let’s talk about cūnt

let’s talk about cūnt, babes.

fun fact: the word cūnt can be traced back to old norse, old english, and middle english languages. in old norse, the word kunta referred to the female genitalia and had a neutral or even positive connotation, finding its way into various old norse texts, including sagas and poetry. similarly, in old english, the term cunte was a neutral descriptive word for the female genitalia, appearing in medical and herbal manuscripts alike.

the derogatory sense of the word we have come to know started to emerge during the middle ages as societal attitudes towards sexuality and gender began to shift. this was a time marked by a stark sexual ethics of purity, with medieval anatomical terms reflecting this mindset. for instance, medieval anatomists referred to women’s external genitals as the pudendum, a word derived from the latin pudere, meaning “to make ashamed.” our genitals were thus named “from the shamefacedness that is in women to be seen.”*

we see this time and again in language surrounding women. you’ve most likely heard by now that old latin has also blessed us with the word vagina, originally meaning “a sheath or scabbard for a sword.” a sheath, otherwise known as a protective enclosure that held and safeguarded the blade of a sword, was used as a metaphorical comparison that likened the protective function of the sword sheath to the role of the vaginal canal in the act of penetration. in so many words, the vagina is inherently a place to insert one’s cock.

skimming over the fact that this is an awfully cis het lens thru which to baptise an organ, we are still faced with the annoyingly unsurprising fact that our own genitalia was named after the function it serves men, once again robbing people with vaginas from any sense of embodied agency thru language.

our bodies were not meant to be understood as our own. they were not written as our own. simply put, they did not exist for us, but for men. when we take these etymologies into account, we realize that language has played a vital part in co-opting women’s bodies. words, and their histories, carry authority.

so what does it mean when many of the words used to describe female bodies were named by and for men? it means that we learn how to think of our bodies thru a white, cis het patriarchal lens. it means that we are meant to understand our bodies in one of two ways, or both: as carriers of shame and/or as receptacles of reproduction (madonna-whore complex, anyone?). i, for one, no longer wish to carry language that has imprinted itself into our bodies, slithering its way into the tapestry of our ancestry for centuries.

i choose to reclaim the word cūnt because unlike its counterparts, it once lived beyond the shameful and misogynistic language we know today. its roots are ancient and sturdy, its modern connotations subversive. cūnt encompasses us in our wholeness — it does not dissect us into the cold, anatomical parts that reduce us to reproduction. neither does it elude to the ignorant mystery that is the female body, reflected in words or sayings such as “down there,” “crotch,” or “privates.”

cūnt is powerful. it cannot be tamed. it is delicious and strong and entitled. it can make even the most boisterous of misogynists pale.

it gives us permission to be bitchy, witchy, and dare i say, cūnty.

cūnt can be our sacredness in its entirety, if we so choose it to be. but more specifically, cūnt can be ours.

what word makes you feel powerful in your body?

*come as you are by emily nagoski