Roitburd, Alexander. Пить. Курить. Ебаться. 2008. Oil on canvas. Provenance unknown.
just cunty things, a running list:
Cans of Diet Coke, especially the tiny ones. Noir-colored Coke Zero cans once held the title, but lost their cunty qualities in the awful rebrand to red. Original Coke cans were never cunty, obviously
Staging an air purifier directly in front of a congested coworker’s cubicle and walking away without a hint of editorializing
Not responding to your high school reunion invitation. Not not attending, but rather straight up ghosting the girls who were sweet in 2010 and now work in real estate, and/or take part in a multilevel marketing scheme
Taking part in a multilevel marketing scheme
Publicly railing against bolo ties as a fashion statement for the better part of six years as a bit, then watching Pulp Fiction while mondo-stoned, ordering a bolo tie like the one John Travolta wears, and donning it before friends as a contrarian gesture (speaking from experience)
Kate Siegel's white bob in The Fall of the House of Usher
From the backseat of his mom’s Honda Odyssey, Kelly Clarkson on the radio, a young Malcontent, aged no more than eight or nine, conspired to use the word ‘hell’ in a sentence.
He was determined to become a person who cursed in an everyday cadence: comfortably, sensually, ebulliently. He was not a boy who yet thought about his career, had never settled on one of those lofty ambitions which requires intense and lifelong dedication, ‘astronaut’ or ‘star athlete’ or even ‘veterinarian.’ No, this disposition – that of a casual curser – was his top priority, and perhaps the first goal to which he truly committed himself.
His mother inquired about his day at school, as he knew she would, and he rattled off a brief monologue he’d prepared in his head, with an aside for the drama which had transpired on the kickball field during lunch.
He neared the conclusion, his teacher having forgotten to print their homework: “And so she had to run to the front office and get the papers, and we were all sitting there like, ‘What the hell?’”
It was as effortless as he’d hoped it would be.
He’d cursed before – stilted outbursts after stubbing his toe; a stream of naughty words, improperly applied, amongst the neighborhood kids – but saying ‘hell’ in the company of his mother, just another word to convey the un-seriousness of the moment in class, affirmed his instincts. He was a born curser, even at an age when he suffered a speech impediment, before puberty dropped his voice to its eventual default, a faggy tenor-baritone register.
His mother called him out for the word right away, scolded him for using it, warned him not to use it again. He got a distinct impression in the moment, that she knew that he knew what he was doing. Pushing the envelope, testing her limits.
His parents were cursers, confirmed by a slip-up here and there, but they were competent enough at policing themselves around he and his sister. He wondered what age they had settled on, in their Good Parenting accords, how old he would have to be before they allowed him to speak freely.
Not that it mattered. He had committed himself, and he would win this battle of wills. Sooner rather than later, he’d curse as he pleased, and his parents were just going to have to live with it.
And now I cry in the middle of the night / For the same DAMN thing!
The Malcontent was right about so very few things in his life, but he was spot-on about this shit. He continued to innovate in the casual-cursing space, mined for ways to drop ‘damn’ and ‘bitch’ in conversation like a high-pitched Molotov cocktail, to the aggravation of his parents.
It was a prolonged stalemate, and at its nadir they had no choice but to opt for the classic soap-in-mouth maneuver.
[Ed. Note: Did the modern ‘woke parent’ expulsion of corporal punishment extend to soap in the mouth, or just spanking and belting? Asking for an aggrieved millennial.]
But it didn’t work, the fuckers. He spit out the soap and kept right along with his cursing. Dastardly, ascetic adherence; he exerted the sort of discipline in this arena which might have behooved him in, say, learning to code.
He wore down his parents’ resolve like sandpaper to his pinewood derby racer, and while they never gave him the satisfaction, never threw their hands up and said, YOU WIN, eventually they forewent their highfalutin concerns, stopped exclaiming after each ‘shit.’
The sweetest victories are the hard-fought ones, and earning his status as a young potty-mouth was a Goddamned incredible feeling. He had no idea what he wanted to be, be it a veterinarian or a good parent or the unholy epitome of a Leo sun-Cancer moon. But, in a very real sense, he knew exactly who the fuck he was.
Still, there was one curse word which didn’t enter into rotation, not yet, for his parents demanded it remain taboo. (Well, okay, he didn’t use the N-word. Slurs are a whole different category, and a stain on the noble, respectable craft of cursing.)
