A Curious History of Sex Read online

All that receive it.6

  Monticelso doesn’t admit it, but what is driving this rant is a fear of women, fear that they can wield power over men; they can ‘teach man wherein he is imperfect’. Here, a whore is not a sex worker, she is a woman who has authority over a man and must be shamed into silence at all costs.

  Historically, ‘whore’ has been used to attack those who have upset the status quo and asserted themselves, usually in an attempt to reassert sexual control and dominance over her. But unlike the word ‘prostitute’, whore is not tied to a profession but to a perceived moral state. Which is why many powerful women, with no connection to the sex trade, have been attacked as ‘whores’; Mary Wollstonecraft, Phulan Devi, even Margaret Thatcher were all labelled whores. The word is an attempt to shame, humiliate and ultimately subdue its target, and your average woman on the street is just as likely to be called a whore as a world leader, perhaps even more so.

  ‘Whore’ is a nasty insult today, but calling someone a whore in the early modern period was regarded as such a serious defamation of character that you could be taken to court for slander.* By far the most frequent insult cited in these cases where a woman has been slandered is ‘whore’ and myriad creative variants thereon: ‘stinking whore’, ‘ticket-buying whore’, ‘drunken piss-pot whore’, ‘lace petticoat whore’ and ‘dog and bitch whore’ have all been recorded.7

  In 1664, Anne Blagge claimed that Anne Knutsford had called her a ‘poxy-arsed whore’.8 Poor Isabel Yaxley complained of a neighbour alleging that she was a ‘whore’ who could be ‘fucked for a pennyworth of fish’ in 1667.9 In 1695, Susan Town of London accused Jane Adams of shouting to ‘come out you whore, and scratch your mangy arse as I do’.10 In 1699, Isabel Stone of York brought a suit against John Newbald for calling her ‘a whore, a common whore and a piss-arsed whore … a Bitch and a piss-arsed Bitch’.11 And in 1663, Robert Heyward was hauled before the Cheshire courts for calling Elizabeth Young a ‘salt bitch’ and a ‘sordid whore’. In court he claimed he could prove Elizabeth was a whore and she should just go home and ‘wash the stains out of thy coat’.12

  Examples of ‘unfeminine language’ from New Art of Mystery of Gossipping, 1770.

  In order to prove a case of slander, you would need a witness to the insult, to prove the accusation was untrue with a character witness, and to show how your reputation had been damaged by being called such names. The punishment for slander ranged from fines and being ordered to publicly apologise, through to excommunication (though this was rare). One example of punishment occurred in 1691, when William Halliwell was ordered to publicly apologise in church to Peter Leigh for defaming his character:

  I William Halliwell forgetting my duty to walk in Love and Charity towards my neighbour have uttered spoken and published several scandalous defamatory and reproachful words of and against Peter Leigh … I do hereby recant revoke and recall the said words as altogether false scandalous and untrue … I am unfeignedly sorry and I hereby confess and acknowledge that I have much wronged and injured him.13

  The accusation of ‘whore’ was particularly damaging as it directly affected a woman’s value on the marriage market. So when Thomas Ellerton called Judith Glendering a ‘whore’ who went from ‘barn to barn’ and from ‘tinkers to fiddlers’ in 1685, he was doing more than being abusive, he was preventing her finding a husband.14 In 1652, Cicely Pedley alleged she had been called a ‘whore’ with the intention ‘to prevent her marriage with a person of good quality’.15 It could even affect business. In 1687, a Justice of the Peace decided that calling an innkeeper’s wife a ‘whore’ was actionable because it had affected trade.16

  There are numerous slander cases brought by a husband whose wife had been called a whore. Calling someone’s wife a whore was a particularly devastating insult as it not only insulted the wife, but also impugned the husband as a cuckold and questioned his ability to sexually satisfy the missus. In 1685, for example, Abraham Beaver was accused of ordering Richard Winnell to ‘get thee home thou cuckold thou will find Thomas Fox in Bed with thy Wife’.17

  Although cases of men alleging slander were less frequent, they too were often sexual in nature. In 1680, Elizabeth Aborne of London was taken to court by Thomas Richardson for saying that his penis was ‘rotten with the pox’.18 Men were also attacked as ‘whoremongers’, ‘cuckolds’, ‘bastard-getters’, ‘rogues’, and in one case a ‘jealous pated fool and ass’.19 Men brought cases against people who had called them thieves, beggars or drunkards. In 1699, for example, Thomas Hewetson was brought before the courts in York for calling Thomas Daniel a ‘mumper’ (beggar): ‘he was a mumper and went about the Country from door to door mumping’.20

