Covering Up the Naked Truth

College. My first boyfriend. A redhead, by the way. He was in the ROTC, and very hot. Did I mention that he was very hot? We got in a fight one day, and he did the unthinkable. You're thinking: "he hit you," or "he cheated on you." No. What he did was far worse. He called me a cunt. Now, I had learned about this word fairly early on, reading coverless porn that my friends and I had found at the bus stop. I seem to remember that the pages were often stuck together... Anyway, I had learned about this word way back when I was learning to not say the "n-word" or any of the other racial and ethnic slurs that we have in our lexicon. Somehow, with all of the ugly, hateful, racial slurs in our language, "cunt" was the primo numero uno of the curses, the one word no one could ever say (which begs the question: if it is the forbidden word that no one can ever say, why has it stuck around?). Somehow, fag, queer, pussy, cock, dick, and prick seemed to be passable-- never in mixed company, or at a job interview as I learned the hard way (not really, but it's funnier if you think I did), but passable nonetheless. It wasn't until many years later that I began to ask myself "why?"

As a child, I always thought I was equal; I thought I was the same. I thought I had the same abilities and chances that everyone else had. I romped with the boys in the field behind my house while we played War, throwing stink-balloons filled with foul concoctions made without our mothers' knowledge in our kitchens. They were carefree days in summers that lasted years; they were days of laughter filled screams and getting filthy crawling on our bellies in the dirt like soldiers. That was before: before I knew of the Freudian lack between my legs.

My childhood progressed like that of many women (or so I imagine); I played Barbie's, I went to sleepovers, and, somewhere around fourth grade, the inevitable talk about boys began. I wasn't interested in boys (yet) and I participated in a relatively perfunctory manner; after all, these were my playmates the other girls talked about; my friends-- the ones I didn't have a gender around. It was during these prepubescent conversations that I realized that my mates and I were different. How? I wasn't certain yet, but those whispered, giggled conversations around the sacred circle of sleeping bags were illuminating to me in a way which shapes all of us who are (un)lucky enough to have been born with a hole in place of a pole.

I know it may sound as though I was sheltered, but I did know that my daddy had a penis. I had announced as much at the dinner table when I was three. I also knew where babies came from, although I couldn't believe that any woman would willingly do that. My lack of insight was merely due to the fact that boys were fun, and they were rough and tumble like me. My female friends often got annoyed with me since my Barbie was always ruining the other Barbie's dates by trying to rescue them from their kidnappers. I just couldn't see what all the fuss was about.

Fast forward a year, and we (the fifth grade girls) were sitting in the cafeteria, all blushes and secretive glances, waiting for THE MOVIE to begin. Yes ladies, you all know THE MOVIE. Today, I remember only ideas and messages from this film of evil that altered my world view and haunts me even today. Do I sound melodramatic? I assure you I am not; in fact, I believe I am underestimating the impact this had on me and countless other women in America. I have only begun to dissect the harm this film did to my body image and my self worth.

The curse. Like a hex that the evil witch on the Snow White ride at Disney World might place on you. It might turn you into a toad or a newt, or something much worse: a woman. Yes, the film talked about men-stru-a-tion, aka the period; the curse. It told me to be ashamed-- don't wear white pants because the blood of the ever-persecuted Eve might show through. That would be the single most humiliating thing that could ever happen. I don't know that I ever understood why-- as an adult, I can think of far more humiliating things than a little blood on my pants, but I fell for it hook, line and sinker. I swallowed that worm and the hook was jammed in my jaw for good.

Sixth grade. Reading Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret for the fifth time, I wondered why I didn't have boobs. Finally, when I got them, it was not the glorious event that I had imagined, but rather an overheard, hushed conversation between my mother and her friends about how she was going to have to take me bra shopping. Somehow, this introduction to my life as a woman was far less than the fairytale I had concocted. It was squished into a dressing room with my mother with her sighing and stealing all the potential fun from the induction by strapping my budding breasts to my chest with some medieval torture device. My first period was no less a let down. I remember my best friend being sent home because I was-- shh-- bleeding. It was a humiliating experience complete with cardboard applicators and-- hey damn it! Why did you send my best friend home? Surely this was something you should share with your best friend! What I took away from these experiences was a sense of my own inadequacy and the old Judeo-Christian notion that here I was, two millennia later, still paying for Eve's sin. What's so wrong with wanting a little knowledge anyway!?

