Country matters

Responding to a comment from S, I promised to post something on sexual vocabulary. But the topic is too vast. Here, though, are few thoughts:

A person's sexual vocabulary is the list of words and phrases that a person uses comfortably in writing, talking, or thinking about sex for themselves; the words and phrases that a person uses with the people they have sex with; the words and phrases that best capture, for them, their sexual responses to their own body and to the bodies of others, and to the sexual acts that they engage in.

The list is necessarily open-ended.

My sexual vocabulary: fuck, cunt, cock, balls, cuntlips, foreskin, clit, breasts, tits, nipples, ass, asshole, cockhead, shaft, suck, lick, mouth, tongue, tonguefuck, assfuck, grind, pounding, ball-slapping, blowjob, cocksucking, facesitting, cunt-eating, go down, ride my cock, orgasm, come, climax, seed, spurt, spray, cuntjuice, wet, tight.

Words and phrases that are less comfortable (often uncomfortable) for me: vagina, penis, anus, pussy, making love, dick, screwing, shagging, bonking, jugs, abbreviations like 'pits or nips, jargon like teabagging or eiffel tower, euphemisms like male member or man-part.

Words like armpits, lips, mouth, nipples, tongue etc are words that have many, many non-sexual occasions of use, and so are unlike cunt, fuck, blowjob. No-one finds these words uncomfortable except when used sexually, and typically there are no alternatives for use in a sexual context. Nevertheless, a person who cannot say to a partner, 'Lick my armpits!' does not have the word 'armpit' in his sexual vocabulary.

Sexual vocabulary, because its use is so restricted, is highly variable and plastic. Two people whose non-sexual vocabularies are the same may have non-overlapping sexual vocabularies. One person may use a different sexual vocabulary with different audiences.

Another person's sexual vocabulary, when it is significantly different from one's own, is either risible or offensive. Not much offends me; there is a lot that I find risible. My sexual vocabulary would probably offend many, and be thought risible by few. Most of the sexual terms that qive me qualms are of the 'jugs' or 'shagging' sort: these may bother me because they seek to avoid offence by being jokey instead, and so they pretend not to be euphemisms while still doing euphemistic work. (I am a prig about sexual vocabulary, Candy, as well as a pedant.)

Some people's sexual vocabularies are much larger than other people's. Some people can barely even whisper the word 'vagina' without flushing with embarassment, even when they are on their own, and cannot write it at all, or only as v****a or the like. For such people, the word 'cunt' is unutterable, and someone who utters it freely unutterably crude. To me, the word 'cunt' is not merely utterable, but an utter pleasure to utter. I like cunts, so I like writing the word 'cunt' and saying the word 'cunt'. But I can say 'vagina', and have only slight qualms about the word 'pussy'. These are words that are outside my sexual vocabulary not because I cannot utter them, but because they do not express anything sexual for me; I would not express a sexual desire of mine using these words. I would not ask a woman, "Can I taste your vagina?". These are non-sexual words for me, not part of my sexual vocabulary. But they are part of the sexual vocabulary of others, and if I have sex with such a person, these words may end up being part of our joint vocabulary. And any even modestly articulate sexual connection requires a joint vocabulary.

The word 'cunt' is Exhibit A in most discussions of sexual vocabulary because it regularly shows up as the one word that reliably outstrips 'fuck' in offensiveness: more people find 'cunt' offensive than find 'fuck' offensive; people find 'cunt' more offensive than 'fuck'. To me, this linguistic terrain - cunt, cock, fuck - is flat: when I fuck D, I put my cock in her cunt; D fucks my cock with her cunt; I fuck her cunt with my cock. I can't see how one of these words stands higher than the others. I love the word 'cunt', as I have said. I love it more than the word 'cock' but I think only because I love cunts more than cocks. Its etymology is contested (A Blunt History of the Word Cunt: being a prig, I utterly repudiate the offensive joke about yeast infections at the end of this piece) . But Chaucer uses it (spelled 'queynte'), and that's good enough for me.

If I were to walk up to a strange woman in the subway and ask her if her cunt is wet, I would certainly offend her. That is why I do not do it, even if I am curious as to the answer to the question. A rather small and uninteresting part of the explanation of the offensiveness of my question has to do particularly with the word 'cunt'; nearly everything there is to say about why my question is offensive will apply if instead I ask if her pussy is wet, or if her vaginal secretions are of such a character as to render entry of the erect male member into her vaginal canal easy.

'Cock' is, to my ear, just a little bit cocky, and I like to connect it to ballcocks or a cocked rifle rather than the barnyard strut of the rooster. But the etymology is not on my side here. Still, 'cock' in this root sense means no more than 'male' - as in cock-robin, cock-sparrow. 'Manhood' is slightly risible to me, but I can see the sense of it as a term for a cock, and the reverse-formation, 'womanhood' for a cunt would say something true sexually as well. To be a man is to have a cock; to be a woman is to have a cunt (these claims are true, as Aristotle routinely says, 'either always or for the most part').

'Fuck' is one of the great words of the language, an atom that bonds very freely with others to make sexual compounds of dizzying variety. The only problematic uses of 'fuck' are non-sexual, used simply as verbal fist-pounding or in the sense of 'fuck-up'. Its use to mean exhaustion I like; after a long, hard session with D, I do feel fucked - but not fucked-up.