Cunt (25 page)
Authors: Betty Dodson Inga Muscio
It’s been almost a decade since I first set out to write this book, and I am honored
and thankful that a second edition is in order.
Fucken rad.
Writing a book called
Cunt
is a very odd experience.
Just today I was laughing about how I always get emails with subject headings like
“My Big Cunt” and “Northern Whores.” I make wagers with myself about whether or not
they’re spam porn.
Like the two above, they’re often not.
While working on this book, my world was two things: writing and surviving. It took
three years to write
Cunt.
I estimate I spent a year and a half actually working on the book. The other year
and a half was devoted to survival—in this case, finding and getting fired from jobs
every three or four months.
After
Cunt
came out, I was totally ecstatic, depressed and confused. What is one supposed to
do
after their first book is published?
Thankfully, right around this time, I interviewed Dorothy Allison for
Bust
magazine. I asked her what she did after Bastard
Out of Carolina
hit the streets. She told me that her press had socked away three thousand dollars
for book promotion, and planned to spend the whole wad on an ad in some fancy newspaper.
Dorothy told them, essentially,
“My ass
are you gonna spend three grand on one ad,” and used the money to go on a national
tour.
“Honey,” Dorothy said, “you need to get out there and promote that book.”
So I, Miss Genetically Logistically Impaired, planned a national tour. Besides challenges
engendered by thinking, say, Chicago is “on the east coast,” I also had not one red
cent.
But I am a Taurus, and when you are a Taurus, you just forge ahead and do things anyway.
Continuing to get fired from jobs, with all my stuff in storage and living with friends,
I put together a tour.
The money eventually, miraculously, showed up.
Yes, a month before the first scheduled reading, my friend Cedric Ross handed me a
theretofore hypothetical—even mythical—check. I cried a bucket when he gave me that
piece of paper. This act of kindness will awe me for the rest of my days.
Cedric, thank you.
In one of the most striking ironies of my life, by the time I left for tour in the
fall of 1999, my self-esteem was lower than it had been since pre-adolescence, and
I found myself in rooms full of people who thought I had done something wonderful.
This was bewildering, to say the least.
I had hoped that people would like my book, but I had no idea what it
would mean.
I had no experience going to strange cities and sitting in (locally owned, independent)
bookstores surrounded by people who knew intimate details of my life and so shared
with me intimate details of theirs. I had no experience signing books. Most of all,
I had no experience taking responsibility for putting something in the world that
wasn’t there before.
When my sister had a baby last year, her humility, anguish and joy resonated deep
in my heart.
A book is not a baby, but also, it is.
I have learned many things from the experience of writing a book called
Cunt
.
There is a part of myself that positively itches to insert new paragraphs, edit whole
sections and otherwise “update” the original text of this book.
One of the things I have learned, however, is that Cunt is a spirit that came through
me. Though it may sound strange for the author of a book to say this—I believe I have
no right to tamper with it.
I love this book and I don’t want to change it, but I have changed and things have
changed.
So here are some changes.
When the general public asks me what
Cunt
is about, I used to say, “It’s a women’s studies book,” and change the subject. By
the “general public” I mean those who unquestioningly exist in a culture of consumerism,
the teevee and denial. Most folks of this stripe aren’t attracted to the ideas in
my book, so I don’t see much point in engaging about it.
Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his
salary depends on his not understanding it.”
(Forgive him the male-centered language; Sinclair never saw the likes of Katherine
Harris, Gale Norton and Condoleezza Rice in action.)
I study occupational vocabularies so I can convincingly fabricate an identity when
I am in social situations (like weddings) where the fucken annoying question, “And
what do
you
do?” is likely to come up.
Lately, I’ve been an underwater welder and a cake designer.
Don’t get me wrong.
I’m not a reticent person. It’s just that the Corporate work ethic has completely
infiltrated U.S. culture and created a pathologically unhealthy atmosphere for self-actualization
and open-mindedness. I’ll talk a blue streak with self-actualized/ open-minded folks.
I can spot a self-actualized person from a mile away, and have gotten into breathtakingly
beautiful cunt-versations with open-minded cowboys and marines.
Once I was in Flagstaff and my buddy Dawn Kish asked some friends of hers if they
had read a book called
Cunt.
One of them, a man, kinda chuckled and said, “No. What’s it about?”
Without missing a beat or even looking askance at me, she said, “Freedom.”
