By David Futrelle
Sometimes people new to Men’s Rights activism — and who haven’t yet realized that they’ve joined a hate group rather than a real civil rights movement — ask why feminists don’t work together with MRAs to make the world a big happy place for everyone.
Perhaps because MRAs go around saying shit like this all the time?
I found this in a discussion in the Men’s Rights subreddit over that pressing problem of our age: Women having too much self-esteem.
NOTE: In case there are any stray MRAs reading this post and feeling sorry for that poor fellow in the picture I used above, don’t worry! The lady in question had a very good reason for throwing him down a well. And then dropping rocks on him.
The picture is a cropped version of Elisabetta Sirani’s 1659 painting Timoclea Killing Her Rapist. As Ariela Gittlen points out on Artsy.net, the painting is based on a story in Plutarch in which a captain in Alexander the Great’s army rapes Timoclea during the invasion of Thebes. “Following the assault,” Gittlen notes,
the captain asks where her money is hidden. Timoclea leads him to her garden well; as he peers into it, she pushes him in, dropping heavy rocks down the well until he dies.
I’m not generally a fan of capital punishment, but in this particular instance I have to say I don’t really have much of a problem with Timoclea’s approach.
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So, you’re in favour of poisoning the well?
I’ll just link to the Rejected Princesses page on Timoclea.
But seriously though, I highly doubt this idiot has had any exposure to feminism except crappy Hollywood movies written by out of touch old men and strawman memes.
What does “cunt” mean?
I turned to Merriam-Webster.com for help:
cunt noun
\ ˈkənt
\
Definition of cunt
1 obscene : the female genital organs also : sexual intercourse with a woman
2 usually disparaging and obscene : woman sense 1a
woman noun
wom·an | \ ˈwu̇-mən
, especially Southern ˈwō-
or ˈwə-
\
plural women\ ˈwi-mən
\
Definition of woman
1a : an adult female person
So this redditor is insulting women for being women.
It wasn’t always considered a rude word. During the middle ages, it was, at most, mildly vulgar. Doctors routinely used it! Famously, there were numerous streets around England called “Gropecunt Lane”, or variants thereof: streets where sex workers plied their trade.
It wasn’t always considered a rude word. During the middle ages, it was, at most, mildly vulgar. Doctors routinely used it
oddly enough I have always preferred the word “cunt” to say the word pussy. Of course when talking about genitals, not calling people names. I just don’t use it often because of how it is seen now.
I hate the quote thing so much sometimes y’all.
Just spell it “queynte”. That’ll get a smile from anyone who knows their Chaucer.
Oh noes the females might get it in their heads that they deserve better than what mra’s got.
Capitol punishment is something the State does. It is not killing in self defense, or even retribution, so you’re fine.
Oh my god, I couldn’t tell that was a well at first glance – I thought she was in the process of ripping him in half from the crotch up by just wrenching his legs apart
…all with that unfazed, almost bored expression on her face, too
I wouldn’t feel bad being a queynte to this bozo, to be quite honest.
I must be out of the loop. I don’t know what that is.
After the murder of the officer, Timoclea was brought before Alexandre the Great who pardonned her and placed her, her house and her family under his aegis for the rest of the sack of Thebes.
I thought that was the only part of me they were interested in?
About the Timoclea picture, my first thought was that she was doing a terrible job of playing doctor.
Meh. Whenever an online dude calls me a cunt — which is generally at the end of a debate where they realize they don’t have sufficient evidence to uphold their claims beyond “I Am a Man and You Are a Mere Woman, Ergo I Am by Default Correct” — I just post this handy little image.
I don’t mind being called a cunt in the least, in fact I tell them it’s a compliment!
well… yes. you have in fact stumbled on what they do for fun.
@Moggie
It’s the correct English term for the organ in question; the vulgarity only arose when use of Anglo-Saxon roots instead of Norman or Latin became entirely associated with the lower classes.
@Lainy
Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, which uses spelling that’s very different to modern forms.
@CarrieV
No it isn’t. They’re completely separate roots.
But feminism teaches women to be more than just a cunt. Which, by the reductive logic of MRAs, is being a cunt.
But at least he satisfied himself that women always feel bad, however they’re behaving.
OT but Nigel Farage had to hide on his bus because people with milkshakes were nearby
The guardian article
@Buttercup Q.
Or at least he tried, this random guy on the Internet, to make women always feel bad about what we’re doing. He did his best. An individual can do no more.
@Lainy
I don’t really know why, but I’ve always defined “cunt” as “vagina” and “pussy” as “vulva.”
Of course, as we know, these guys don’t know the difference anyway.
@ Lainy, Dalillama
Not just the spelling, the Middle English that Chaucer wrote in is hard to follow without prior study.
@Pagan Reader:
I’d like to see people turn up at his events carrying empty McDonald’s cups. Keep him guessing. Hard to see what the police could do about that.
Tbh it’s a bit vague. Being a cunt as a woman to a man could be anything that involves not completely acquiesing to his every whim, if the man in question hates women.
