why i must stop reading (most) magazines
Apr. 2nd, 2005 09:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rktsometimes, i wonder why i bother having hope. actually, i wonder this quite often.
but there is NO EXCUSE for this. NONE. NADA. ZIP.
i admit, i get rageful rather easily. but, considering i wasn't reading maxim, etc. this still took me by surprise. how the fuck anyone can have so much stupidty/hate, i don't know. there's SO much wrongness going on in this essay, it's practically a pardoy of itself. (which, i am sure, is what the editors will claim it was/is later.)
NO ONE, has the right to go around talking smack about my cunt. NO ONE. i don't care who you are or what publication you write for, YOU DON'T HAVE THE WRITE TO SPREAD HATE. don't fucking tell me what i can and can't reclaim. don't re-create a reality to justify your own stupidity. just don't. don't. don't. it's not funny. it's not cute. you absolutely do not get my respect.
if you seriously feel the need to puff your own malenss, go home and wank. leave me, and my cunt, out of it.
boldifications, footnotes, and typographical errors are mine. everything else below, is brought to you by gq and mr. kirn.
THE FORBIDDEN WORD
Walter Kirn
GQ april 2005
We were fighting. I was losing. She'd already called me a bastard and an asshole, and I'd already called her an evil witch. We'd lost track of what had set us off by then, but it still seemed important that someone come out on top, if only so we could go to bed that night in complete depair and mutual agony and set the stage for a morning of sobbing apologies followed by hours of tender, remorseful sex. Unfortuanetly, my girlfriend had stopped playing. She'd gone quiet and cold. Her car keys were in her hand. And I couldn't stop her. I was out of ammo.
Except for the C-word, that is - my verbal fragmentation bomb and possibly the last word in the English language that keeps on hurtin geven after it's spoken, echoing across the months and years untl it reemerges in a divorce proceeding or as part of a woman's defense for spousal homicide. It's not a word I like to use in arguments because, by and large, it can be used only once. Afterward, there's little more to quarrel about, because the relationship isn't worth preserving. Love is dead, at least on her side. Still, when I find myself cornered by a woman, my very masculinity in jeopardy, there is something more important than love: making her feel filty and subhuman. And there's only one way to accomplish that, I've learned.
"You stupid cunt," I said.
She put th keys down. Her eyes regained their ferocity and focus. "What did you just call me?"
I hesitated.
"Grow some balls," she said. "Say it."
I kept my peace. Once you've played your ace, you've played your ace. "It's over," she said. And yet she didn't leave. She stood there, awestruck. Our stalemate had begun. When affection goes, only stamina remains.
In a way, it's astonishing that the word still works. After all, that's all it is - a word. It doesn't bruise. It doesn't leave a mark. Yet women treat its deployment as tantamount to an act of nonphysical domestic violence. Use it and you have every right to fear a call tot he police within five minutes. "That's it," you can imagine your partner saying. "I'm packing my stuff and going to a shelter." Even worse, most shelters would probably take her1. Nothing inspires female solidarity like a vivid story of verbal combat retold in a caricatured male voice: "And that's when he put the TV set on mute, looked up at me from the couch, and said..." The horror. Slap on the handcuffs, call in the attorneys. never mind what she called you. Insult a man with the caustic slang and hey, that's life, pal, but call a woman a you-know-what and you've committed a heinous political thought crime.
It's a mystery why this should be, one of life's abiding semantic puzzles. Howe can one syllable posses such power, particularly in an age when most obscenities can be freely spoken on cable TV? Bitch lost most of its impact years ago when women adopted it as a feminist boast. "I'm such a bitch," they say, and grin, meaning that they're empowered and uncompromising. And they sling around whore and slut now like they're nothing - just so much ultramodern hip-hop trash talk. This ongoing business of claiming their sexuality has made women as potty-mouthed as any man. More so, in fact, because they're still intoxicated with the novelty of it all. The few times I've been forced by urgent need to use ladies' restrooms, the graffiti there has shocked me. 2
But you'll never hear someone call herself a cunt, let alone call another woman one. It's as if they have a silent agreement, a genderwide Geneva Convention. If one of them should be rude enough, or drunk enough, to come out with the C-word, a chilly silence falls. Faces go blank. Backs turn. You're on your own, girl. The only time it's acceptable for a woman to speak such vileness is wehn she's quoting a man and seeking sympathy for the wounds he has caused her.
