The C-word has no non-offensive meaning. You prick your finger and Dick is a name, but that word is only used as a vulgarism and/or insult.
I think “asshole” has slipped into every day language as someone who is being an idiot.
How is the word bugger blasphemous?
People actually call someone " a gash"? That just sounds weird to me. Wehere I’m from (the UK) “gash” is used as an adjective. “That film was gash”, for example.
Personally I’ll cunt anyone that deserves it. I’m an equal opportunities cunter. I don’t buy any feminist arguments of it being misogynistic either as I believe it has more-or-less lost its sexual meaning. The word is much more likely to be used as an insult than to refer to genitalia.
Before I learnt a foreign language I used to say I spoke two languages, “English” and “English without swearing” for when I am near my parents.
Well…the answers seem to be all over the map. Which I kinda expected.
I asked because a girlfriend’s boyfriend called her a “fucking cunt” in a text message; he didn’t use it jokingly.
Foolishly (we were drinking, although he wasn’t) I called him up and told him that I don’t think that’s something you EVER call a woman you love. I don’t care how mad you are. I just think it crosses a line. It’s not something you can take back. It’s just ugly.
He reiterated to me that he’ll call her whatever he wants, and that he wouldn’t take it back or apologize.
Not my place to get in the middle of their shit–and looking back, of course, it was stupid for me to call him–but I was just curious if my instinctive response was shared by anyone else. It genuinely made me mad. Not just for my friend, but in general; like what kind of man says that to a woman he says he loves? Not a woman who cut him off in traffic, or some random unknown person, but a woman he says he’s in love with. What kind of man does that make you?
I dunno; I just don’t think it’s OK. Obviously not everybody shares my opinion, which is why I posted the OP.
If you’d have specified “a woman you love” in the OP, I would have given a different answer.
I’ve used cunt for women who merit it, and you have to be a very very rotten person for me to call you a cunt. I hate the word bitch whether used toward men and women, btw.
If a man I was in a relationship ever called me a cunt, I’d be out the door immediately.
If a friend ever called the woman he was with a cunt, he’d stop being my friend immediately.
Answered without reading anything but the first post, in the name of science.
a) Yes.
b) When she’s being one. Sometimes people deserve to be confronted with their behavior.
c) N/A
d) It’s a great insult, and guarantees attention.
Well I figured that would color the results so I wanted to see if it was EVER ok in peoples’ opinions.
Cheating a little, there is a non-offensive meaning: “Cun’t”, A dialectal contraction of “couldn’t” (or “can’t”).
a) Yes.
b) Usually when I’m at the point where “If you were a man we would already be fighting” you and generally it is followed by the sound of me slamming the door and leaving. Also I’ve used it before to signify that the person in question was little more than a receptacle for semen disposal; also followed by a slamming door and a decidedly unremarkable lack of me being there any more.
c) N/A
d) It’s a great insult, and guarantees attention.
Sometimes I use it in a non-pejorative but extremely vulgar sense, for example “You were about a cunt hair from death right there.” While some would use the word as a vulgar female genitalia substitute, I tend to prefer gash, hatchet-gash or bloody hatchet-gash.
Hell, I’ll often call my girlfriend a cunt (usually jokingly) and she’ll call me one right back. We both realize it’s not some magically super-offensive word (then again I don’t consider any word to be such a thing). Ironically the word only gains its strength and power from people who bestow such power to the word in the first place. Get it? The more you use it, the less powerful it becomes. The more you say it’s horrible and should never be used, the more powerful and hurtful it becomes. At the end of the day, there’s so much more to worry about than a four-letter word.
My mother, on the other hand, seems to have some deep hatred for the word and freaks out if I ever utter it, as if I’m summoning the devil. This coming from a person who has no trouble dropping f-bombs left and right. That kind of hypocrisy is something I will never understand.
Norman Mailer once greeted Diana Trillling at a public event, “And how are you you, smart cunt?”, which she found abrasively charming.
Oddly, enough, though my ex-wife (a specialist in Mailer’s work) liked the anecdote, thinking it typical of Mailer’s outrageous style (and maybe you’d have to know Diana Trilling, a very dignified elderly lady, to appreciate the remark fully), she got all over me when I quoted it to my just-born daughter in the delivery room. Somehow, she didn’t find the remark charming in the least in that setting.
(The anecdote is excepted here, a collection of Mailer comments after his death last year.)
Cunt is an extremely high level insult that I would apply equally to either man or woman.
However, I do try to stop myself from using it against people that really really piss me off…why?
Merely because cunts are useful and I like them - which can’t be said of anybody that cuts me off in traffic 
NB: I haven’t read the other responses yet and I’m very sorry about that 
a.) is it ever OK to call a woman a cunt?
Sure.
b.) if that is OK, under what circumstances?
Under the same circumstances as calling a man a cunt, e.g; “stand back, I am now going to use a strong word in a heated situation, with the possible consequence of being thought an arse”. Or, if you’re British; “I like you and am larking around in the grand UK tradition, what”. YMMV, YMMV, a thousand times YMMV.
c.) if you’re a woman, are you okay being called this? and if you’re a man, are you okay with calling her that?