  By the end of the seventeenth century, there was a notable decline in the number of slander cases brought before the Church courts. Historians have long debated why this may have been the case. It may be that as cities swelled and the population grew, the courts became more concerned with crimes other than women calling each other ‘hedge whores’ and ‘poxy-arsed whores’. It may just be that there was a shift in culture and taking your slagging matches before a judge became less the done thing. By 1817, UK law ruled that ‘calling a married woman or a single one a whore is not actionable, because fornication and adultery are subjects of spiritual not temporal censures’.21

  Google Ngram Viewer: frequency of the word ‘whore’ recorded in English literature from 1500 to 2008.

  As the above chart shows, since the seventeenth century there has been a notable decline in the use of the word ‘whore’. Until the end of the seventeenth century, ‘whore’ was still a legal term and turns up in no less than 163 trials at the Old Bailey from 1679 until 1800. Historians such as Rictor Norton have examined how ‘prostitute’ or ‘common prostitute’ came to replace ‘whore’ as the legal terminology for a person who sells sexual services.22 I suspect the sharp decline in the usage of ‘whore’ at the end of the seventeenth century is linked to the linguistic shift from legal terminology to a pure insult.

  Today, ‘whore’ is largely confined to abusive and coarse speech. However, like the word ‘slut’, ‘whore’ is also in a state of reclamation and can be used to directly challenge the shame the word has carried for hundreds of years. ‘Whore’ may be a term of abuse, but it is one rooted in fear of female independence and sexual autonomy. Its progression from meaning a woman who desires, to an insult seeking to shame that desire, traces cultural attitudes around female sexuality. I do not use ‘whore’ to shame, I use it to recognise all those who rattled cultural sensibilities enough to be called a whore. I use it to deflate the shame within it. I use it to remember that our language shapes how we view each other, and it is constantly evolving. Historically, if you desire, you are a whore; if you have sex outside of marriage, you are a whore; if you transgress and threaten ‘the man’, you are a whore. We are all historical whores.

  * * *

  * Three excellent sources to read more about Tudor slander courts are Dinah Winch, ‘Sexual Slander and its Social Context in England c.1660–1700, with Special Reference to Cheshire and Sussex’ (unpublished PhD thesis, The Queen’s College, Oxford University, 1999); Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford Studies in Social History) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Rachael Jayne Thomas, ‘“With Intent to Injure and Diffame”: Sexual Slander, Gender and the Church Courts of London and York, 1680–1700’ (unpublished MA, University of York, 2015).

  1 Daniel Chandler, Semiotics: The Basics, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 25.

  2 Georg Büchner, ‘Danton’s Death’, in Danton’s Death; Leonce and Lena; Woyzeck, trans. and ed. by Victor Price (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 65.

  3 ‘Bernie Sanders Quickly Condemns Rally Speaker Who Called Hillary Clinton a “Corporate Democratic Whore”’, RealClearPolitics, 2016
[Accessed 9 August 2018].

  4 ‘Oxford English Dictionary’, Oed.Com, 2018 [Accessed 9 August 2018].

  5 Thomas De Chobham and F. Broomfield, Thomae De Chobham Summa Confessorum (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1968), pp. 346–7.

  6 John Webster, The White Devil, in John Webster, Three Plays, ed. by David Charles Gunby (London: Penguin Books, 1995), pp. 84–5.

  7 Rachael Jayne Thomas, ‘“With Intent to Injure and Diffame”: Sexual Slander, Gender and the Church Courts of London and York, 1680–1700’ (unpublished MA, University of York, 2015), pp. 134–5.

  8 ‘Anne Knutsford c. Anne Blagge’ (Chester, 1664), Cheshire Record Office, EDC5 1.

  9 Quoted in Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford Studies in Social History) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 193.

  10 ‘Susan Town c. Jane Adams’ (London, 1695), London Metropolitan Archives, DL/C/244.

  11 ‘Cause Papers’ (York, 1699), Borthwick Institute for Archives, University of York, CP.H.4562., p. 3.

  12 ‘Elizabeth Young c. Robert Heyward’ (Chester, 1664), Cheshire Record Office, CRO EDC5 1663/64.

  13 ‘Peter Leigh c. William Halliwell’ (Chester, 1663), Cheshire Record Office, CRO EDC5 1663/63.

  14 ‘Judith Glendering c. Thomas Ellerton’ (London, 1685), London Metropolitan Archives, DL/C/241.

