Probably NSFW -- A Fascinating History of the Word "C***"

[obamanut2012]

How a word meant to signify female pleasure was turned against women and into something evil, fearful, unspoken.

August 14, 2012 |

Late in 2011, a song from a virtually unknown 20-year-old rapper from Harlem knocked the Internet on its ass. Azealia Banks’s “212” was a wildly original debut single that found the rapper dribbling a steady stream of elastic wordplay and oh-no-she-didn’t raunch over a skronky beat from producer Lazy Jay. And then there was the song’s hook, a repeated provocation to a male rival for the affections of another woman: “I guess that c*** gettin’ eaten.”

“212” was voted Pitchfork’s no. 9 track of 2011, propelling Banks to the top spot on NME’s 2011 “Cool List” and earning her a coveted endorsement from Kanye West—all before she even landed a record deal. But some listeners just couldn’t get past that C-word. In a December 2011 cover story for self-titled magazine, the interviewer asked Banks a question that no one would have asked, say, Lil Wayne, who was three years younger than Banks when his debut album dropped: “Is it weird to play these songs for your mother?” When she responded in the negative, he pushed on: “It’s jarring hearing a young girl say ‘c***’ so often.” Banks brushed him off with pointed flippancy. “Sex is fucking sex,” she said. “We wouldn’t be sitting here if it wasn’t for sex.”

In a time when few formerly naughty words still pack a potent punch, “c***” holds a unique position—everyone from Germaine Greer (who has said that the C-word is “one of the few remaining words in the English language with a genuine power to shock”) to anonymous Urban Dictionary scribes can agree on that. As Liz Lemon explains in a classic episode of 30 Rock , the word demonstrates a frustrating lingual gender imbalance. “There’s nothing you can call a guy to come back. There is no male equivalent to this word.” (She then tries out “fungdark” on a male colleague. He doesn’t flinch.)

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http://www.alternet.org/fascinating-history-word-c***

Replace the *** in link with the proper letters.

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This is an extremely interesting and fascinating article. I "cleaned up" the language for DU, but the word is spelled out in the article at the link.

[yardwork]

1. Very interesting! Thank you for posting. K&R.

[obamanut2012]

2. I thought it was, too!

I was hoping people would be able to read it at home.

[yardwork]

3. It's a very empowering look at the word. And I like the fact that young women and women of color

are leading the effort to take back a word that apparently originally meant something rather empowering about women.

It's sad and not surprising that a word that encapsulated the idea of female erotic power would be made into a taboo "bad" word.

[Dash87]

4. Mainstream rap was / (is?) extremely stupid. There's no artistic merit to it.

I'm sure there's talented rap artists out there who respect themselves enough to write beautiful songs, but it's drowned out by the hacks that sing about guns, violence, and all that stereotypical garbage.

Lil' Wayne. Lil John, Eminem, DMX, Snoop Dog, and all those other guys are, and have always been hacks. Their songs take no talent to write or perform, and the mainstream rap audience eats that crap up. It's basically the McDonalds of song writing.

Basically, you know you're a hack when you throw swears in your song for no other reason than to make it edgy, along with stupid ass made up words, because the 12 year olds won't buy it otherwise...