As Toni Morrison says, this is about language and power.  There is so much to explore here, but I'll kick off with ideas about race and gender.

Now that 'fuck' has become an acceptable response to stubbing your toe or even to a pleasant surprise, only the 'C' word shares with the "N" word such a strong taboo that they are rarely spoken out loud.  Why these two words?  Both, when used to insult human beings, can be the most powerful expressions of hatred and anger.  Both are associated with guilt and shame.    The 'N' word carries the ancestral shame and humiliation of subjection and slavery for Blacks and the ancestral guilt of slavery and colonial violence for Whites.  Click here to read notes and extracts from  Jabai Asim's excellent 2007 book,  The ‘N’ word: who can say it, who shouldn’t, and why.  These extracts focus on a discussion of attempts by gangsta rappers and poets to reclaim the word as a badge of pride.  Asim argues that, while gays can reclaim 'queer' for themselves, the 'N' word is too embedded in violent history and negative stereotypes to be accorded any such dignity.

And the 'C' word?  Why does this word for female genitals evoke such guilt and shame, hatred and rage?

       

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 I remember a midwife telling me that if I let my lips (my mouth) go soft and floppy, the lips of my vagina and birth canal would respond with a matching softness.   In The sex which is not one, Luce Irigary bases a whole theory of female sexuality, language and gender politics on the duality of lips and the multiplicity of erogenous zones in the female body.   In the dominant phallic culture with the proud cock - defined, measured, counted - strutting its singular form, "women are multiple". And "being multiple we become the 'not is' of 'what is'".   Irigary was writing this in the early 1990s, and we may now challenge her binary view of gender difference.  But what she says about women's subjection to male narcissism resonates for me as I try to understand my own experience.