Me: Maybe the next one, 4-D or whatever you’re going to be doing, I think it should probably be all dick all the time!
The plan was working. The interviews were going great. Everybody was eating it up. Talking about dicks and pinning dicks on various body parts was as much fun as watching a dog get surprised by his own farts over and over. And you know how crazy they can get! Anyway, my last room had a bunch of the Jackass crew grouped together, so I had a feeling the Molotov cocktail was just waiting for me to light the wick. I walked in, sat down, and proceeded to break the ice with a little dirty banter, and then I went in for the kill. I brought up the game, and we all started to play. Then, without skipping a beat, Chris Pontius, famous for dancing around in a G-string, stood up, unzipped his pants, reached in, and whipped out his single-barrel pump-action yogurt rifle. (You could hear the gasps in the room.)
For the uninitiated, let’s just say he’s packing a meter-long King Kong dong, and that’s when it’s flaccid. (I’m guessing he’s more of a shower than a grower.) He then started to put on a show by doing the helicopter, or should I say the heli-cock-ter, with his meat tassel. I could tell that this whole thing was his attempt to take control and shock me into some silly giggle-fit or fearful scream. But this was my interview and my game. Truth be told, I was tickled pink. I can only imagine that the smile on my face must have resembled that of a hungry hobo staring down a Pink’s nine-inch stretch chili dog. So, much to his shock, once his steamin’ semen truck slowed down into a stationary position, I proceeded to pin a johnson sticker on his deep-V diver. They took the dick out, and I took the dick back!! A hot hand, cool delivery, and more game than they knew what to do with!! To the winner go the spoils! BOOYAH! MUTHAFUCKAAAAAAAAH!!!!
When I walked out of the room, I was fucking thrilled. I could tell the room was in a state of shock because what had just happened had never happened before, and I don’t mean that in a good way. I suddenly got rushed by all the junket employees and studio people in a state of panic. I couldn’t adequately describe the fear and genuine concern on all their faces, especially our rep’s. But they weren’t there to yell at me … this time, they were comforting me. That’s how much the tables had turned.
“Are you okay!?” they asked gingerly, arms around me like I’d just been rescued from a well. I could have been angry. I suppose, from their perspective, I could have sued Paramount Pictures for truckloads of money, retired to a Caribbean island, and opened my bar, because it was harassment on every level. I mean, let’s face it: This is a major studio holding a proper press event. It’s one thing for the press to step out of line and be admonished, but how often does the talent engage the press in a sexually explicit way with the cameras rolling? I assure you in the movie marketing handbook, there is plenty on what to do when an actor launches his heat-seeking moisture missile on set, but nothing on what to do when he starts laying pipe for the press. This was clearly not a good look.
“Yes, why?” I answered, genuinely puzzled. “That was the greatest thing ever!” I was living in my No Good bubble, and it didn’t even occur to me while it was happening that it was controversial, or possibly legally actionable. Hey, if you put a baloney pony in front of me, I don’t run screaming. I put a sticker on it! And just like a few years back, when we proved our mettle to the studio by how we handled Nelly, on this day, with the shoe firmly on the other foot, we did it again with how we handled this, further reinforcing our relationship with them. Nothing wrong had happened back with Nelly years before, and nothing wrong had happened today. It was all part of our No Good world.
Recorded in the annals of No Good History as the Pontius schwing, this piss-weasel incident was definitely a first—and, as far as I know, a last—in the junket world. I guess there are some lines that shouldn’t be crossed. Then again, rules are made to be broken. Without the rebels and pioneers, we wouldn’t have thrown tea into Boston Harbor. We wouldn’t wear white after Labor Day. And, without Dutch Scratching, I wouldn’t have felt the joy of unwrapping Santa’s package.
Is that the kind of world we want to live in? I think not.
13
AMERICA VS. THE FOREIGN CUNT
There are no bad words. Bad thoughts. Bad intentions, and wooooords.
—George Carlin
Before you ask … No, this is not an analysis of Donald Trump’s book on foreign policy. And, yes, unfortunately, it bears the same title.