Maybe part of the problem is the hard c. Face it: The word is an ugly sonic package, as compact as stone, with a dense ballistic heft that makes it perversely enjoyable to hurl at people. In them moment before you say it, a pressure builds at the back of your mouth, against your palate. Try it. Exciting, isn't it? Like cocking a pistol. Now pull the trigger. What a sweet release- a miniature orgasm of anger. And then there's the muffled , metaphysical thud when when the round hits home. Could it be that women's displeasure in hearing the word is related to men's pleasure in speaking it?
Then again, most four-letter words are ugly. The terms for the male reproductive organ ar just as hard and strong and pointed, but so is the organ itself, ideally, which makes those words appropriate. Most men just aren't offended by obscenities that reduce them to a sexual part 3; indeed, they may even find such words complimentary. Depending on the situation, I like being called a dick from time to time. It's a tribute to my vigor, my alpha status, my swollen, overbearing potency. At least I've made an impression, is how I feel. It makes me want to whip the big guy out, slap him down on the table, and say, "You're right, babe." In truth, if I've gone too long in a relationship without being called a dick, or something like it, I start to wonder what I'm doing wrong.
The female reproductive organ, by contrast, is supposed to be flowery, delicate, mysterious - a Georgia O'Keefe painting rendered in soft pink flesh. Men don't quite see it that way, but women do. They don't appreciate being made to feel like they're carrying a small pigsty between their legs. That's why even the filthiest male pillow talker knows to avoid the word. It spoils the mood. (Her mood is the only one that counts.) It crops up now and then in porn, but only in hard-core, plain brown-wrapper porn, not in the atmospheric hotel-room porn that's meant to be viewed while sipping mini-bar wine.
The essence of the word's offensiveness may relate to the fact that women have selves. They cherish this notion- the idea that they're special , complicated - in a way that men don't. But cunt makes them sound distinctly uncomplicated, like wall sockets with fur. The word obliterates individuality. It strips away any aura of uniqueness and pretense of intelligence. Men know this at some deep, instinctive level, which is why they tend to pair the term with adjective meant to futher dehumanize their targets. Idiotic, worthless, and lousy come to mind. What you'll never hear, on the other hand, are these words: "She's one smart cunt, that woman." Impossible.
Maybe men should be grateful for this word, still capable in a way that nothing else is of turning back the social clock to a time when women's self-esteem didn't impinge on ours. Back in the '70s, when I was young and feminism was a strange new force in my tiny Minnesota town, I remember my sense of puniness and dread when one by one of my buddies' mothers became aware of their talents and potential and started doing things like taking night classes in Journal Writing and Sketching the Male Nude. Houses that had been spick-and-span for years suddenly languished, with toys all over the living room and half-eaten TV dinners in the trash cans.4 Something big was happening. Big and bad. When I heard my playmates' parents fighting, the husbands' voices were high and pleading, like the voices of firemen talking down stranded kittens. The wives' voices were as throaty as V-8 engines, though, and they made me fear for my future as man. Would I be allowed to talk back when I grew up, or had the sexual order shifted permanently?
Later, in college, surrounded by the daughters of those growling, liberated mothers, it took me awhile to dish out the low blows that they felt entitled to aim at me. The utter shame of having been born male was being reinforced daily in my classes, which, no matter what their subject was - but especially if it was literature or art - seemed devoted to reminding me that my sex had long run roughshod over the word and would presently face some frightening reckoning. I could only conclude that I'd been born too late. My forefathers had held the upper hand for centuries, but just a few years ago they'd dropped their fists and exposed my generation of men to a thousand years of pent-up wrath that we were expected to absorb without complaint, in the name of historical justice or some such nonsense.
