[lbo-talk] 'American kids, dumber than dirt'

Tim tim_boetie at fastmail.fm
Thu Nov 1 10:48:28 PDT 2007


On Thu, 1 Nov 2007 10:30:00 EDT, JBrown72073 at cs.com said:
> Doug writes:
> >Well yeah, but "prick," "dick," (both male) and "asshole" (gender-
> >neutral) are pretty synonymous, though "cunt" admittedly has greater
> >shock value.
>
> This seems to be more of a British usage, in my observation. The

The singer in question, Jarvis Cocker, _is_ British, so it makes sense to interpret his use of the word in the British sense, which I don't think has the same gendered quality it has in the US. As I understand it, "cunt" in America is mostly applied to women, and relates to an evaluation of their status as women (I'm not American, so my knowledge of the use of the word in the US is limited, but I've generally understood it to function like "bitch," to describe a woman who doesn't behave in the way the speaker thinks women should). I don't think the use of the word in the UK carries that connotation, although it's difficult to actually demonstrate that. Arguably, the illogicality you see in saying "cunts are running the world" would itself be evidence that Cocker isn't using the word the way you understand it - he doesn't seem to be saying that women, or men who have some unpleasantly female quality, are running the world. He's saying that the people running the world are arseholes, or bastards, or shits.

[...]


> both women and men. But 'cunt' as a metaphor for the rich and powerful
> is not
> really logical--on that basis I attribute its use here to misogyny. The

But it's not really a metaphor, it's a term of abuse. The relationship between the literal meaning of an insult and its connotations can be pretty indirect ("motherfucker" seems like it has a particularly indirect relationship ).


> cunt's
> crime is to be attached to an oppressed and therefore despised group.

But pricks are attached to a privileged group, and "prick" is still a term of abuse; the abusiveness of the word doesn't _necessarily_ come from abuse directed at the object it literally refers to. Though there is something troubling about the fact that a term for women's genitals is considered worse than a term for men's genitals, the way the word is employed seems more important in figuring out its relationship to misogyny than the word's etymology. --

"The bourgeois want art voluptuous and life ascetic; the

reverse would be better."

-- Adorno



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