I remember being with a group of feminist friends talking about the names we use for our vulvas. (Yes, such conversations really do happen among feminists, we’re that cliché). A radical feminist in the group, most of us were, explained that knowing the history and meaning of the various terms she’d chosen to reclaim ‘cunt’. She had some persuasive arguments for reclaiming it. Do you use it with your doctors, I asked. Yes she did. Hmm.. but you don’t have kids, I wonder how this would play out with kids, I said.
Here’s a father, a pro-feminist man, trying to reclaim ‘cunt’ for his daughter. Matthue Roth at Raising Kvell with The C-Word. Both the post and the discussion that follows are well worth a read.
I really never thought this would happen. I had a vision that I was going to be able to raise my kids differently than anyone ever had, that they’d grow up free of racial prejudice and television and only wearing pink and all the other bad stuff that’s wandered into the head of any other kid, ever.
Sadly, that is not always the situation. Case study #1: Language.
In college I read Inga Muscio‘s amazing book Cunt: A Declaration of Independence. (I was a feminist! I was the only guy in Womyn’s Issues Now! I could do anything!) Essentially, the point of that book was that the word “cunt” used to be an honorific term for the female ruler of a country, whereas the word “vagina” is an Old English Latin word meaning “sheath for a sword.” And, in the earliest days of changing nappies and learning how female people wipe, I was quick to teach my gurgling baby proto-feminist girl to say “cunt!” instead of “vagina” — or instead of whatever other term you’d use.
No matter what anyone else said, or how they looked at me when I said it. In fact, because of how they looked at me when I said it.
Soon, my older daughter joined a playgroup.
It fascinates me, as feminist parents, which values we sacrifice along the way in our parenting practices and which we hold on to no matter the resistance. Outside the mainstream, none of this is easy is it?