But then I learned I didn't have to take it. I learned that men still had a weapon in this war, if only they dared to draw it from its sheath. The kid who taught me this was a friend, a rural tough with a taste for heavy-metal bands. Late one evening, at an outdoor party, he heard me being berated by a girl for getting her beer with too much foam on it. Why hadn't I waited for the bubbles to subside? Why hadn't I tried another keg? I said I was sorry. I said it several times. Then the girl called me a jerk and walked away.
You shouldn't roll over like that, my buddy said.
I know. I know.
They don't respect it, he said.
I asked him what they did respect.
When you call them a selfish cunt, he replied. 5
That night my relationship with women changed. I'd taken a male self-defense course, in a way, and I didn't have to use my knowledge to feel its effects on my self-confidence. At any moment, I now realized, I had the option of blowing to smithereens any female I encountered. The problems arose when I exercised this power. Yes, the word gets respect. it also gets hatred. Sometimes, alas, the two are indistinguishable. And yet, all in all, I'm grateful for the C-bomb, and thankful that women have nothing with which to match it. When a man has already lost the argument and his girl is headed out the door - when the situation is truly beyond redemption and there's nothing to lose but everything - the gods of the English language (who must be male, despite what the feminist-lit professors say) have given us one last, lethal grenade to throw, even if we chose not to.
Which is wise.
1. actually, no. while such verbal attacks are most certainly a form of violence, and warning of what is to come from a misogynistic asshole, most shelters do not have space/funding to take in women until the batterer gets physical.
2. what fucking bathrooms has he been using?
3. because y'know, that would, like, Totally be the same thing.
4. because only the female-head-of-household is capable of doing any of these things.
5. respect is the last word i'd choose in this case.
x-posted.
but there is NO EXCUSE for this. NONE. NADA. ZIP.
i admit, i get rageful rather easily. but, considering i wasn't reading maxim, etc. this still took me by surprise. how the fuck anyone can have so much stupidty/hate, i don't know. there's SO much wrongness going on in this essay, it's practically a pardoy of itself. (which, i am sure, is what the editors will claim it was/is later.)
NO ONE, has the right to go around talking smack about my cunt. NO ONE. i don't care who you are or what publication you write for, YOU DON'T HAVE THE WRITE TO SPREAD HATE. don't fucking tell me what i can and can't reclaim. don't re-create a reality to justify your own stupidity. just don't. don't. don't. it's not funny. it's not cute. you absolutely do not get my respect.
if you seriously feel the need to puff your own malenss, go home and wank. leave me, and my cunt, out of it.
boldifications, footnotes, and typographical errors are mine. everything else below, is brought to you by gq and mr. kirn.
THE FORBIDDEN WORD
Walter Kirn
GQ april 2005
We were fighting. I was losing. She'd already called me a bastard and an asshole, and I'd already called her an evil witch. We'd lost track of what had set us off by then, but it still seemed important that someone come out on top, if only so we could go to bed that night in complete depair and mutual agony and set the stage for a morning of sobbing apologies followed by hours of tender, remorseful sex. Unfortuanetly, my girlfriend had stopped playing. She'd gone quiet and cold. Her car keys were in her hand. And I couldn't stop her. I was out of ammo.
Except for the C-word, that is - my verbal fragmentation bomb and possibly the last word in the English language that keeps on hurtin geven after it's spoken, echoing across the months and years untl it reemerges in a divorce proceeding or as part of a woman's defense for spousal homicide. It's not a word I like to use in arguments because, by and large, it can be used only once. Afterward, there's little more to quarrel about, because the relationship isn't worth preserving. Love is dead, at least on her side. Still, when I find myself cornered by a woman, my very masculinity in jeopardy, there is something more important than love: making her feel filty and subhuman. And there's only one way to accomplish that, I've learned.
"You stupid cunt," I said.
She put th keys down. Her eyes regained their ferocity and focus. "What did you just call me?"
