Cunt

Recommendation: Highly Recommended

Listening to While Reading and Writing: Savage Lovecast Podcast and Lily Allen Its Not Me, It’s You

So not going to lie, Cunt by Igna Muscio is 100% the inspiration for the title of this blog. I 100% agree with her sentiment that “‘Word Cunt’ seemed like a nice title for a woman writer” (5). Because of this inspiration I really desperately wanted my first post on this blog to be dedicated to Cunt. 

I love Cunt. I love the idea of reclaiming the word cunt, and transforming it back into something powerful and positive. When I picked it up, at first I had no idea what I was in for. The title seemed pretty self-explanatory, but it could have had anything to do with cunts. Overall, this book is a call to love yourself, love other women, and to create a society that approaches difficult topics with love instead of anger. I will always be on board with that, even if I have different opinions on how that can be achieved.

I had a pretty violent reaction to Cunt at first. It’s a reaction I am still having writing this particular post and maybe its always going to be something that I struggle with to some greater or lesser degree. I’ve spent a long time hating the word cunt. I was 19 the first time it was used against me in a really negative way, and that was by a family member. I still have to pause whenever I type the word cunt here. I have written several round about sentences that use the phrase “that word” instead of just typing cunt the first time around. Thank the gods for editing.

Cunt is definitely a very feminist book, and one I would highly recommend, particularly to anyone broaching into feminism for the first time. It eases into topics of intersectionality. This was a concept I both understood in theory and didn’t understand how I could personally practice it when I was studying in college. I found it a lot easier to understand this time around, but I also think that stems from Muscio’s easy to read writing style.

Each chapter is taken from a very personal point of view. Muscio’s personal story is laced throughout everything she writes, so it is easy to see how she got to where she is. I can feel her call to action in every chapter. Topics covered in this book range from periods to abortion to orgasms and sexuality to the way women treat other women to rape to issues surrounding transgender people. I’ll say that I did not fully agree with her 100% of the time, but honestly, that’s okay. It opens the topic up for debate and positive dialogues about how to upset the cunt-hating patriarchy.

In particular, I found myself disagreeing with some of the things she’d been writing about in her topics on periods and abortion. On the topic of periods, it wasn’t so much about disagreement; it was more that I found that I was asking myself “so what?” towards the end of the chapter. “What do you want me to do about it?”

Don’t get me wrong; some of the things that she was writing about, such as switching to things like sea sponges instead of tampons and using washable and re-useable pads were great. It was all information that I had no idea about, and I found her personal experience invaluable. But I also felt like she was calling for a change in the feminine hygiene world, but left me feeling a little overwhelmed because I had no idea where to go from there.

A lot of the chapter was about finding love and compassion for yourself on your period, and how you can change how you experience your period, just by finding that love. It can lessen the pain you feel from cramping. And yes, I do think that is the case for some people. I don’t think that is the case for all people. I, myself, am one of those people. I have a very high tolerance for pain, and I still find the cramping that I experience debilitating for the first day or so. After that, I’m fine, but the first 24-36 hours are excruciating.

I know for a fact that I don’t have it as bad as some people. I have a friend that definitely has worse period’s than I do. There is a lot of conversation now about how extreme pain during your period can, in fact, be a medical condition: dysmenorrhea to be precise. I sincerely doubt it’s something that can simply be willed or self-loved away. But I do think that self-love can make periods easier to handle each month in general. I think every one of us could do with a little more self-love.

And this leads me to the second point I disagreed with. When talking about the field of medicine in her chapter on abortion, I found that the topic of will came up a lot. Muscio seemed to be suggesting (to me at least) that medicine is secondary to imagining ourselves feeling better with every ounce of our being, and her description of her third abortion did not happen solely through hoping for it. There was medicine and active steps involved, departed to Muscio through people in their respective fields. I think that the medicinal knowledge (alternative healing though it may be) is down played heavily, in favor of the idea of will and a community of women coming together to make a much less traumatic, and much more emotionally supported, abortion happen.

I have a lot of health issues, and a majority of them are not things that I can resolve without some sort of medicinal help. Believe me when I say that I have tried. I’ve tried believing away my depression. My PTSD. My anxiety. It didn’t work. I still struggle with it now and it is worse in some ways for having tried so hard to will it away with every ounce of my being. It is something that impacts my life every day. My first foray’s into therapy helped to keep me from sinking deeper but did nothing to get to the root of the problem, and my search for a natural mood regulator served to make my depression worse, to the point that I wanted to kill myself. Five years of not being in therapy saw my symptoms of depression and anxiety worsen to the point that I had a hard time sleeping, a harder time getting up and going about my day, and a sharp increase in severe panic and anxiety attacks that would render me incapable of driving myself anywhere because of how physically ill they made me.

And I know this has nothing to do with my cunt per say (it does, but that’s an entirely different conversation for an entirely different post). But what I am getting at is that it wasn’t wishing alone that made my psychological health start to get better. It was a combination of talk therapy and medication that, I am quite frankly dreadful at remembering to take with consistency. In some cases, medication or help from a medical professional is the way to go, and I felt like that was down-played and argued against pretty heavily.

I’m not disparaging alternative healing here. I think that finding more natural and holistic ways to improve your life and go about things is definitely a GREAT suggestion, where it is best applicable (holistic medicine is great and I am, in no way, arguing against it) but I think it is a disservice to discredit modern medicine as a whole. I love that a whole community of women came together to give Muscio the support she needed and helped her achieve her goals. I just wish that this chapter didn’t feel like it disparaged the knowledge that medical communities provide and the aide the offer. I am feeling this even more strongly now, as I sit here writing and editing this post, months after having started it, now that we are in the face of a MASSIVE pandemic. Will is not going to be enough to resolve the problems going on here. Tapping all communities to not only gain knowledge quickly, but to also gain support for each other, is necessary.

I wish that I could say I disagreed with how she talked about how women talk to each other. I really wish I could. But I can’t. Women are capable of being awful to each other. I learned this the hard way in school, where most of my bullies were girls, and it’s been a lesson that was repeated at work. Women are capable of being both extremely catty towards one another or extremely supportive. I wish that I could say that my experience was more the latter, but it hasn’t been. I can count on both hands the supportive women in my life, and most of them have not come into my life until the last year or two (I’m 27 at the time I am writing this).

But I’m not saying that to bash the women who haven’t been supportive in my life. In their defense, American society is very good at making women feel like they need to attack one another in order to prove superiority. I’m just saying that I agree that its an obscenely common occurrence. One that I would like to change. So that’s where this blog is coming in for me. I want to create a safe spot for people to talk about their experiences. I want a safe spot to cultivate supportive relationships for people that have had both wonderful and awful things happen to them. I want to create that in my real life as well, but that is a grander goal to work towards.