Cunt

Alison Mandaville

Word Count 1207

There are quite a few everyday words for the vulva. I’m not talking about the specific parts of the vulva. Because who ever gave time to the specifics? Certainly not the ones who generally create and deploy these words. BOYS.

There’s TWAT— which never drew me— no real power there. Purposefully, I suspect. That’s the point of TWAT. Also, It’s kind of British.

There’s SNATCH. Which is almost not worth mentioning because it marks only the snatcher. What is snatched is therefore entirely eclipsed by the unwanted and irreverent action of the snatcher.

There’s PUSSY— which is ok if said the right way— kind of lush and something you wouldn’t mind a little snuggle from, barring allergies, and if the pussy has a mind to. Pussies always have their own priorities.

There’s BEAVER — which has no particular valence for me, except as perhaps a more hairy and un-tame version of PUSSY. An innocuous sounding entity— and beavers are vegetarians, after all. Though, extending that metaphor— and thinking about tall trees chewed handily down by saw-sharp teeth that continually grow… maybe BEAVER deserves a second look.

There are so many more. But the one I want to admire today is the big C. The majestic CUNT. Now, CUNT gets flung about as if it’s some intensification of BITCH,which, incidentally, refers indirectly to what makes a creature a BITCH—its CUNT. So many animals. FYI—I don’t get too worked up about the animal analogies—because the other available metaphors would be plants or inorganic substances. So, animals—ok.

But BITCH bugs me. Some folks like it for its power—but to me it’s a yappy dog power. It’s a whiny and grievance-laced power, it’s a power to irritate. Also, it only indirectly references the CUNT. I’ve never felt any likeness in the two terms. CUNT is in a class of its own. Something so powerful people GASP— GASP! —when it is named. 

The power of CUNT is absolute and centered. The CUNT is entirely itself, nothing metaphorical about it.

CUNT is fully visible. It is something like WORK, which is energy applied to matter. Except CUNTgoes further; it is an alchemical fusion of vulva and energy.

And if it is used as synecdoche, well, so be it. Being a CUNT is SO much better than being a DICK. Weigh each on your power scale, one in each hand. CUNT wins every time.

Now, you can be a BIG CUNT or a LITTLE CUNT. You can be CUNTY, especially if you don’t have one and live in Australia. And, if you don’t have one, you can certainly still feel like one, if that feels best. And if you do have one, but don’t feel like one, that’s ok, too. To be or not to be, that’s your own question.

For all the others it makes sense that only adjectives will do—no nouns for you, you CUNTLESS ones!

And so we come to my most shameful and secret memory in my life, one I have told almost no one until now. Certainly, never in public. This is an act more shameful than stealing money from the March of Dimes. More shameful than accusing a poor girl in my class who only had four dresses she wore all year of stealing money from my desk when I knew in my heart it hadn’t been her and I can still see her crying after school snot running down onto her lip out on the school field sobbing I didn’t do it I didn’t do it while I yelled at her You know you did. Yes. I did even that. I was, then, just a little CUNT.

And yet – when I was nine or ten or eleven, and my body was doing its nine or ten or eleven thing, and I was newly exploring those exciting changes, as nine or ten or eleven year olds do, I suddenly realized my CUNT did not look like the other girls’ CUNTS, the ones I had been catching glimpses of in the pool dressing room, on overnights, at summer camp. Mine certainly didn’t look like my younger sister’s.

My labia minora (ok I am getting into some specifics—but I don’t have any fancy fun words YET for the specifics)—my labia minora hung out, actually dangled free of, my labia majora. In fact—and I learned these words quite early, fascinated as I was with reproductive and sexual biology—I thought the labels must be wrong, because my labia minora seemed so much more prominent than my labia majora.

And the danglers were kind of purple. 

Was this, I wondered, because of all the masturbation? Because almost no one—except finally Judy Blume (but I hadn’t read that particular book yet) talked about masturbation for those of us with CUNTS. I knew it was sex. I read those Playboys and girls my father was lent as leftovers from some friend of his who had a subscription. But I did not know if anyone else was doing it—or if they were doing it as often. 

But that’s not the shameful part. Not at all. The shameful part is how I then treated my CUNT. Which had done nothing wrong. Which had only served to give me strange new pleasure. I was, I now feel deeply discomfited to say, ashamed of my CUNT. I tried to avoid having it seen, pulling on underwear in the pool dressing room with supersonic speed, even as I kept trying to see what all the other CUNTS were up to.

And now for the really bad part. For some time in the stretch of years before I hit my teens and saw my summer camp bunk mate had similarly hanging and purpled labia and another friend in high school hilariously noted that one of her labia minora hung down much further than the other, probably, she thought, because she’d pulled on that side while sucking her thumb to comfort herself as a small child—well, sometime before these revelations from friends for which I honestly should send them flowers and chocolates, I got some masking tape, and I taped up my CUNT. 

I tucked the hanging bits up inside. Left a little gap for peeing. Which, incidentally, did not work very well, and necessitated frequent patting dry and re-taping such that I kept the masking tape on the reading shelf next to the toilet at home. I thought that maybe, just maybe, this would remold my CUNT, discipline it. Remind it of what it should be doing. Make it a demure CUNT.

Don’t worry, though. This has a happy ending. Because my CUNT was having none of it. The bits kept escaping. Turns out masking tape is no match for a CUNT. For CUNTS will out. Fuck demure.

And my world, of course, grew bigger and more populous of CUNT variety—and of power.

For CUNTS are whole and sovereign—note that lovely open curve of the C, the bottomless gong of the “UN,” and—ok—the BEAVER teeth sharp serration of the T. Full. Plosive. Stop.

Since I learned the name, thankfully sometime after I mistreated it, I have never minded being called a CUNT. CUNT truly feels like a compliment. CUNT can make me grateful. CUNT can make me laugh. CUNT never makes me apologize.

Alison grew up in Portland, Oregon, Turkey, Massachusetts and Yemen. Her prose, poetry, and translations from Azerbaijani have appeared or are forthcoming in Redivider, Terrain, Four Way Review, Diagram, Magma, and World Literature Today among other places. A past Fulbright scholar, she has received grants from UNESCO and the Open Society Foundation for her work with women writers and artists in Azerbaijan. She splits her time between Seattle and Fresno where she teaches comics, writing and literary civics at California State University, Fresno. She is currently at work on a collection of environmental lyrical essays anchored in the Pacific Northwest.