@ Moggie
A few custard pies in the mix could amuse…
OT: well, I just got back from voting in the EU election. I’m feeling a bit emotional, since it’s probably the last such election I’ll get to vote in. Fuck the leavers, fuck the politicians whose poor governing of the country led so many voters to think that this was a desirable outcome, and, most of all, fuck the self-serving, lying bastards like Farage and Johnson, who are happy to burn it all down if that furthers their own careers. May they drown in milkshake.
No need for non-rapists to get holed in a well actually.
@Dali
Interesting! Which part of tge anatomy is it referring to, specifically? I’ve heard vagina, vulva, and both and am unsure which you’re referencing.
@Kupo
Generally the vulva, but the old Anglo-Saxons weren’t what you’d call experts on reproductive anatomy.
Carrie V, great job. I have to say (as a person who’s dabbled in etymology) that ‘cunt’ sure sounds like it stems off the ‘ken-‘ branch of the root word ‘gno-‘, except maybe in the past tense, so that the idea that ‘cunt’ means ‘one who has acquired knowledge’ makes a lot of sense. Any further thoughts?
My favorite use of ‘ken-‘, though, is the way thieves lifted it and added it to their cant, where it meant ‘hideout for disreputable people’. Stupendous. (And now that I think about it, ‘cant’ sounds like another ‘ken-‘ word.)
Ooh, I think “azazelcrowley” will have to define what he means by “being a cunt”. Does he mean “she disagreed with me”? “She locked me out and threw all my clothes out of the window”? She didn’t make me any pie for supper”? “She told her friends that I couldn’t get it up last night”? “She burned the toast at breakfast time”? “She didn’t get her clothes off fast enough when I wanted sex”?
C’mon now, get specific. You know perfectly well that any and all of these complaints have been said by various men at some time or another. Which things do you mean? And then we can tell you whether or not she was fully justified in “being a cunt” to you.
So long as people are arguing over the origin of the word, the version I heard was: the furthest we can trace it back to is the reconstructed proto-indo-european “gwen”, meaning “woman”.
Lumping the vulva and vagina under one word, it seems? Kind of like “arse” lumps together the buttocks/anal cleft/anus?
(Or the modern popular use of the word “vagina”, as we remember from that one recent incident of extreme mansplaining)
Men have a tendency to confuse women responding to men being out of line by enforcing their boundaries without sugarcoating apology or coddling their fragile masculinity with being big meany-bo-beanies for no reason. Common mistake.
It’s not unusual for the words for body parts to be ambiguous in some languages; for example, the Irish words for “hand” (“lámh“) and “foot” (“cos“) can also refer to the whole arm or leg respectively rather than just the bits at the ends. If you want to refer specifically to the limb rather than the extremity, you have to use the word “géag” which means a limb or a branch.
(I believe there is a similar ambiguity in Koiné Greek which is one of the reasons why there are disputes about exactly where the nails were placed at Jesus’s crucifixion)
And, of course, most languages didn’t even have a native word for the clitoris until some Renaissance anatomist invented it… 🙄
I very lightly remember Chaucer from Senior English class. Really the only thing I remember about it is we read a store about a young woman that was raped by a knight and the queen told the knight he would be sentence to death unless he found out what women crave in a years time. Mainly I just remember it because it described it as him destoring her maiden head, and this guy Cody in my class was like “oh shit he cut her head off” and I had to explain to them what actually happened. It was a very small class cause I was in the one for kids with learning disabilities.
Chaucer also wrote a treatise on the astrolabe for “lyte Lowys my sone” (“little Lewis my son”, possibly his godson) which is believed to be one of the first (if not the first) piece of scientific/ technical writing in the English language. Which possibly means he also invented the FAQ 😉.
(Compare with Līlāvatī, the treatise on mathematics written by the Indian mathematician Bhāskara believed to have been written for his daughter. “Oh Līlāvatī, intelligent girl, if you understand addition and subtraction, tell me the sum of the amounts 2, 5, 32, 193, 18, 10, and 100, as well as [the remainder of] those when subtracted from 10000.”)
@Genjones
I love what Gloria Steinem, quoting Marlo Thomas, says about aggressive women (cunts?):
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gloria-steinem-is-a-bad-bitch_n_
Hmmm, going by their logic, clearly the best person is:
I’m still of the opinion that we need more Boudica cosplayers instead of Handmaid cosplayers at abortion protests.
@CarrieV @Dalillama @bekabot
Using Wiktionary, a fairly decent source for etymology.
It appears that “cunt” comes from Proto-Germanic *kunto, which either comes from PIE *gen or *gʷneh₂.
*gʷneh₂ is the root word for woman, found more obviously in “gynecology”. Descendants include “queen”, but oddly not “woman”.
*gen is the root for creating, found in words like “generate”. A descendant of this, interestingly, is “king”!
So that makes a cunt both a queen and a king, but not something to do with knowledge, that’s another root entirely (*ǵneh₃).