I hesitated.
"Grow some balls," she said. "Say it."
I kept my peace. Once you've played your ace, you've played your ace. "It's over," she said. And yet she didn't leave. She stood there, awestruck. Our stalemate had begun. When affection goes, only stamina remains.
In a way, it's astonishing that the word still works. After all, that's all it is - a word. It doesn't bruise. It doesn't leave a mark. Yet women treat its deployment as tantamount to an act of nonphysical domestic violence. Use it and you have every right to fear a call tot he police within five minutes. "That's it," you can imagine your partner saying. "I'm packing my stuff and going to a shelter." Even worse, most shelters would probably take her1. Nothing inspires female solidarity like a vivid story of verbal combat retold in a caricatured male voice: "And that's when he put the TV set on mute, looked up at me from the couch, and said..." The horror. Slap on the handcuffs, call in the attorneys. never mind what she called you. Insult a man with the caustic slang and hey, that's life, pal, but call a woman a you-know-what and you've committed a heinous political thought crime.
It's a mystery why this should be, one of life's abiding semantic puzzles. Howe can one syllable posses such power, particularly in an age when most obscenities can be freely spoken on cable TV? Bitch lost most of its impact years ago when women adopted it as a feminist boast. "I'm such a bitch," they say, and grin, meaning that they're empowered and uncompromising. And they sling around whore and slut now like they're nothing - just so much ultramodern hip-hop trash talk. This ongoing business of claiming their sexuality has made women as potty-mouthed as any man. More so, in fact, because they're still intoxicated with the novelty of it all. The few times I've been forced by urgent need to use ladies' restrooms, the graffiti there has shocked me. 2
But you'll never hear someone call herself a cunt, let alone call another woman one. It's as if they have a silent agreement, a genderwide Geneva Convention. If one of them should be rude enough, or drunk enough, to come out with the C-word, a chilly silence falls. Faces go blank. Backs turn. You're on your own, girl. The only time it's acceptable for a woman to speak such vileness is wehn she's quoting a man and seeking sympathy for the wounds he has caused her.
Maybe part of the problem is the hard c. Face it: The word is an ugly sonic package, as compact as stone, with a dense ballistic heft that makes it perversely enjoyable to hurl at people. In them moment before you say it, a pressure builds at the back of your mouth, against your palate. Try it. Exciting, isn't it? Like cocking a pistol. Now pull the trigger. What a sweet release- a miniature orgasm of anger. And then there's the muffled , metaphysical thud when when the round hits home. Could it be that women's displeasure in hearing the word is related to men's pleasure in speaking it?
Then again, most four-letter words are ugly. The terms for the male reproductive organ ar just as hard and strong and pointed, but so is the organ itself, ideally, which makes those words appropriate. Most men just aren't offended by obscenities that reduce them to a sexual part 3; indeed, they may even find such words complimentary. Depending on the situation, I like being called a dick from time to time. It's a tribute to my vigor, my alpha status, my swollen, overbearing potency. At least I've made an impression, is how I feel. It makes me want to whip the big guy out, slap him down on the table, and say, "You're right, babe." In truth, if I've gone too long in a relationship without being called a dick, or something like it, I start to wonder what I'm doing wrong.
The female reproductive organ, by contrast, is supposed to be flowery, delicate, mysterious - a Georgia O'Keefe painting rendered in soft pink flesh. Men don't quite see it that way, but women do. They don't appreciate being made to feel like they're carrying a small pigsty between their legs. That's why even the filthiest male pillow talker knows to avoid the word. It spoils the mood. (Her mood is the only one that counts.) It crops up now and then in porn, but only in hard-core, plain brown-wrapper porn, not in the atmospheric hotel-room porn that's meant to be viewed while sipping mini-bar wine.