This curse word seemed to incite real ire, real pain, still bore the power to shock and offend. It was a word so violent, particularly to women, it seemed like it would never, could never, forge a path to redemption.
The films of Sofia Coppola
The television show The Gilded Age, according to a friend whilst perusing the tiles on Max (he’d never actually watched it, but he took her word for it based on the period costuming alone)
Caroline's wine glasses, according to another friend, pouring Aperol Spritzes (themselves a cunty cocktail) for the group during a night in
Twirling one’s hair with a pencil, but only if said hair extends past the neckline, is blonde and wispy-thin, and you are a woman
Splaying seductively across a couch and/or a carpet, but only if you are a man, think Burt Reynolds in the Cosmo photoshoot
On that note: Truman Capote’s dustjacket photo
The reclamation of foul words – the value in it, or the wrongheadedness of it – was nothing new.
In fact, the 2009 Oprah interview in which Winfrey and Jay-Z debated the merits of reclaiming the N-word was a flashbulb memory for the Malcontent, from the days when he’d stroll through the garage door after school and the hum of the living room TV would welcome him home.
As longtime readers (of nine months) have surmised, he was an early and vocal co-signee on the reclamation of the word ‘faggot.’
It was during the Obama administration when it became a star player in his vocabulary, a bigger bubble in his everyday word cloud, which also apportioned sizable real estate for the terms ‘wack,’ ‘ruminate,’ and ‘Lady Gaga.’
His use of it delivered a very specific message: he was progressive, cared about human rights and health insurance, but he wasn’t a tightass, or worse, one of those Hamilton obsessives.
He was someone who could co-found an LGBTQ+ student organization, a safe space for the marginalized on his college campus; he was also someone who could lean against the wall in the back of a party and mutter in Lewis’s ear, “Remind me, what’s the name of the fag who invited us?”
He was nothing if not a pragmatist, and his expertise in the art of ‘faggot’ was a logical extension of this. Call a spade a spade, as his dad would say. It also made for an easy punchline, and he needed his friends to think he was mildly-to-moderately funny.
He was called ‘faggot’ often enough in adolescence that it quickly lost its novelty, and thereby its power. Also… the bullies were right in the end, weren’t they?
He still heard ‘faggot’ every now and then, even in liberal Los Angeles: a homeless man while he went for a run in Santa Monica, or a different homeless man as he strolled out of Skylight Books. He didn’t take pains to present like a faggot, so when it shone through in spite of his plain clothes, some self-evident quality in his gait, his je ne sais quoi… well, it made him more proud than usual.
Nobody seemed all that scandalized when he said ‘faggot’ anymore, much less hurt.
At a recent party among trusted friends, he deployed it more aggressively than usual, antagonizing a friend for a comic aside. Almost instantly, he felt bad about this ‘faggot,’ realizing that for once, the joke hadn’t been on him.
He meant to apologize, but by then, the buzzing around him had resumed, the moment had passed without incident, and to apologize would have been overkill. He clapped his friend on the shoulder and circled back to the charcuterie board in the kitchen.
And so ‘faggot’ remained a useful garnish in genial chatter, albeit in talks held outside of the workplace.
Joining its ranks, in recent years, was The Other Word, the one forbade by his parents’ generation, embraced warmly by his. Its contemporary, household utility emerged from Black and queer spaces, from which so many slays and yass queens had been appropriated, lascivious banter adopted by the younger, more brusque corners of the Internet.
For all of the hysteria surrounding the overly woke sanctimoniousness of Gen Z, there existed in tandem a sizable chunk of teens posting, every single hour of every single day, selfies with captions like, ‘just wanted to share a cunty lil photo of me xx’.
In its metamorphosis from loaded, injurious noun to frisky, recuperated adjective, ‘cunt’, however improbably, was now a term of endearment, and one the Malcontent used all the God damn time.
According to Kayta Zomo, “The absolute fucking prodigious restraint required for me to not immediately offer the nastiest wettest most obscene blowjob to literally any man who comes by to fix any goddamn thing at my house regardless of what he looks like or the quality of his work”
Mariska Hargitay on a red carpet, asking photographers to zoom in on “her necklace” as an ostensible tribute to a friend
Any time a lactose intolerant person eats ice cream
Olives
Guillotines
It was important to, for the uninitiated, distinguish between ‘bitchy’ and ‘cunty.’
Although superficially alike, sisters in slang, ‘cunty’ was friendlier by far.