Now, I love a good “fuck” as much as the next girl, and lord knows, I’ve given as good as I’ve gotten, but if you’ve studied your Roman lyric poetry like I have, then you know that amongst the profanum vulgus, “fuck” is a child’s word, and if I was to become an adult, I was going to need to conquer the “cunt.” What I could not have anticipated was the epic journey that lay ahead of me, rife with historical triviality and cultural hypocrisy. A decade-long quest that would begin with me, dead center, in the eye of a hurricane of establishment horseshit. Then, have me crawl my way through a septic tank of contradictions and misconceptions, most of which were opinions held firmly as fact by a group of Darwin Award nominees. And finally, see me rise above the fray, triumphant, only to sit upon what can best be described as a porcelain throne. But I had a date with destiny. After all, was it not Corinthians 13:11 that taught us, “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child. Now that I have become a woman I must set aside childish things”? My path was set; I was loaded for bear, and the “Great Cunt Hunt” was upon me.
Of all the curse words ever created, cunt is, without a doubt, the most controversial. Feminist scholar Germaine Greer said it best when she described it as “one of the few remaining words in the English language with a genuine power to shock.” And it’s hard to argue with that. Here in the United States, it’s the ultimate verbal kill switch. Imagine you’re throwing the party of the century at a spectacular mansion in the Hills and it’s attended by every A-lister, sports superstar, and supermodel there is. In one corner Jay Z, Kanye, and Queen Bey are trying out some new material on the crowd, in another corner the Victoria’s Secret Angels are playing Twister, and in the pool George Clooney, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, and Ben Affleck are about to get a game of volleyball going. It’s around midnight, the joint is packed, and it is slammin’! Then, the front doors swing open, and in struts O. J. Simpson, Gary Glitter, Phil Spector, and Bill Cosby. They are lookin’ fly and ready to get turnt up! So how fast do you think your party shuts down and clears out? You guessed it: faster than Jared Fogle when he finds out the hooker’s of legal age! That, my friends, is called the “cunt effect.”
“Oh Yeah! This is the one I get to say fuck, shit, cunt on!! Sorry, Gillian. That’s my publicist.”
—Judy Greer
Now, in spite of all that, “cunt” still happens to be one of my all-time favorite curse words. I still remember how fierce it sounded the first time I heard it used by a woman. The guy I was dating in college brought me home to meet his mother, whose name was Connie. Wanting to make small talk, I told her my mom was also named Connie and asked if her name was short for Constance, to which she replied, “No. It’s short for Cunt-Chetta!” That’s all I needed to hear. Sign me up for the cunt show. Fact is, if you follow me on Twitter then you know that it was I who originated its use as a collective noun when I tweeted: “As go a ‘Murder of Crows,’ so go a ‘Cunt of Hipsters.’” (You’re Welcome.)
It truly is the perfect word. In one syllable it accomplishes as much, emotionally and viscerally, as most of our greatest poetry and prose. It is uniquely feminine yet unabashedly formidable. It represents all that is wrong and all that is right with human interaction and communication. It is a word that means many things to many people, encompassing every emotion from love to hate. Therefore, it has been the subject of a deep philosophical divide between the U.S. and the rest of the world. Which has, in turn, made it the single best example of why the persecution of words over intent is a ridiculous waste of time. On a more personal note, it stan
ds as the root cause of the most complicated and rewarding struggle in my career. As well as being the mightiest weapon in my arsenal to combat what I like to call “lingual bigotry.”
While adjectives like “notorious,” “lethal,” and “powerful” have typically been used to describe it, there are strong arguments to be made that it might, quite possibly, be one of the most influential, impactful, and incredibly important words in history. Now, I wouldn’t blame you for having a hard time believing that “cunt” is anything other than disposable and vulgar. Plus, you’re still hurt that your mom called you one after she found out she’d spent forty-seven-thousand dollars a year for you to attend Skidmore College only to discover you were majoring in “the Sociology of Miley Cyrus.” In all honesty, it wasn’t your finest moment, and in her defense, she was just making an observation. But would you believe me if I told you that the very freedom of speech that you and I now take for granted in literature has the word “cunt” to thank? It certainly does.
