryside) inspired a group called Ladies Art Revival to distribute knickers bearing the slogan 'I Love My Cunt'. Another feminist group, T-ShirtMamas, also sells 'I Love My Cunt' t-shirts.

An online shop, Cafe Press, sells t-shirts, mouse mats, boxer shorts, mugs, bags, and caps all emblazoned with 'I Love My Cunt' (all by Cuntlove, 199-). Not Kid Friendly (200-) also via Cafe Press, sells 'I LOVE CUNT' t-shirts, hats, mugs, and bumper-stickers; they also sell a range of 'CONNETICUNT' items: various t-shirts, tank-tops, creepers, sweatshirts, magnets, thongs, hoodies, golf shirts, stickers, bumper-stickers, and registration-plate frames. (Cafe Press also retails a similar range of 'C.U.N.T.' t-shirts, mugs, boxer shorts, and caps by Trailervision (2001). They also sell a range of t-shirts, caps, thongs, magnets, boxer shorts, mouse mats, and teddy bears by Love Is A Cunt, all featuring the slogan 'LOVE IS A CUNT' (2004).)

Written pseudonymously in the zine Bust, an essay by Jayne Air celebrates the shock-value of 'cunt': "CUNT. So many hate it. They say, "We've reappropriated 'bitch' and 'girl' but cunt is just going too far." [...] Somebody else isn't going to own that word. I figure it's so fucking dangerous, and it's so intimately about my anatomy, that it's going to be mine, too. [...] Cunt is a word that you just wouldn't say in front of your mother. Cunt is a word that can still make men suck in their breath uncomfortably and look down at the floor. It says, "There's nothing you frat boys can call me that I haven't already thought of myself, before you. And I'm using it my own way, thanks so much." [...] Cunt has all the power of a magic word" (199-).

This essay, titled A Vindication Of The Rights Of Cunt (a reference to the classic A Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman) is, like Germaine Greer's The Politics Of Female Sexuality, explicitly presented as a manifesto. Like Greer's essay, it was first published by the underground press, and is refreshingly direct, radical, and powerful. It has been reprinted, in abridged form, by C Magazine as That Cunt Has Balls: The Last Of The Four-Letter Words (2002). Fortunately, it has none of Eve Ensler's self-congratulations and none of Inga Muscio's over-generalisations. Indeed, The Politics Of Female Sexuality and A Vindication Of The Rights Of Cunt are probably the two most significant contributions to the cunt-power movement.

The poem Cunt Cuntry (2001) by Alix Olson (who refers to herself as "Jane Hancunt") has a similar theme to the cuntlovin' and cunt-power manifestos discussed above. It begins with an explicitly revolutionary call-to-arms:

"I've decided to start
Cunt Cuntry!
Write our own Cunstitution
Let our liberated clit bells ring out:
The Cunts are coming: It's the Cunt Revolution!"

Olson describes "Cunt Land", a utopia in which "Cunt-Liberators tossed Cunt-Traitors into the sea", with the parodic motto "My Cunt tis of Thee". She refers to women as "Cunted Creatures" and "the Cunt Cuntry Army", and accepts men provided that they are gynaecologists (the "Cunt Commander in Chief") or are pro-feminist (having a "Cunt Mentality").

Whereas Germaine Greer, Eve Ensler, Inga Muscio, Jayne Air, and Alix Olson seek to alter the meaning of 'cunt', transforming it from a negative word into a positive one, Kathy Acker and Jane Gallop highlight the word's harshness by employing it repetitiously and forcefully. Acker recreates masculine usage of it, using exaggeration to draw attention to its misogynism. The first part of her novel Algeria is titled CUNT, and chapter titles include CUNT, The Next Crazy CUNT, and A CUNT Does Not Belong To Any Man.

Acker replaces each of her female characters' names with "THE CUNT" and "it", the substitutions drawing attention to male objectification of women: "There is no such thing as a woman. Henceforth a woman is A CUNT" (1984). The novel is "cunt-littered" (Deborah Orr, 2006), and the viciousness of the term is revealed by Acker's deliberate over-use of it. For example, she writes about the suicide of her mother: "THE CUNT ate at the most expensive restaurants in New York [...] It stole money and jewelry from THE CUNT its mother [...] THE CUNT'S THE CUNT mother had made two million by marrying a rich man when it was thirty years old. On Monday THE CUNT asked THE CUNT its mother for money. THE CUNT mother refused. Now THE CUNT had driven itself as close to suicide as it could get [...] In the hotel room THE CUNT ate down all its Librium and died". By harshly objectifying her mother in this way, she reveals the cruel impact of similar male objectifications.

