Esplain, pleese? 
Because the PTB, said so. :rolleyes:
Maybe I’m doing it wrong, but in my real-life use of these words they are gender neutral. A female DMV clerk can dick me around or be a dick to me. If things are bad enough, she’s a cunt. My male friends can be pussies. And “cunt” is often used with joking affection.
No love for cock?
Dick = Pussy
Cock = Cunt
IMHO.
Yeah, but doing it that way makes it much harder to use the issue in gender politics. You are supposed to use them in a way that just reduces the person to their genitalia.
The way you’re doing it confuses things too much.
ETA: What is this thing called “varying connotations” that you hyu-manns seem to love so much?
Me, if I wanted to spend half my lunch hour picking out the bones, I’d order fish
I suppose the silver lining to all this is that I will be able to get through an Amazing Race thread or Dancing With The Stars without having to hear about how someone wants to sexually assault Phil Keoghan or Maks Chmerkovskiy.
In common English usage, there simply is no male-specific word that’s as offensive as “cunt”. I don’t know how this state of affairs came to pass, and I don’t claim that it’s “fair”, whatever that means, but it is nonetheless the case. If there were such a word, then I would expect the moderators to take the same response to that hypothetical word as they do to “cunt”.
“Pussy”, meanwhile, although the direct meaning is the same as “cunt”, seems to have a very different usage as a pejorative. When one uses the term “cunt” as an insult, it’s generally directed towards women, while “pussy” is more often directed toward men. The implication of the former is that a woman has no worth beyond her genitalia, while the implication of the latter is that a man should not have qualities associated with women.
I agree with everything else you wrote except these bits. My experience with the word is largely in its application to men, not women.
I think I first heard the word in the Police lyrics to the song Rehumanize Yourself:
A more recent example, spoken by a man in the movie Snatch:
Perhaps it’s just a British tendency when using the word, but I’ve never really heard it used in the way you say. Even when I do hear it applied to a woman (mostly recently, and mostly by women), it is as an amplification of the connotation of the word “bitch”, and in no way having to do with having no worth beyond her genitalia.
Yeah, it’s fascinating how the word changes by culture. Among the black people I know, the word was never a big deal, at all. We considered it “white folk cussin” and mocked it along with “cock sucker” and “fucking A”.
In the last few years, I’ve noticed black women in the media/internet expressing offense to the word. Still haven’t noticed that in real life, though. Even black women who I peg as easily offended would probably just look puzzled at being called a cunt.
As I recall, when the discussion of the word was going on here, it appears cunt is regarded as a much milder word in Britain and Australia than it is in America. But language is all context.
I should have clarified that I meant American English. I understand that it’s used differently in Britain, but I don’t know enough to comment there.
You mock our cussing??! :eek:
I can’t think of an equivalent word either. Though personally, I think banning its use is a counterproductive tactic. The way to take the power out of a word is to use it frequently in a different, milder context (case in point: its usage in Britain and Australia), not to elevate it to “unspeakable.” That just reaffirms its power and probably increases it. IMHO.
What amazes me is that all this time and all this effort has been spent coming up with a rule that this board hasn’t needed for 14 years. The good news is that 14 years from now when we have another thread about a naked woman passing out condoms in public we’ll have a rule in place to protect everyone. Proactive-r-us.
The SDMB rule book looks more and more like a maze than a road map at times.
That seems like a poor strategy. It’s saying if something is wrong we should just endure it until we become numb to its effect. I generally prefer a strategy of addressing something that’s wrong and fixing the problem.
Just to weigh in as someone who has been on the other side of this whole general debacle from you, I’ve always felt that the rule against calling someone a cunt was silly. I think the word “cunt” is, in practice, more offensive than say, “dick” or “pussy” but I’ve never felt that was a reason to ban it out right.
I think there’s plenty of room for calling posters all sorts of historically gendered names without it being “sexist behavior” or whatever we’ve been discussing ad nauseum. Don’t get me wrong, I do understand the implications of the words, as previously explained in this thread, but I can’t say I take strong personal offense to any of it. As someone mentioned up thread, I definitely use all those phrases pretty interchangeably between men and women (in other words, I’ve called many a man a cunt in my day and many a woman a dick-- ok, in my head at least:p), but that might just be how I do it.
But the negative meaning and association that the word has *is *the problem (edit: actually, I suppose the real real problem is people feeling like they can’t tolerate being exposed to it, but that links back to the meaning/association). As far as I can tell, changing the cultural meaning of the word is the only real solution (even if it’s just in your own head). Everything else is just avoidance. And yeah, if what you’re avoiding is, say, being lit on fire, then yes, avoidance is the only way to protect yourself (not a great analogy, sorry).
But that’s not what we’re talking about here. Fact is, the word exists. You will come in contact with it. And yes, words have power, but to a certain extent, we have power over them too and over our interpretations and reactions.
And speaking personally, I find being able to do that makes me feel a lot better than feeling like I have to be protected from it. Plus, then we’re not forbidding other people from using it who don’t feel the need to be protected from it.
Missed the edit: there’s another issue here. And that is, how far is it reasonable to try to protect people from things they find hurtful and offensive rather then it being their job to protect themselves by not exposing themselves to it? To a certain extent, that’s subjective, but I personally feel that protecting people from having to read or be called the word cunt in a forum specifically designed for flaming and insults is going too far. (It’s the Pit for God’s sake. What do you expect to read there, if not stuff that’s antagonistic and quite possibly offensive and insulting?)
Because I know it’s been an issue recently and this thread is related to it: I feel it’s reasonable to moderate lewd jokes board-wide in the way it’s been decided by the mods. But I’m pretty sure you couldn’t call someone a cunt in MPSIMS even before it was banned from usage and I think it’s reasonable to ask someone to avoid the pit if that kind of thing is an issue for them.
I didn’t mean to stir things up and I certainly didn’t mean to get into the recent sex joke scandal, so I’m not looking for a debate on that. Maybe I shouldn’t include that second paragraph at all, but I realized how what I said in paragraph one could be applied to that issue, so I’m hoping to prevent more stirring up.
