Comments Elsewhere

aketus, I’m not the cops and I don’t have either the power or the desire to make Andy post different things on his weblog. I’m replying to what he said in a forum for replies that he made available. Your appeals to his rights to post anything he likes are therefore out of place.

aketus: “What’s important to remember is that words on paper are just lines. Words out loud are just sounds. It is humans that define whether they are offensive or not.”

Look, let’s say that Andy were talking about some male white supremacist twit, and he’d posted the same image, reading “Jesus loves you! But I think you’re a faggot.” Would you be responding the same way?

aketus: “But you’re not questioning why the word is offensive. It’s just 4 letters. Where is the Board of Profanities that label certain words with more or less connotations than others? And who gives them the right to make it universally accepted this way?”

aketus, I don’t care about whether the word “cunt” is by itself “offensive,” “vulgar,” “profane,” “dirty,” “obscene,” etc.; thus I don’t care about how we’re supposed to determine this. As I explained above, what I’m concerned with is not the word at all, but rather the way it’s being used in the “funny” image at the end of the post.

Andy, thanks for the reply.

I’m not claiming that the image couldn’t be funny without an appeal to sexism. In fact I think it would be funnier if it weren’t using the word “cunt” to contemptuously describe a woman (if it were, say, “But I think you’re an asshole,” just to take an example off the top of my head).

The problem with using “cunt” that way is that (1) it takes out your contempt in the form of explicitly sexualized aggression toward her (by reducing her to her genitals, making her a mere “cunt” instead of a human being) and (2) it presupposes that a “cunt” is a bad thing to be (otherwise it could hardly work as an insult). I hope you can imagine why this might be insulting to people who happen to have one.