There are also more light-hearted methods of reclamation. Comediennes Jenny Eclair ("hahahaha, cunt, cunt, cunt"; Francis Hanly, 2002) and Jackie Clune, for example, both use 'cunt' openly in their stand-up routines, their "liberal use of the word indicat[ing] that its novelty hasn't quite worn off" (Fiona Sturges, 2001). They provide a welcome contrast to the revolting comedians Roy Chubby Brown and Bernard Manning, who use 'cunt' in an exclusively insulting sense.

In her show Bland Ambition, Lucinda Cowden combines comedy with feminist theory. This culminates in a celebratory 'cunt' monologue in which she discusses her positive usage of the word: "I use it a lot. I really enjoy the word, actually [...] I've got one, so why the hell can't I say it? You know, men are allowed to talk about their dicks [so] why aren't girls allowed to say 'cunt'?" (2001). Her performance concludes with a song called I'm Just A Girl Who Can Say Cunt:

"I'm just a girl who can say 'cunt',
People all look at me strange.
Soon as I say that naughty word,
They think that I'm deranged. [...]
I think it's just my style,
I do say 'cunt'!".

In The C-Word (2006), an article for Vogue magazine - a clear sign of the word's increasingly presence in the zeitgeist - Deborah Orr writes of her own regular use of 'cunt': "I've been cunting away myself for several decades now. [...] It's a part of my vocabulary that is utilised in controlled situations - for emphasis, for comic effect, or even to shut down a discussion I'm bored with. Calling something or someone a cunt is oddly dismissive. It tops everything. For me, it's not a serious word. It's a word for playing with, but in a not-very-dangerous game. [...] Using the c-word, in the right company, is pleasingly wicked and funny. It shocks. It packs a punch. It grabs attention". Orr also recounts her friends' various senstitivities towards it: "My friends have mixed feelings about using the word. One close friend refers to it as: "That word I never say." The taboo is tumbling so fast, however, that she recently told me: "I was so furious that I said that word I never say." Another does use the word, but remains slightly pink-cheeked about it - very self-conscious and awkward, like a teenager teaching herself to smoke. [...] Another says she loves hearing women saying the word, and loves saying it, even though she cannot abide hearing men using it".

Zoe Williams criticises "People who object to the word cunt" (2001): "Get over it. Just because it makes a cute Anglo-Saxon explosive noise doesn't mean it's any worse than, say, willy". Lisa Jardine "used to be offended by the word cunt, but not any more [...] For years it has been fine to call the male genitalia by names, but not the female ones. It should change" (Richard Brooks, 1999). Similarly, Natasha Richardson is "not offended by ['cunt'] at all" (Andrew Goldman, 1999) and Kate Moss is surprised that "People don't like the word". Kathy Lette seeks a reclamation of its original anatomical usage: "The c-word is only offensive when used derogatively. We can live with 'cunt' if we get equal pay". Ann Marie McQueen recalls that, when she first heard the word, she was deeply offended, though after attending a consciousness-raising workshop she "had become almost indifferent" to it (2004). Joan Smith reveals that "some of my friends use it quite deliberately when they talk about their own bodies. This is [an] effective way of removing its sting [...] and it makes me wonder what the lads will do if we succeed in taking away their worst insult" (1998).

At Wesleyan University there is an official Cunt Club whose sole goal is to reclaim 'cunt', and Penn State University hosted an empowering Cuntfest in 2000. In a conference paper at the University of Southern Maine, Megan Goudey and Ashley Newton argued that the original etymology of 'cunt', which defined it in positive terms, should be a contemporary inspiration to women who seek to reappropriate the word: "the etymology of the word "cunt" in its origins has more positive connotations associated with it than negative ones. By recognizing and reclaiming the etymological connotation of the word "cunt," women can take back part of the language that keeps them in their socially determined subordinate position. By recognising that words have socially created meanings, women can influence other women and inspire them to work collectively to bring back the positive imagery associated with "cunt" and other harmful words. By re-appropriating and converting the meaning of common slang, women can create a language for themselves" (2004).

The purpose of the reappropriation of 'cunt' is to reclaim it as a neutral or even positive anatomical term, replacing its persistently pejorative male usage. This is to return 'cunt' to its original status, to revert to its pre-taboo usage. The word's power can only be maintained so long as its taboo is maintained: "reappropriation by feminists may slacken its bite in time" (Mark Irwin, 2001[a]). Male usage of 'cunt' has created a climate of fear and disgust around the word, however, and the freeing of it from these associations is not an easy process: "The history of the C-word means that reclaiming the word will be an uphill struggle" (Rhonda Pietrin, 2001). As Robin Brontsema points out, reclamation necessarily harnesses the original power of the abusive term, and therefore some of this invective may be retained: "because it necessarily depends upon the word's pejoration for its revolutionary resignification, it is never without contestation or controversy" (2004).