My mother was a douche. No scratch that: a doucher. Apparently, she would feel less than fresh at times, and the feminine hygiene products would come out. Here is my issue with the "hygiene" thing: I have never thought that sweaty balls were particularly hygienic, but they don't have a special wash for it. I would like to see a commercial one day with two men-- I'm envisioning Rugby players). So these two Rugby players are sitting in the locker room, maybe their names are Rocko and Mick, and Rocko says, "Do you ever feel less than fresh?" and Mick says, "yeah, sometimes I do, brother; that's when I use Autumn's Afternoon Disposable Ball Wash." Let's be absolutely clear for a moment. If Rocko ever said anything like that, Mick would beat him upside his un-helmeted head with whatever heavy object he had available, before calling him a "pussy," and telling all their other teammates, who would subsequently throw poor Rocko a blanket party on the next away trip. So, why are their sweaty balls somehow more hygienic than my nether regions? And why does it always come back to the "pussy?"

So it's 2009, and I'm a graduate student studying language and all of its promise and peril. I am an adamant adherent to the idea that the words we use are damning or sanctifying, and can demean, uplift, celebrate, or scar. Sticks and stones? No. I don't believe that one bit. Names and words do hurt us and, hence, my point here. Words, the carefully chosen, the offhanded, the open-mouth-insert-foot words that we string together on a daily basis, have a stunning effect on us and ultimately on the gender politics of this great nation of ours.

Examining the impact of words necessitates asking what a cunt is. And, by the same token, why is it any worse than a prick? Well, the answer is both simple and complex. If you call a man a prick, the idea you are conveying is that he is arrogant and assertive, and ultimately a jerk. When you call a woman a cunt, you are implying something far more dark; you are implying that she is mean and vicious, you are implying something about her very nature. The implication here is that she is dirty; unclean and unwholesome, she violates the nature of femininity and womanhood (which seems ironic to me since, in most cases you have to have one to be called one). So, while the term "prick" celebrates all the facets of manliness and machismo, the other implies all the possible negative associations we can make to women. The simple answer is that the penis is an object of worship in this society. Not literally in the sense that we are bowing down to phallic symbols, but figuratively in the sense that we consistently revere the attributes of real men-- womanizing, pushy, demanding, authoritative-- the qualities that come with testosterone (which is of course why poor Rocko will be called a "pussy" by his teammates-- potential feminization is the single most effective way of getting men to toe the party line). So what about the complex reason? Okay here comes the boring part:

The primary pejorative terms we use for women are "whore," "bitch," and "cunt." The interesting thing, to me anyway, lies in the power of these words, and what they say about men's insecurity regarding female sexuality. Women who enjoy sex, or put out "too much" are called whores; women who are more masculine in their behavior (read here "assertive"), or who don't put out "enough" are called bitches. And any woman can be labeled either term. If a woman doesn't screw, she's a frigid bitch, and if she does, then she's a whore. We cannot win. The patriarchal culture we live in offers no middle ground for exploring, engaging, or enjoying our own sexuality. Some of you may be asking why I feel these words are male driven. Easy: the term for a man who sleeps around is "stud." Recently, I've heard the terms "male-slut" and "man-whore," but neither of these carries the same persecutory connotation of the word sans its masculine determiner. The very fact that he is a male slut as opposed to just a slut cements the idea that the word is reserved for women. Do men have any idea how much time we spend trying to walk that fine (alright, nonexistent) line between bitch and whore? No. Will they ever have an idea? Probably not.