Yes. I mean, my word, it’s not okay to call people obnoxious names in your daily discourse, of course not*. However, if I’m going to be insulted I’d much rather be a “cunt”.
*Unless you’re a foul-mouthed Briton, because we’re all doomed anyway.
d.) If you’re a woman who is OK with it, why? And if you’re a man, why are you OK with saying it?
“Cunt” to me sounds quite a powerful term and which I place somewhere around “bitch” on the reclaimed words spectrum. I have no specific horror just because it’s a bawdy word for vagina.
[Watch out, it’s a tangent! I’d be much more insulted to be called “slut”, or similar, which seems to bring my sexual behaviours and the shame I should feel for them into situations on which they have no bearing*. There is no male equivalent for “slut” in general use, as far as I can see, and that bothers me.
I’ve had exchanges that have gone;
Chap: Heated opinion A!
Me: Contrary heated opinion B!
Chap, as if this is a sure-fire argument winner: Reiteration of heated option A, slut!
**Me: **Wtf?
… And they have been perplexing and horrible, because I’m not sure why bringing up my supposed sexual dysfunction is meant to make me shut up.
Basically, in my general vernacular;
Cunt = horrible person.
Slut = sexually disinhibited person who otherwise might be perfectly pleasant.
Soooo, I think my problem is that “slut” is a gender-specific insult - I don’t have much problem with “cunt” because a man can be a cunt, a woman can be a cunt, it’s all gravy and it’s all “reasonable” to bring up in a disagreement (I disagree extravagantly with opinion A, you horrible person versus I disagree extravagantly with opinion A, you person who has had carnal knowledge of several". It’s gender neutral (YMMV), like “dick” or “arsehole”, and I know you didn’t ask me my opinion of being called a slut, but I kind of needed to compare them to get my point across, plus I just had a huge coffee].
This is my opinion, though, and I do acknowledge that it’s a powerful word for others, especially older people - it seems to be diminishing in status lately. My mum, for example, would be appalled to be called a “cunt” under any circumstance, and fair enough - I’ll put that on my ongoing spreadsheet, “How not to address birthday cards.xls”
- Assuming that I’m being insulted for reasons other than my sexual behaviour, of course - if you’ve just caught me in bed with your sister it’s probably fair enough.
IMHO, the human race will always have “powerful” words, even if the ones we are currently familiar with become too common to take seriously. Our spoken language is what separates us from other mammals; it will always be taken seriously. I view “cunt” the same way I view “nigger.” IOW, somebody else is free to make it so commonplace that it holds no true meaning, but I’m not gonna be the one to start that movement. I would never use either word as an insult. It goes beyond insult; it says far more about the person saying it than the person to whom it is directed.
Sure, there are other things to worry about, but when has that ever stopped people from being hurt? If my SO ever called me a cunt you can buy stock in the fact that I won’t be worrying about the state of the world at large. I won’t shrug it off and note that at least I’m not starving in some third world country. Words that are meant to hurt people DO hurt people. It’s not OK. If we wear out the word in question, some other word will take its place. That doesn’t mean that hurtful words are OK to use.
The whole point of the word is to wound; the worse the word, the bigger the wound. That’s the whole point of insulting/offensive words.
They DO mean something.
I would argue that not only are words powerful (and it’s pointless to try to take that power away), that it is a good thing that words are powerful. Words convey ideas, and ideas are the most powerful things we’ve got. Pen is mightier than the sword, and all that. “Sticks and stones blahblahblah, but words will never hurt me” is a lie that adults tell children when they don’t want to really deal with the fact that someone is being hurt. Words can hurt; they are supposed to. It’s silly to pretend otherwise, and IMO it’s an abdication of responsibility.
Anyway, it interests me that the words we’re speaking of here are about genitalia and sex. I happen to be fairly fond of those things (along with the rest of the human body), and don’t like to make them ugly and insulting. I’d prefer to treat them with more respect and fondness. I wonder if the same people that like to use these specific words also think we should all just relax about sex and talk about genitalia no differently than we talk about, say, an elbow. And yet at the same time are enthusiastically using language that singles out genitalia and specifically tries to make it insulting and ugly. To me that seems like a disconnect. If there’s nothing special about a penis, why turn it into a swear word?
My answer would be no, but, then again, I use a profanity filter on my web browser, so I’m probably not your intended audience. I only figured out the word through context.
Should I be mortally offended at the rampant misandry should a woman call me a dick, a prick or a tool ? :rolleyes:
I would not call a woman a cunt because I find “you genital!” as an expression of anger and contempt to be downright stupid. I don’t call guys cocks or dicks either.
I’m not all up in arms about it as a Really Bad Thing to Say either though.
I actually kind of like the word. It sounds jaunty and triangular like a woman’s externally visible area, like the word cuneiform, etc, and blunt, and emphatic. Yeah baby. Cunt is cool in my books.