For Andrea Dworkin, 'cunt' is an inherently violent word, and is symptomatic of society's inherent misogyny. She argues forcefully that 'cunt' cannot be successfully reclaimed until the general hatred of women is removed from society: "There have been radical efforts to make malignant words take on an innocent or benign meaning [however] the meaning[s] did not change. Change requires a change in power relations, a redistribution of power, an equality of worth that is socially true. The meaning of words that express derision of inferiors does not change [...] unless the hate and power they signify change[s.] Dirty words stay dirty because they express a hate for [...] women's genitals" (1987).

Dworkin's vehement opposition to reappropriation seems, as discussed earlier, defeatist and even self-pitying (as she highlights social misogyny yet denies women the capacity to change it). Furthermore, she declares that men who use 'cunt' in positive contexts are merely compounding their inherent misogyny - "Worshipping "cunt" and hating women [are] not, in real life, exactly distinguishable" - and, given my position, I find myself in considerable disagreement with her argument here.

The reappropriation of 'cunt' has not been widely accepted by women, as Jane Mills admits in Channel 4's documentary Expletives Deleted: "I can't go 'round saying 'cunt' all the time on my own, it doesn't go down very well!" (Kerry Richardson, 1994). The extent of our 'cunt' taboo has overshadowed its reappropriation. Since the cunt-power sexual liberalism of the 1970s, reappropriation has been repeatedly called for, though it is yet to be widely accepted, either by women or men. Inga Muscio has built upon the work of the previous generation, though she also covers the same ground, as her predecessors did not have a widespread impact. As she herself admits, she does not expect "to pluck on the heartstrings of [...] All Women" (1998). Editing a feminist issue of Hungappa, designed to pose questions such as "Why are we so bloody scared of Vaginas? [and] Why are we scared of the word cunt?", Bel (2005) noted that the same questions were being asked thirty years ago, and that even now they are no closer to being answered.

Germaine Greer, despite her passionate advocation of cunt-power, regretfully acknowledged that, thirty years later, the word's pejorative potential remained undiluted: "Nothing that any[body] can call anybody is worse than the word 'cunt'", and she even confessed to the failure of cunt-power to garner sufficient support: "Cunt-power as I defined it has still to manifest itself" (1999). Most recently, Greer has undergone a change of heart, now proclaiming herself pleased that 'cunt' remains the ultimate insult, as Anthony Barnes explains in his article The C Word (2006): "Thirty years ago, Germaine Greer set out to defuse the most explosively taboo word in the English language. But now she has reversed her position. The c-word, she insists, should still be X-rated". Greer announced her about-turn in The C-Words, an episode of the documentary series Balderdash And Piffle: "In the 1970s, I thought this word for the female genitalia shouldn't be abusive. I thought it should be an ordinary, everyday word. [...] I tried to take the malice out of it. I wanted women to be able to say it. [...] It didn't work. And now, in a way, I'm sort of perversely pleased, because it meant that it kept that power. You know, I don't think, now, that I want the c-word to be tamed. I love the idea that this word is still so sacred that you can use it like a torpedo [...] It is a word of immense power, to be used sparingly" (Deborah Lee, 2006).

For Linda Grant, cunt-power was theoretically enlightening though practically impossible: "The Cunt Power revolution would have required a massive realignment of our culture, our history, our mythology, our art" (1993). Indeed, even during the supposedly 'liberated' 1960s, the avant-garde itself was perceived as phallocentric: Carolee Schneemann described herself as a 'cunt mascot' (a 'token female'), and felt that her sexually explicit performances were misinterpreted as pure titillation. To this day, it remains the case that most women "find the c-word very, very objectionable" (The Eleven O'Clock Show, 1999) and "by and large, are not fond of using it" (Andrew Goldman, 1999). As a lexical weapon in the battle of the sexes, 'cunt' is still used to wound women rather than to empower them: "we're still a long way from a widespread denotative usage of CUNT by women as part of a larger anti-sexist movement. It remains an extreme term of abuse" (Ruth Wajnryb, 2004). For Andrew Billen (2007), this continuation of the offensive power of 'cunt' represents the complacency of contemporary feminism: "['cunt' has] replaced the f-word as the Worst Word Of Them All. The r