I was delighted. Dawn inadvertently provided me with something to say to members of
the general public who manage to find out I wrote a book called
Cunt.
So, freedom.
The all-purpose, common-denominator, one-word synopsis of
Cunt
that I like best.
Cunt
is a product of my freedom and my need to be in a free world with free people.
Cunt
spoke of freedom to a young woman I met in Virginia who’d recently been raped and
found out she was pregnant. She happened to be reading
Cunt
when she got the test results back, and subsequently induced a miscarriage. Affecting
her destiny in such a powerful way helped her to survive and thrive after being sexually
assaulted.
It spoke of freedom to the two women who opened Ruby’s Pearl, a woman-positive sex
store in Iowa City. Not long after reading
Cunt,
Lauren Crassley, Kymbyrly Koester and her baby Vivian took stock of their economic
realities and their community. Ruby’s Pearl is the result of bringing these factors
together.
Cunt
spoke of freedom to the wealthy patriarch who came to a reading in Texas and asked
me to sign copies for his wife, his daughters and all of his grandchildren.
It speaks of freedom to bookstore employees all over the country who take great joy
in asking if there are any
Cunts
in stock over the in-house PA system.
I lived in a small town for the first nineteen years of my life, and I was not free
there. It was no secret to me. Towns like Santa Maria are tried and true petri dishes
for cultivating incredibly oppressed adolescents.
When I was growing up, “feminism” and “vegetarianism” shared similar, extremely peripheral
roles. I could probably have given you a definition for both terms, but it never occurred
to me that “feminism” and “vegetarianism” were
actual realities
that happened in the lives of
actual people.
I had absolutely no experience with either term until I was almost twenty years old,
when people started calling me a “feminist” and I found out how grocery store chickens
die.
As a teenager, I had one, and I mean ONE resource informing me that there existed
sound-assed reasons for feeling imprisoned in my community—an album called “Penis
Envy” by the U.K. band, Crass.
It was, evidently, enough to kick-start a life of political resistance which shows
no signs of petering out, but really, “Penis Envy” was all I had. The end. Nothing
else.
Crass is a social movement/band of vegan anarchist punks who created their own record
label, a community center/school and other such amenities in the early era of the
punk movement. “Penis Envy” sent me scurrying to the dictionary, puzzling together
phrases like “rituals of repression.” I listened to that album every day, over and
over.
Loudly.
In my room with the door closed, but thudding.
How does one go from being a pissed-off little punk rocker holed up in her bedroom
to being a pissed-off writer who gets to experience fucken rad things like freedom?
It’s a long process. I live in flux. Nothing stays the same here.
By the time I sat down to write
Cunt,
I was at a point where I’d read a lot of books, interviewed a lot of people, written
poems, songs, articles and stories, and,
crucially,
had almost ten years experiencing life in communities where women were, for example,
on stages talking/singing/rapping serious-assed shit and starting night patrols to
see people home safely. I was sick of being pigeonholed as a “feminist” just because
I asserted myself. I was also angry about the prevalence of and ambivalence towards
sexual assault (among many other things). I wanted to write a book that could, feasibly,
speak of freedom to all girls and women.
And—in my wildest dreams—to boys and men as well.
What I did not consider—and this is totally a result of my socialization—is that the
world is made up of more than women and men, boys and girls. In writing Cunt, I completely
overlooked the realities of gender-variant people.
This was brought to my attention a year after
Cunt
came out.
At the 1999 Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, issues of transgender inclusion exploded
within the queer community. As the story goes, some trannyladies attended the festival
that year, thus defying the festival’s “Womyn Born Womyn” policy. While one of the
“trans-gressors” was taking a shower, other festival attendees saw her dick and people
freaked out and started running around screaming “There are PENISES on The Land!!!”
(I am not making this up.)
A few months after this brouhaha, I started being questioned about what my “position”
on trans-inclusion was. In particular, some readers had problems with the sentence,
“All women have cunts,” which appeared in the introduction to the first edition and
led many trans-folks to feel expressly (and rightfully) excluded from
Cunt.
The events in Michigan set off a firestorm, and I was pressured to defend my book
in ways I’d never anticipated. I was confused—kicking myself for inadvertently alienating
an entire sector of humanity, and at the same time, being patient because learning
never ends.
Learning is endless.
A woman named Zabrina Aleguire from the wonderful land of North Carolina wrote me
a long, incredibly intelligent email about gender and trans-inclusion.