And then there is the third category of women which encompasses all the negative Judeo-Christian beliefs about our gender: Cunts. A cunt is a woman who epitomizes all the negative (and frankly, silly) thoughts that men have had about women's vaginas. Yes, ladies, some cultures believe that our vaginas had teeth at one time. And I'm certain you have heard "don't trust anything that bleeds for seven days and doesn't die," or "how are we ever going to get the smell off the fish now?" In the Jewish religion, the child is only Jewish if his mother was Jewish-- the religious heritage is matrilineal. Sounds nice doesn't it? Not really. I remember hearing that it was due to the fact that you could never be certain who a child's father was, but you always knew who its mother was. Hasidic Jews don't touch their wives for two weeks out of every month because she is unclean, and we are still hearing about how Eve caused the fall of man. By the way, it never says in the bible that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. Nonetheless, we all hear these jokes, stories, terms that are reserved solely for women, and see "hygiene" and cardboard applicators ('cuz we really shouldn't touch it), and special washes that will keep us from stinking, and we, of course, come to the conclusion that we are meant to accept-- we are somehow not pure, not clean, not equal.

It occurs to me, as I write this, that if we viewed our genitals in a positive way, then cunt would be a positive term. And this leads me back to a point I was circling around earlier: the culture we eat, sleep, crap, and breathe indoctrinates us to see our vaginas and our sexuality in a dangerous and humiliating fashion. We are seen as sexual predator and sexual object, virgins and whores. This dichotomous view asks us to seek a role in between, never being able to gain a solid foothold and continuously struggling against one label or the other. It keeps us off kilter, which, in turn, keeps us constantly treading water. If we are busy fighting a blazing inferno, it is hard to stop the arsonist who keeps setting the fires. So as we push our way towards some semblance of equality, we are losing ground in many other areas. Control of our bodies, minds, and reproductive rights should be a no-brainer; yet, here we stand, too many years later, still having the Roe v. Wade discussion. Roe versus Wade is less about abortion than it is about a woman's right to control her own sexuality. Trust me, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be covered under our health insurance policies. Does it truly surprise anyone that the majority of people who protest at clinics and who scream "murder" at the traumatized and scared women going to those clinics, belong to churches and religious groups that don't allow women to hold positions of power? The Catholic church does not allow women to be priests. Why? Ultimately, because women are not equal in the minds of the Vatican-- they are vessels to carry children, and the cause of our fall-- after all, did not Eve eat the apple? Didn't Lot's wife turn back? Didn't his daughters, conniving, sexual predators, get him drunk to have sex with him? What was Mary's greatest achievement? That she gave birth to Jesus, and that she was pure enough to do so. Is it any wonder then, that we have a difficult time asserting control over what we do with our bodies?

Our media gives us two types of women: the objects of beauty, and the brainy women who give us our news and work in the man's world. The brainy ones still have to be beautiful. I'm thinking of ex-swimsuit model cum reporter Lara Logan, Katie Couric, and Oprah-- if you've ever seen the cover of her magazine, she is always shown looking beautiful. We have very few Cristiane Amanpour's or Julia Child's. No offense to either woman who I think has a form of all-encompassing beauty through brilliance. Men can be as disheveled and unappealing as they want-- think the fatter, older version of Sean Connery, the balding, womanizing Bill Maher, or the consistently untucked, broken nosed Michael Ware-- we still find them attractive. This is because men's sexual appeal lies in their ability to provoke in us a recognition of their manliness, their testosterone laden machismo, and their control over their surroundings. What we actually find appealing is the rugged, raw power that these men exude. Why? Because we are taught to by a culture that worships masculine ideas about beauty and sexuality. Anthropologists would argue that it is biological, but that does not explain everything.

It does not explain why we show sexually laden music videos of underage girls like Brittney Spears wearing Catholic school girl uniforms, it does not explain why ESPN reporter Erin Andrews had a video posted on the internet of her changing-- I'm still waiting for the Anderson Cooper version. Quite honestly, it doesn't explain why, in two thousand and nine, when we comprise more than fifty percent of the globe's population, we are forced to fight our way through the quicksand of cultural hegemony in order to control our own sexuality.

Today. I no longer wonder over the hyper-sexualization of our young women, or the fantasy images in magazines that are supposed to represent female standards of beauty, or why one in four women in America will be raped in her lifetime. These are questions with a straightforward answer. And this answer is the naked truth we cover up. Cunt is not just a word we use to insult someone, it is a word that keeps us in our place. The question that burns in me today is what can we do about it. Instead of musing on the unfairness and insurmountable odds against us, I wonder what we can do to stop chasing the fires, and start chasing the fire starters.