Editorial: How Cunt Became Cunty

“You’re a cunt.”  

I said to my labrador at 5-years-old after he pushed me over. 

I was meant with shocked faces around the kitchen, and a few giggles.  

“Don’t you say that word,” my mother growled.  

I learnt the word meant a women’s genitals. A bad word. The lesson stuff with me, not to mention my mother will bring it up as a funny anecdote.  

With the word being censored so often, it is difficult to know its true origin. The word ‘cunt’ most likely evolved from Germanic into the old English “cunte,” or the old Frisian “kunte”, the Indian goddess “kunti”, or old Norse as “kunta”.  

In the medieval period, it was the most common medical term for female sex organs and wasn’t considered offensive.  

It was even recorded in place names, including ‘Gropecunte Lane’ in 1230 London, which became a common place name for streets associated with sex workers.  

But by the 1700s, cunt had been well and truly branded negatively. In 1785, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue defined cunt as: "A nasty word for a nasty thing." 

But today, many slang words like “slay”, “read”, “throw shade”, “pussy”, and “cunt” began their rebrand with black trans women and queer people, particularly in the New York ballroom and vogueing scene. For example, in 1995 a drag queen in the scene, Kevin Aviance, released the song Cunty (This Feeling). Beyoncé was later seen sampling the song in her Renaissance track Pure/Honey in 2022.  

But with drag and queer culture slowly becoming more mainstream, the word “cunt” has made its way into many young people’s vocabulary, including my own.  

I often notice how easy it is for my queer friends to drop the c word. But I think this is because they exist outside of the norms that made the word offensive in the first place.  

Queer writer Amelia Abraham says in her Art Review article that queer people “exist both within and outside of the heterosexual power relations that make ‘cunt’ misogynistic to begin with.” She says “cunt” challenges the cisgender paradigm, “You don’t have to be a man to desire cunt or to call someone one. Nor do you have to be born with a vagina to ‘serve cunt’.”

Historically, it seems that when someone who isn’t a cos straight man uses the word cunt, it’s seen as bad taste. But queer people aren’t trying to appeal to the straight male gaze. These rules don’t apply. 

Living in this state of pleasing men is perhaps what stopped me from using the word until now. To utter a word that was only okay for men, is to break from that ‘good taste’ and leave me seen as masculine myself.  

But watching the queer community, a community that has been so sexualised reclaim a word like ‘cunt’, inspires cis-women like me to do the same.  

Before the reclamation of ‘cunt’, I can’t think of any words for a women’s genitals that are empowering. So, I will use it proudly, and my friends can laugh at how straight I am.  

I facetimed my mother to test the word on her 15 years after my initial telling off. I leant my phone against the wall to show her a new coat, the one I’m wearing in this photo.

“What do you think Mum? Isn’t it so cunt.”  

She gasped.  

“Don’t you say that word.”  

That’s it. The same response I was given at 5-years-old.  

I’m left knowing the reason the word will still hold shock value for years to come. Because woman saying “cunt” is like a woman saying “fuck the patriarchy”.