Holy shit, you are a woman? I already learned something today.
A perfect example of what I was saying: the twain aren’t meeting.
Curious indeed. I don’t
understand why that would be.
Needless to say,
this is an interesting topic
I can’t get behind the “cunt” == “nigger” thing because I almost never hear two white guys calling each other niggers, but they call each other cunts all the time. “Nigger” has pretty much one specific meaning. “Cunt” is all over the place.
Seconded.
I don’t see calling someone a cunt any different than calling them a dick or a cock. They are two sides to the same coin. One is no more offensive than the other.
Right. Some words just take a life of their own. Look at “fuck”. It is seldom used to mean sexual intercourse. This is even more so on the internets. “Retard” and “gay” are used in ways I have never seen IRL (or maybe I am just hanging out with the wrong crowd, by which I mean the right crowd, of course).
Being the possessor of my own personal cunt, I have no objection to the term, and have been known to use the term myself. It all depends on the usage of it. I will call someone a fucking cunt, if they are being a fucking cunt. It is invective. I have been called a cunt previously, and I have no doubt I may get called a cunt in the future. Words have the power to hurt that you ascribe to them. If it takes mild invective to get my point across, I will use it, but sometimes mild is not what is needed to work.
Use any words you like, though I think that that level of invective is appropriate to the pit and none of the other forums.
If a woman deliberately gets pregnant to trap her boyfriend into marrying her, he doesn’t go for it, and, since she now has no use for the baby, she throws it in the dumpster, I want something stronger than “inappropriate.”
If “cunt” is as bad as “nigger,” it’s become that offensive awfully fast. In “The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television,” George Carlin said that “piss” and “cunt” weren’t in the same league as “fuck” and “shit” and shouldn’t be on the list.
You know what? I used to get upset when people called me “dyke” when their ire had nothing to do with my sexual orientation. Then I remembered, “oh yeah, I’m a lesbian! It’s just a put-down word that people of smaller minds use because they can’t think of anything more eloquent with which to insult me or express their displeasure with my opinions.” It stopped bothering me so much.
What really hurt when I was accused of being ignorant, uneducated, childish, and arrogant, because those are things I do not feel that I am (mostly.)
Cunt? Sure, I have one. Go ahead, use it pejoratively if you wish, because at least that much is true. I’d rather hear that than read that someone finds me ignorant and arrogant. That hurts more, because those are things I work hard to avoid.
Besides, if you call me a cunt, I reserve the right to call you a dickhead, and that’s one of my favourite words.
For me, there’s no one “ultimate” insult. I find it more insulting if someone deliberately ascribes motives or words to me that I haven’t espoused, or if I’m deliberately misrepresented. If someone calls me a “Cunt” or a “Whore” or a “Fat fucking bitch” I just don’t care.
I actually like the sound of cunt. It’s a very sharp word.
One of my earliest memories from childhood was my mom being cut off dangerously on the highway and shouting “You fucking cunt!” I was maybe… four or five at the time? I don’t know, I can’t put it in order with my other memories.
I’m glad that she talked (and talks) that way, because it taught me from a young age that the only power that words have is what power we give them.
Should she have said, “You darned [insert some non-obscene derogatory word here]”?
Why? It would have conveyed the exact same message.
I think people who are offended by “cunt” are over-sensitive at best and arrogant at worst.
To all the females in this thread saying they aren’t offended by “cunt,” (Sierra, Fiveroptic, aruvqan and any others) I salute you.
Now back to the kitchens, the lot of you.
This is the bit I don’t get. Isn’t it *meant *to be offensive? If not: what is its function?
OK. You think “cunt” is offensive. Why isn’t “bitch” as offensive? I use them interchangeably, they have the same meaning when I use them. Why isn’t “dick” as offensive? It’s more or less a synonym that I use to describe men who I’d describe as cunts were they women.
Any word that you can interchange with another is a synonym. They have the same meaning. So obviously it’s not merely the meaning that makes a word offensive. The idea that certain words are off-limits, or that certain words are more off-limits than others, for reasons we can’t quite articulate, is superstition.