The essence of the word's offensiveness may relate to the fact that women have selves. They cherish this notion- the idea that they're special , complicated - in a way that men don't. But cunt makes them sound distinctly uncomplicated, like wall sockets with fur. The word obliterates individuality. It strips away any aura of uniqueness and pretense of intelligence. Men know this at some deep, instinctive level, which is why they tend to pair the term with adjective meant to futher dehumanize their targets. Idiotic, worthless, and lousy come to mind. What you'll never hear, on the other hand, are these words: "She's one smart cunt, that woman." Impossible.
Maybe men should be grateful for this word, still capable in a way that nothing else is of turning back the social clock to a time when women's self-esteem didn't impinge on ours. Back in the '70s, when I was young and feminism was a strange new force in my tiny Minnesota town, I remember my sense of puniness and dread when one by one of my buddies' mothers became aware of their talents and potential and started doing things like taking night classes in Journal Writing and Sketching the Male Nude. Houses that had been spick-and-span for years suddenly languished, with toys all over the living room and half-eaten TV dinners in the trash cans.4 Something big was happening. Big and bad. When I heard my playmates' parents fighting, the husbands' voices were high and pleading, like the voices of firemen talking down stranded kittens. The wives' voices were as throaty as V-8 engines, though, and they made me fear for my future as man. Would I be allowed to talk back when I grew up, or had the sexual order shifted permanently?
Later, in college, surrounded by the daughters of those growling, liberated mothers, it took me awhile to dish out the low blows that they felt entitled to aim at me. The utter shame of having been born male was being reinforced daily in my classes, which, no matter what their subject was - but especially if it was literature or art - seemed devoted to reminding me that my sex had long run roughshod over the word and would presently face some frightening reckoning. I could only conclude that I'd been born too late. My forefathers had held the upper hand for centuries, but just a few years ago they'd dropped their fists and exposed my generation of men to a thousand years of pent-up wrath that we were expected to absorb without complaint, in the name of historical justice or some such nonsense.
But then I learned I didn't have to take it. I learned that men still had a weapon in this war, if only they dared to draw it from its sheath. The kid who taught me this was a friend, a rural tough with a taste for heavy-metal bands. Late one evening, at an outdoor party, he heard me being berated by a girl for getting her beer with too much foam on it. Why hadn't I waited for the bubbles to subside? Why hadn't I tried another keg? I said I was sorry. I said it several times. Then the girl called me a jerk and walked away.
You shouldn't roll over like that, my buddy said.
I know. I know.
They don't respect it, he said.
I asked him what they did respect.
When you call them a selfish cunt, he replied. 5
That night my relationship with women changed. I'd taken a male self-defense course, in a way, and I didn't have to use my knowledge to feel its effects on my self-confidence. At any moment, I now realized, I had the option of blowing to smithereens any female I encountered. The problems arose when I exercised this power. Yes, the word gets respect. it also gets hatred. Sometimes, alas, the two are indistinguishable. And yet, all in all, I'm grateful for the C-bomb, and thankful that women have nothing with which to match it. When a man has already lost the argument and his girl is headed out the door - when the situation is truly beyond redemption and there's nothing to lose but everything - the gods of the English language (who must be male, despite what the feminist-lit professors say) have given us one last, lethal grenade to throw, even if we chose not to.
Which is wise.
1. actually, no. while such verbal attacks are most certainly a form of violence, and warning of what is to come from a misogynistic asshole, most shelters do not have space/funding to take in women until the batterer gets physical.
2. what fucking bathrooms has he been using?
3. because y'know, that would, like, Totally be the same thing.
4. because only the female-head-of-household is capable of doing any of these things.
5. respect is the last word i'd choose in this case.
x-posted.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-04-03 03:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-03 03:32 am (UTC)it took me forever to read the text. and then another forever to transcribe. and then an even more forever to "clean" it up.
i want to ask who thinks like that, but i don't think i actually want the answer.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-03 07:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-03 07:30 am (UTC)i want to find it hard to believe that ANYONE let theirs near this fuckwad.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-03 07:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-03 07:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-03 08:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-03 06:11 pm (UTC)why can;t i find more like him out there?
no subject
Date: 2005-04-03 06:45 pm (UTC)