Following on the heels of Jane Fonda’s appearance on The Today Show Holly Combe of The F-Word Blog documents her recent encounter with the word “cunt” on Yahoo!‘s “Yahoo Answers” service:

The latest jawdropper, while browsing the site this week, was my discovery that, when it comes to comparing the word cunt to the far more restrictive description of “cum dumpster,” the majority of answerers actually found plain old “cunt” more offensive. Seriously. A term that quite literally reduces the vulva to a passive site for “cum” to be dumped like waste is considered more acceptable than a simple word for it! In fact, at the point when I began to type my own earnest justification of why “cum dumpster” is obviously derogatory in a very literal way, the other answers had all singled out cunt as worse.
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How can one word be so powerful? Why is it that the words “prick,” “cock” and “dick” don’t cause nearly as much offence, even when they’re used as insults? I appreciate that some people just hate the way the word “cunt” is used but does that really mean the word itself is bad? And, if so, doesn’t that impact on attitudes towards women’s bodies?

Read the text in context here.

Actually just as I seem to have dated myself with my post about cocksuckers I may be about to date myself again but at least when I was growing up “cock” was almost as nasty a word as “cunt.” My take growing up was that, like cock, cunt was just too overtly, ungenteely, even assertively sexual. And while I still don’t think I’ve ever said either word out loud for any purpose (isn’t that unusual to have read more words than one has pronounced is it?) I’ve advocated appropriating tinfoil-hatted concerns about sex as men are indoctrinated to express it in language, if it was me I’d agitate for reappropriating cunt as that third positive, non-cutesy/non-medical-sounding thing women can do with their genitals besides gratifying men (a.k.a. “cum dumpsters?” really?) and canal-ing birth. Because goodness knows it wouldn’t hurt men to have a rich, realistic, and not-at-all-prim vocabulary for their partner’s enjoyment any more than it would hurt us to imagine our cocks as good for more than peeing and “pounding” with.