To be cunt – not a cunt, just cunt – was to inhabit the traits and mores of a heel, to take up space and attention in such a way that one’s very being exemplifies a foul ass attitude. Cunty things could be combative in posture, perhaps even pugnacious, or they could be banal, the observer taking a more active role in declaring a thing ‘cunt’ than the thing itself invites.
If society still suffered under the Thought Catalog regime (RIP Jezebel), there would exist an article positing the feminist qualities of the ‘cunty’ phenomenon, how a nation of nasty women stood tall in the face of Trumpist misogyny and existed on their own terms, rewriting the rules for how to be, even terraforming the language oft-weaponized against them.
But nobody needs that article, for such a piece of writing would be smug, certain of itself, and not very cunty at all.
What confluence of events led to this dark horse movement, reinstating ‘cunt’ into the vernacular?
Credit is primarily owed to the youth, X users with Jungkook profile pictures and terrible grammar tossing ‘cunty’ around in replies like resplendent glitter in the air.
One can’t help but to pontificate on the impact of Game of Thrones as well. The weekly dispelling of ‘cunt’ by Sandor Clegane, a fan favorite character, usually to humorous effect, must have had a (scarred) hand in endearing the word to auds. Clegane certainly normalized ‘cunt’ as a gender-neutral remark: men were more often cunts to ‘The Hound’ than women.
But no, there is a different progenitor for the cunty movement, a figure firmly entrenched in the aforementioned Black and queer spaces. A word as embattled and messy as ‘cunt’ deserves a mascot of the same caliber, and if one seeks a three-second primer on the ecstatic joy of proclaiming something cunty, look no further than:
“How could you not say cunt? Like, that’s cunt!”
The artist Azealia Banks is ahead of the times in as many ways as she is woefully behind it. She can be the most hysterical and truth-telling comic on Instagram – that is, when her declarations aren’t ensconced in a pillow of casual homophobia. She is notorious for cancelling shows and nixing new releases, laying the blame for botched career moves at the feet of her collaborators, her representation, the venue, the label, Elon Musk, and every damn body – excluding, of course, herself.
Even so, a compelling case could be made that Broke with Expensive Taste – at almost ten years old, still her only album – is the best and most forward-thinking hip-hop release of the twenty-first century. More than a strong record, the music is dynamic, in-your-face, exactly the soundtrack one would queue during a pregame as shots are imbibed and smudged makeup is applied.
It is as if Banks sought a word for her sound, finding the appropriate language for lack, and invoked instead an avant-garde nomenclature. There is ‘cunt’ before Azealia Banks, and there is ‘cunt’ in the age of Azealia Banks.
For as many outright offensive remarks as she has made, the spectacle is nigh impossible to unfollow. What other public figure, absent fringe extremists, is so willing to play the heel at detrimental cost to their bottom line? The degree of cuntiness is unprecedented, admirable with an asterisk.
Perhaps owing to her pitiful trajectory after a star-making debut, the viral rants and armchair-expert attitude feel harmless, no matter how despicable the words. It is comparable to a complete stranger shouting barbs from across the street. No one should pay any mind to the coarseness of such a cunty individual… and yet, one can’t help but to eavesdrop, rubberneck the invective.
This, then, must be the root of a cunty ethos.
Whether firing broadsides at the whole of social media, or poking the bear from the backseat of Mom’s minivan, a cunty state of mind impels rebellion, against everyone and no one in particular.
The joy of cursing, or embodying cursing’s demeanor, is the threat of provocation, the thrill of behaving improperly whether anyone cares or doesn’t. It is uncouth and it is liberating, philistine and futuristic.
But enough of the fancy lingo. It’s just fucking fun to be cunt.
Taking selfies immediately after bawling your eyes out
Those two women on TikTok who make cocktails in the booths of fast food chains
Walking your dog in a peacoat, t-shirt and jeans, and baseball cap, as if you were a celebrity trying to remain anonymous, when in reality you work in marketing and live in a gentrified one-bed apartment which was put up by glorified slumlords in six months
Walking on subway grates in high heels, a la Rihanna
The clacking of his loafers on the concrete in the office parking garage
if you do one thing this week…
Be cunty on Thanksgiving. Smoke a massive doobie on the cousin walk. Wear a bustier in front of Grandma. Pick a meaningless fight at the dinner table. Life’s too short.
thanks for being here,
stan