  15 ‘Cicely Pedley c. Benedict and Elizabeth Brooks’ (Chester, 1652), Cheshire Record Office, PRO Ches. 29/442.

  16 Dinah Winch, ‘Sexual Slander and its Social Context in England c.1660–1700, with Special Reference to Cheshire and Sussex’ (unpublished PhD thesis, The Queen’s College, Oxford University, 1999), p. 52.

  17 ‘Martha Winnell c. Abraham Beaver’ (York, 1685), Borthwick Institute for Archives, University of York, CP.H.3641.

  18 ‘Thomas Richardson c. Elizabeth Aborne’ (London, 1690), London Metropolitan Archives, DL/C/243.

  19 Thomas, ‘With Intent to Injure and Diffame’, p. 142.

  20 ‘Thomas Hewetson c. Thomas Daniel’ (London, 1699), London Metropolitan Archives, CP.H.4534.

  21 William Selwyn, An Abridgment of the Law of Nisi Prius (London: Clarke, 1817), p. 1004.

  22 ‘The word “whore” occurs in a total of 163 trials at the Old Bailey up to 1800: From the first occurrence in 1679 through 1739, 66 trials (just over 40 per cent); from 1730 through 1769, 61 (just over 37 per cent); from 1770 through 1799, 36 (22 per cent)’. (‘History of the Term “Prostitute”’, Essays by Rictor Norton, 2018 [Accessed 10 August 2018].)

  ‘A Nasty Name

  for a Nasty Thing’

  A History of Cunt

  I love the word cunt. I love everything about it. Not just the signified vulva, vagina and pudendum (which are all kinds of cunty goodness and will be returned to shortly), but the actual oral and visual signalled sign of cunt. I love its simple monosyllabic form. I adore that the first three letters (c u n) are basically all the same chalice shape rolling though the word until they are stopped in their ramble by the plosive T at the end. I love the forceful grunt of the C and the T sandwiching the softer UN sounds, enabling one to spit the word out like a bullet, or extend the un and roll it around your mouth for dramatic effect: cuuuuuuuuuuuunt!

  Gustave Courbet, L’Origine du Monde, 1866.

  I love it because it’s deliciously dirty, endlessly funny and, like an auditory exclamation mark, is capable of stopping a conversation in its tracks. Walter Kirn called cunt ‘the A-bomb of the English language’, and he’s absolutely right.1 I love its versatility. In America, it is spectacularly offensive, while in Glasgow it can be a term of endearment; ‘I love ya, ya wee cunt’ is an expression heard throughout Glaswegian nurseries. That’s not true, but Scottish folk do possess a dazzling linguistic dexterity with cunt. Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel Trainspotting contains 731 cunts (though only nineteen made it into the film).

  But more than anything else, I love the sheer power of the word. I am fascinated by cunt’s hallowed status as, to quote Christina Caldwell, ‘the nastiest of the nasty words’.2 There are other contenders for the ‘most offensive’ word in the English language; racial slurs are obvious heavyweights. The N-word is a deeply offensive word because of its historical context. It is not just a descriptive word, it is a word that was used to dehumanise black people and justify some of the worst atrocities in human history. It enabled the enslavement and brutalisation of millions of people by linguistically denying black people equality with white people. We can understand why racial slurs are hideously offensive, but cunt? Does it not strike anyone else as odd that one of the most offensive words in English is a word for vulva? Or that this word could even be considered in the same league of offence as racist terms spawned from the darkest and most rank of human atrocities? As far as I am aware, cunt has not enabled racial genocide, so we have to ask: how did cunt get to be so offensive? What did cunt do wrong?

  Let’s turn to the etymology first. Cunt is old. It’s so old that its exact origins are lost in the folds of time and etymologists continue to debate where in the cunt cunt comes from. It’s several thousand years old at least, and can be traced to the old Norse kunta and Proto-Germanic kunt, but before that cunt proves quite elusive. There are medieval cunty cognates in most Germanic languages; kutte, kotze and kott all appear in German. The Swedish have kunta; the Dutch have conte, kut and kont, and the English once had cot (which I quite like and think is due a revival).* Here’s where the debate comes in: no one is quite sure what cunt actually means. Some etymologists have argued cunt has a root in the Proto-Indo-European sound ‘gen/gon’, which means to ‘create, become’. You can see ‘gen’ in the modern words gonads, genital, genetics and gene. Others have theorised cunt descends from the root gune, which means ‘woman’ and crops up in ‘gynaecology’.3 The root sound that most fascinates etymologists is ‘cu’. ‘Cu’ is associate with the female, and forms the basis of ‘cow’ and ‘queen’.4 ‘Cu’ is linked to the Latin cunnus (‘vulva’), which sounds tantalisingly like cunt (though some etymologists claim it is unrelated), and has spawned the French con, the Spanish coño, the Portuguese cona, and the Persian kun (کون).5 My favourite cunt theory is that the ‘cu’ also means to have knowledge. Cunt and ‘cunning’ are likely to have descended from the same root – ‘cunning’ originally meant wisdom or knowledge, rather than sneakiness, while ‘can’ and ‘ken’ became prefixes to ‘cognition’ and other derivatives.6 In Scotland today, if you ‘ken’ something, it means you understand it. In the Middle Ages ‘quaint’ meant both knowledge and cunt (but more of that later). The debate will rage on, but the bottom line is that cunt is something of a mystery.