You’ve misread me. I didn’t say whether or not *I *think it is offensive. You said that people who find it offensive are over-sensitive. Is it not meant to be offensive? I was asking that if it isn’t meant to be offensive, what is meant by it?
This rule has always bothered me as well. When I think “cunt”, I think vulva. To be told that this is The Most Horrible Word on the Intrawebs!11™ is pretty insulting to me as a woman. Why us? Why not dicks? Why can’t dicks or testicles be the most insulting thing ever?
To be honest, I’d far prefer to be called a cunt than a bitch. When you really pare down the words meanings, cunt is one of the nicer insults that can be lobbed at a woman.
Using the same insult on a man is a bit bothersome to me because I’ve noticed that ascribing anything feminine to a man (i.e. bitch, cunt, “I can see your vagina from here”) is apparently an insult. On the flip side, if I tell a female friend “Wow, you have balls the size of Texas” it is likely because she’s done something wildly courageous. Weird, that.
Congrats, you’ve missed the point of swearing entirely.
Question: How is “cunt” more offensive than “douchebag”, when used as an insult?
For my own part… I can relate to boycotting the use of a snippet of profanity as a consequence of thinking it to be politically loaded; I don’t use “fuck” as a verb because the word is on the one hand treated as a synonym for “have sex with” and yet on the other hand is used to express the violent destruction of someone or something, as in “I’m gonna fuck you up”. Combined, they have the political effect of reinforcing the notion that sex IS rape, that sex IS violent, that the desire for sex IS a desire to do harm to someone, that it is an act of hostility, etc.
(I do toss it around in the other sense, “oh fuck this”, “that fucking piece of shit”, etc)
To my way of thinking, there has to be more than “this is a bad word because it is such a BAD word” / “it’s the worse thing you can call someone” / etc.
I do see some sense to the assertion that when the word is used as a presumed derogatory insult towards males, it is politically loaded because it implies that being female or being thought female would be a grave insult to a male, and this is borne out somewhat by the parallel use of “pussy” or “bitch” to insult a guy.
Oh, I did, growing up in Valdosta / Lowndes County GA. A preadolescent white boy enraged at another and ready to start a fight might indeed say “you nigger!” (and got into a heap of trouble with the teacher & principal for doing so). By the 1970s, there was a whole lot less use of the word altogether, enough of a sea-change in attitudes having occurred that those who’d be inclined to use it were a lot more cautious about doing so except in specialized company. Other white kids would stop having anything to do with you if you called some other person a nigger. But back in the late 60s when more kids were still doing it, it might even have been more likely to be hurled casually at a white person, because they were more likely to be talking to another white person and because, from that way of thinking, it’s not an insult to a black person, it’s just reminding them of what they are, if that makes any sense.
Anyway, if the objection to “cunt” is along the lines of “it’s sexist”, it seems like the rule ought to be that you can’t call anyone a cunt if they don’t have one. And the rule should similarly extent to fag or faggy or “so gay”, etc — that you can’t use terms like that to put down something that patently ISN’T as an intended insult, thus reinforcing the notion that those things that ARE are inferior and contempt-worthy. And so forth. Thus, a philosophical stance from which a general rule is derived, and from the general rule, a specific application to “cunt”.
I’m not trying to put words into the mouths of the folks who run this board; I don’t know their thought processes. So I don’t know if they do in fact have a perspective that underlies the sentiment about the use of “cunt” as an insult on this board. But it does seem to me that if they do, that in this environment it would be received better if they laid it out.
We really need a poll listing all these swear words so that they can be voted on for their relative offensiveness.
Even if I misread you, my point still stands.
1.) It’s not always said with the intent to offend.
2.) Even when it is said with the intent to offend, if you take issue with the use of the word “cunt” and not its meaning, you’re arrogant. As in, if I say “You’re a bitch,” and you’d shake it off, but when I say “You’re a cunt,” you explode? That is arrogance. Why isn’t “You’re a nasty shrew” offensive? That’s what cunt basically means. Its meaning isn’t what’s offensive. It’s the word itself that is. And THAT is superstition. That’s the point I’m trying to make.
This is nonsense.
Women you hate are called cunts. Men you hate are called dicks. People of both genders you hate are called assholes. I’m seeing a pattern here. You’re over-analyzing it.