“You can forgive a young cunt anything. A young cunt doesn’t have to have brains. They’re better without brains. But an old cunt, even if she’s brilliant, even if she’s the most charming woman in the world, nothing makes any difference…”
With these audacious and scintillating expressions and many more, in 1934, a forty-three-year-old American writer took Paris and the rest of the literary world by storm with the release of a novel he originally intended to title Crazy Cock. However, Henry Miller’s extraordinarily graphic and sexually explicit book better known as Tropic of Cancer erupted with the force of a supervolcano across the U.S. literary community. It was promptly banned for breaking obscenity laws and remained so for the next thirty years. It wasn’t until a reprinting in 1961 that led to sixty obscenity lawsuits across twenty-one states, all leading up to a Supreme Court decision in 1964, that the book was finally declared not obscene. When all was said and done, it was Mr. Miller’s multitude of “cunts” that influenced the very literary reform and freedom of speech we Americans hold so dear and declare with pride to the rest of the world. So forgive your mom, and be sure to let your inner “cunt” out. We’ve earned it.
In spite of its historical significance, the word “cunt” is greatly misunderstood. Without question, the issue of vulgarity has always been at the very core of the cunt debate that has existed for hundreds of years. But what most people don’t realize is that it hasn’t always had a vulgar connotation, and even today, outside of the U.S., it’s commonly used in very familial and friendly ways. In England it’s basically a synonym to the word “asshole,” and in Australia it has almost replaced the word “mate,” proving that vulgarity is truly in the eye of the beholder and not an objective determination. This has undoubtedly added to the endless confusion over why Americans still struggle with its very utterance and why it’s perceived so negatively.
The answer may lie in the fact that the word “cunt” stems from feminine symbolism in a male-dominated culture that has spanned thousands of years. Germaine Greer made this very interesting argument: “For hundreds of years, men identified female sexual energy as a dangerous force. And unlike other words for female genitals, this one sounds powerful. It demands to be taken seriously.” Sounds to me like cunt might be a secret mystical weapon for women that we should be paying closer attention to instead of being offended by. I mean, who is it that’s been telling us that we should be offended all this time?
Let’s face it, much of the information available on the origins and first use of the word “cunt” tend to follow the path of The Oxford English Dictionary, which traces its use to describe the vulva to AD 1230. In fact, the word was part of a street name in London called Gropecuntlane, which was the name of any street equivalent to a red-light district. Not to be confused with Shavecuntewelle in Kent or Cuntewellewang in Lincolnshire. Not going to lie to you, part of me wishes that I was born on that street just so I could have said it when I was growing up and not gotten into trouble. To see the look on my friends’ moms’ faces when I said, “You can drop me off at 69 Gropecunt Lane, please,” would have been amazing.
Clearly, this path leads us down the road to a vulgar word for the vagina, which is what most people regard as its source. It’s a negative definition that’s been fortified in people’s minds for hundreds of years through literature, art, and speech. But in stark contrast, if you read Inga Muscio’s book Cunt: A Declaration of Independence, she traces cunt back much, much further in time and states that it originally stemmed from words that were either titles of respect for women, priestesses, and witches, or derivative of the names of goddesses. So it seems entirely reasonable to reach the conclusion that all that’s negative about the word is very much a male construct. In fact, in Germaine Greer’s feminist manifesto, “Vaginal Revolution,” where she’s asking women to reclaim the word “cunt,” she states, “the only other terms (women) may deploy have been deformed by centuries of sadistic male use. ‘You cunt, gash, slit, crack, slot…’ Women have no names of their own for what is most surely their own.”
I realize that this may be more information about cunt than you ever wanted to know, but it’s important to understand that it’s just an incredibly versatile word that’s been infinitely manipulated. And it appears that every thousand years or so, this particular word becomes the domain of a different sex. So whether you subscribe to Francis Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, which defines cunt as “a nasty name for a nasty thing,” or you heed Inga Muscio’s call to every woman to be the “Cuntlovin’ Ruler of Her Sexual Universe,” at the end of the day it’s just a word with many definitions that we each can take ownership of and enjoy. I’m talking to you, ladies, and you, America. It’s time to make peace with the “foreign cunt!”