  Here is what we do know: cunt is the oldest word for either the vulva or the vagina in the English language (possibly the oldest in Europe). Its only rival for oldest term for ‘the boy in the boat’ (1930) would be yoni (meaning vulva, source or womb). The English language borrowed yoni from ancient Sanskrit around 1800 and today it has been appropriated by various neo-spiritual groups who hope that by calling their ‘duff’ (1880) a yoni they can avoid the horror of cunt and tap into some ancient veneration of the ‘flapdoodle’ (1653). Of course, the irony is cunt and yoni may even have sprung from the same Proto-Indo-European root. Furthermore, cunt is far more feminist than vagina or vulva could ever dream to be.

  Vagina turns up in seventeenth-century medical texts and comes from the Latin vagina, which means a sheath or a scabbard. A vagina is something a sword goes into; that’s its entire etymological function – to be the holder of a sword (penis). It relies on the penis for its meaning and function. We may as well still be calling the poor thing ‘cock alley’ (1785) or the ‘pudding bag’ (1653). There are many cunning linguists who rightly get their proverbials in a twist when you confuse vagina with vulva: to be clear, the vagina is the muscular canal that connects the uterus to the vulva, and the vulva
is the external equipment (comprising the mons pubis, labia majora, labia minora, clitoris, vestibule of the vagina, bulb of the vestibule, and the Bartholin’s glands). Vulva dates to the late fourteenth century and comes from the Latin vulva, meaning ‘womb’ – some have suggested it comes from volvere, or to wrap. In his 1538 Latin dictionary, Thomas Elyot defined a vulva as ‘the womb or mother of any female animal, also a meat used of the Romans made of the belly of a sow, either that hath farrowed or is with farrow’.7 So, yet again, the meaning of vulva is dependent on being the container for a penis – or a questionable cut of a pregnant Roman pig.

  Cunt, however, predates both these terms and derives from a Proto-Indo-European root word meaning woman, knowledge, creator or queen, which is far more empowering than a word that means ‘I hold cock’. Plus, cunt is the whole damn shebang, inside and out. There’s no need to split pubic hairs when it comes to cunt. Words like vulva and vagina are linguistic efforts to offer sanitised, medicalised alternatives to cunt. And if that wasn’t enough to sway you over to team cunt, in 1500 Wynkyn de Worde defined vulva as ‘in English, a cunt’.8 Cunt is not slang; cunt is the original. So, cunt is the godmother of all words for ‘the monosyllable’ (1780) – but then the question arises: has cunt always been such an offensive word as it is today?

  The simple answer is no. To the medieval mind, cunt was simply a descriptive word, a little bawdy perhaps as cunts tend to be, but certainly not offensive. The fact that cunt would make it into de Worde’s dictionary and medical texts shows how everyday the word was. John Hall’s sixteenth-century translation of Lanfranc of Milan’s medical text Chirurgia Parua Lanfranci is not cunt shy and describes ‘in wymmen neck of the bladder is schort, is made fast to the cunte’.9 The earliest cunt citation in the Oxford English Dictionary dates to 1230, and is a London street in the red-light district of Southwark – the beautifully named ‘Gropecuntelane’.10 It did exactly what it said on the tin: it was a lane for groping cunts. There were Gropecuntelanes (or variations of Grapcunt, Groppecuntelane, Gropcunt Lane) found throughout the cities of medieval Britain. Keith Briggs locates Gropecuntlanes in Oxford, York, Bristol, Northampton, Wells, Great Yarmouth, Norwich, Windsor, Stebbing, Reading, Shareshill, Grimsby, Newcastle and Banbury. Sadly, all of these streets have now been renamed, usually as ‘Grape Lane’ or ‘Grove Lane’.11