Outrageous for Lisa

To beautiful Lisa who reminds me of Japanese Haiku:

“Between our two lives/ there is also the life of/ the cherry blossom.”

"You are filled with doubt/ of the magic inside you,/ but it's all I see."

Something "outrageous" (or not) for your birthday

When my friend Susan Reid left academic work, she asked herself "What are you really interested in?" The first thought that popped into her head surprised her: "I am interested in women's cunts". This led to her work on women's sexual language and this, in turn, lead to her talisman "I have a big cunt".  When stressed or anxious, she whispered this phrase to herself and "poise calm and dignity descended".

Soon after I arrived in France in 1989, Susan asked if I would accompany her to her garden below the village to pick fresh figs. I was in a sad, tear-stained state and said little as we walked so Susan filled the silence with a monologue about her first and second marriages. Her first husband had been her university professor at Oxford and, at first, his age and authority delighted her but she soon discovered he was arrogant, condescending and a womanizer although he had one agreeable trait: "He loved cunts. He found each one unique and beautiful." I must have looked shocked, as Susan paused and explained that no one word describes the whole of women's genitalia. She would like to dispel its ugliness and bring "cunt" back into fashion. (Six years later, Eve Ensler, in her play the Vagina Monologues, also wanted women to reclaim the word.)

Although I trust Susan implicitly, cunt is a powerful appellation and I had to push myself to use it especially in my blog as my mother and father read me daily. (Later, my father commented on my "filthy" language. ) Sadly, I still find it difficult to write about cunt. In languages other than English, it does not have the same potency but as Germaine Greer argued in 2007 cunt "is one of the few remaining words in the English language with a genuine power to shock".

"I tried to take the malice out of it. I wanted women to be able to say it. The same way I would say: “You think cunt is nasty? I’m here to tell you cunt is nice. Like "Black is Beautiful”. Cunt is delicious. Cunt is powerful. Cunt is strong.

"Ah - it didn’t work. And now, in a way, I’m sort of, perversely pleased, 'cause it meant that it kept that power."

In her poem "Hypocrite Women",  Denise Levertov notes women coddle men as if they cannot handle the truth but women too don't have the guts to admit our own harsh truths: 

Hypocrite women, how seldom we speak

of our own doubts, while dubiously

we mother man in his doubt!

And if at Mill Valley perched in the trees

the sweet rain drifting through western air

a white sweating bull of a poet told us

our cunts are ugly - why didn't we

admit we have thought so too? (And

what shame? They are not for the eye!)

no, they are dark and wrinkled and hairy,

caves of the Moon...             and when a 

dark humming fills us, a

coldness towards life,

we are too much women to

own to such unwomanliness.

Whorishly with the psychopomp

we play and plead--and say

nothing of this later.          And our dreams,

with what frivolity we have pared them

like toenails, clipped them like ends of

split hair. 

Her description of the cunt and women's attitudes toward this precious part of our anatomy makes me despair. In adolescence, I too thought it as ugly as sin, when the hair started sprouting. I thought worse -that it was smelly, and once a month bloody-awful. 

This was so unkind and such a lie.

I don't know how young women think about their cunts these days. 

I remember when my daughter was a little girl, she looked up at me in the shower and exclaimed "aren't vaginas beautiful, mummy?" YES. 

If this is of interest at all, I recommend reading Susan Reid's autobiography in three volumes. The first is titled "About Being German; Speak to me: recollections of growing up in Germany, 1927-1948: Volume 1"