From the controversial wonderment of its discovery in 1492 to the horror and exaltation of its quest and subsequent Declaration of Independence in 1776. Through the brutality of its sacrosanct Civil War from 1861 to 1865 and the abolition of its greatest shame, slavery, with the Thirteenth Amendment in 1864. From its meteoric rise as an industrial world power to its hard-earned victory for women’s suffrage in 1920. Through its perseverance during the bloody devastation of two world wars and the moral bankruptcy of its darkest days during the McCarthy era. From the decimation of hope that was the Kennedy assassination to its crisis of conscience during the Vietnam War. Through the national betrayal that was the Nixon presidency and the jubilant resurgence of peace signaled by the end of the Cold War. From the endless crises in the Middle East to the unforgivable terror at home on 9/11. The people of this great nation of ours, the United States of America, have survived, overcome, conquered, overpowered, defeated, overwhelmed, made peace with, or risen above incomprehensible struggles against impossible odds. Yet, despite our inexorable ability to heal wounds so deep it boggles the imagination and our interminable dedication to freedom, growth, and progress, to this day we are still trying to come to terms with the word “cunt.” Who hurt you, America? Who hurt you?
America’s relationship with the word “cunt” seems deeply rooted in fear and hatred almost bordering on some sort of psychosis. Clearly resulting from a traumatic incident from when it was younger. It truly is one of those great mysteries. It’s right up there with why is it perfectly legal in the U.S. for underage kids to smoke cigarettes but it’s illegal for them to purchase them, or what it would be like to live in a world without hypothetical questions. Real heady stuff. If I had to guess what was at the core of America’s intense hatred toward the “foreign cunt,” I would say that it probably involved an open road, two motor vehicles, and a disagreement over dick size.
Now, I may have gotten a few of the details wrong, but I think you can understand the gist of how a standoff can start for no good reason and continue indefinitely for no better one. This is why America’s war against the “foreign cunt” always reminded me of the “War of the Golden Stool.” Which was a pointless conflict that took place in 1900 between the Ashanti Emp
ire in Africa and Great Britain. It was so trivial that the symbolism in the name of the war is more profound than the war itself. Let’s face it: All wars should have a metaphor for feces in the title because they’re always caused by some stupid shit anyway. After all, why is it that a word that is pretty much regarded as harmless and friendly all over the world is still seen as a threat in a cultural war that is entering its 523rd year?
I believe that people tend to get too hung up on words instead of only being concerned with the intent behind them. This ideal has been a central theme throughout my entire career because I love freedom of speech, I love cursing, and I hate being told what is allowed in polite society and what isn’t. Fuck that! Furthermore, cursing, in and of itself, is not racist, sexist, classist, or any other “ist.” It belongs to all of us. Plus, it’s really fucking fun. I have dedicated my professional life to this great cause. And it has been my great pleasure to specialize in the defense and rehabilitation of curse words that have been wrongly persecuted.
So when the “foreign cunt” was first referred to me as a potential client, like most people I was hesitant. I thought, What would people think of me representing a cunt? How would my association with this cunt affect my business and reputation? So I decided to get to know the “foreign cunt” and to try to understand why it was that America thought it was such an unacceptable cunt. Eventually, after a great deal of soul-searching, I came to the conclusion that there was goodness and decency in this cunt’s heritage. And that centuries of poor treatment at the hands of Americans had left this cunt without a sense of purpose or identity, forced to fend for itself in the harsh and unforgiving surroundings of pulp fiction, stag films, and pseudo-feminist manifestos. Gone was the joy and the laughter that all cunts were entitled to in the old country. It was then that I decided that it was my duty to bring back this cunt’s vertical smile for present and future generations. What started out as a simple quest for justice soon turned into a crusade for the “foreign cunt.”
Everybody Curses, I Swear! Page 26