Here is an excerpt:
Dear Inga,
Tearing through your book “Cunt” was incredible for me—an experience I’ve wanted to
share with many other gals.... I’d like to thand your for helping me get back in touch
with my body, my passion my silliness and my fighting feminism. Your book helped inspire
me and some other cunt-loving women to resurrect women’s health and art collectives,
in the tradition of groups like Magical Pussy from Chapel Hill.
In addition to letting you know how much your words have inspired, ignited and entertained
me and my friends, I want to share some thoughts about an omission from Cunt. What
I’m talking about is transgender identity and gender nonconformity. In the intro to
the book I was stopped short by the words “womankind is varied and vast. But we all
have cunts.”
Da we? I thought. Aren’t there women without cunts? Or, what about the tranny boys
in my life who have cunts but don’t consider themeselves women—despite years of assigned
female gender? I wanted their inclusion in this declaration of independence, this
feminist manifesto. And yet, “the anatomical jewel which unites us all” and “the only
common denominator. . . that all women irrefutably share” didn’t seem to imply that
room for inclusion . . .
I’ll tell you about my experience being a bridesmaid in my friend’s huge country-club,
limousine-princess, “you don’t want to know, how much I paid for this gown” wedding.
It was the first wedding I’d been to sience coming out the year before and subsisting
on a really small salary doing queer activist work. By the time we reached the reception,
I was feeling so strange amongst the wealth and heterosexism that I was almost physically
ill. But I burst into a smile when I saw our waitress Joy. Moticeably a male-to-female
trans-woman, Joy hand short hair, a bunch of earrings long press-on nails and long,
pleated black skirt. She was our headwaiter for the wedding party table, and I felt
relieved and a little less isolated konw I wasn’t the only queer in the ballroom.
Then other guests noticed her. Little cousins and the groomsmen began whispering,
pointing and asking, “Is it a boy? Is it a girl?” Then she became a snicker, a joke,
a snide remark. Same were “weirded out” Some were “appalled.” Some were “disgusted.”
Toward the end of the evening the intoxicated matran of honor, Cynthia, exploded,
“I don’t know what the hell he’s doing! I’m gonna call him George. Why does he call
himself Joy? It must give him joy to wear a skirt” The spat her words. “He’s sick!
. . . That man/ woman whatever.” I stood by stunned and pissed off by such a venomous
diatribe against Joy, who was quite lovely–and a helluva good waiter at that. Looking
back I wish I had asked Cynthia what made her so angry. Instead, I have just been
wondering the question on my own since . . .
My guess is that Cynthia was feeling it that weekend—the pressure of conformity. nothing
about herself must have felt good enough—not her house, her car, her job, her, husband,
her family, her appearance. Damn, I was feeling it too—inadequacy, comparison, even
shame. And there was Joy, intentionally, blatantly not conforming in an environnement
where Cynthia required it of herself and doubted her own worth among the wealth, beauty
and (perceived) acceptance of those around her This experience illustrated to me how
we stick to gender conformity as strongly as, if not stronger than, any other norms.
We get hell when we——as women or men or trans or androgynous people—diverge from those
norms. It’s in these moments that I see how tightly feminism, queer and trans liberation
are connected.
Our culture’s stringent male/female gender codes are inextricably linked to our oppression
as women, our materialistic capitalist cultures, and the rigidity and denial of self-expression
that is characteristic of white people (particularly those holding an to significant
power). We are culturally accepted and even celebrated if we staywithin established
power differentiation. That’s how Cynthia gets hers—being a seasoned hetera beauty.
That makes her “better” than people like Joy. How dare Joy challenge the system that
Cynthia knows deep down has gotten her at least somewhere, with a husband, a sorority
membership for life and a home of her own away from that crowded middle-class house
of her childhood in the Midwest
In my mind it makes sense for feminists and progressive transgender folks to be united—and
in many of our communities this is the case. But there is still such serious division,
as we see from the Michigan Wamyn’s Festival I think it’s work like yours that can
help bridge this division. Clearly there needs to be more challenge put to feminist
communities who don’t acknowledge trans-idendity as. authentic, as well as to transgender
communities who don’t engage with gender privilege and oppression. From what I have
observed, your ability to inspire cuntlove in so many people makes me think that you
can really help this effort. I look forward to hearing back from you.
In solidarity,
Zabrina Aleguire