This week saw the legendary Folsom Street Fair take place, as it does every year, in San Francisco’s South of Market district. Founded in 1984, it is now the world’s largest leather and BDSM event. For those like me who live on the other side of the world and have spent the weekend in bed with flu, the kind folks at SFist.com have provided a series of photos (some mildly NSFW) for us all to peruse at our leisure.
Click here for the full gallery.
Something appears to have gone wrong with my blog. Images aren’t being displayed. As a result, I’ll post about something that would probably be easier for you to read at work without an accompanying photo.
Today I’m going to talk about the word “cunt”. It’s a marvellous word. It has power. It offends. We keep it hidden away and save it for special occasions, like a favourite dress or expensive bottle of wine. It’s the Sunday-best of swear words. Few use it frivolously.
Several years ago, someone wrote a letter to Diva Magazine to reprimand them for using the term “cunt” instead of “vagina”. The editor then pointed out that vagina means “sheath for a sword”. Understandably, reference to the female genitalia as a mere “sheath” for anything in a lesbian magazine would have been ridiculous. Cunt remained.
Other words for a lady’s private parts are embarrassingly docile. They make it sound like a fluffy animal, preschool child’s cartoon character or nasty injury. Yet none are as provocative as cunt. It seems taboo to use a word that doesn’t defuse or disarm this dangerous body part, rendering it either a harmless creature or unpleasant affliction. Is a woman’s cunt really so frightening?
As an insult, this word is the most brutal in the English language. There are no penile euphemisms that shock and wound like a well-aimed cunt. Unlike in the USA, it’s a unisex insult in Britain. To call a man a cunt will cut him more deeply than any other term of abuse. Why is this? Are female genitals so much more offensive than those of the male?
Last month, I posted an article about the power of the nude woman in art:
“There is power in the taboo of the naked female form. For centuries, our unclad bodies have been used as symbols to shock, to arouse and to protest, and often in art, a nude is more than just a nude.”
It seems that the word used for the very core of those bodies is similarly intoxicating.
*edit* – just found an interesting article on the etymology of “cunt” here.
It’s amazing what a fuss people can make about a simple fabric, and what a devastating effect prejudices against a perfectly common and harmless kink can have. Here’s part of a Graun article on John Sutcliffe of AtomAge, clothing label and magazine:
‘…Sutcliffe’s designs came out of personal obsession. When his weakness for leather was diagnosed as a symptom of mental illness, he went through a breakdown and a divorce, gave up his engineering job and moved out of the family home. But his motorcycle suit brought requests for similar outfits, and an unexpected career shift. Working out of a loft on Drury Lane in a building occupied by the shoe-makers Anello & Davide, Sutcliffe used his engineering knowhow to transform leather – notoriously hard to stitch – rubber and vinyl into “weatherproofs for lady pillion riders”. He designed a sewing machine for leather and approached Singer to manufacture it. “Singer were so horrified,” recalls his friend Robert Henley, “they called the police.” His experiments with rubber also brought a sticky encounter: Henley came into the studio one day to find Sutcliffe lying on the floor, gasping, almost killed by the toxic fumes of a rubber glue he’d invented.
Sutcliffe went on to make Marianne Faithfull’s all-in-one outfit for the 1968 film Girl On A Motorcycle and influenced Emma Peel’s leather catsuits for the cult TV series The Avengers. With the artist Allen Jones, he designed some extremely rude waitresses’ uniforms for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (they were never used), and his work was an inspiration for Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s punk-era boutique Sex. But AtomAge remains Sutcliffe’s greatest achievement. It made extreme fetish outfits look as threatening as a car boot sale in Cobham, normalising something previously seen as shameful.
It was Henley who suggested publishing the magazine, which ran from 1972 until 1980 and captured that particularly British ability to combine kinkiness with a suburban sensibility. “It wasn’t pornographic, but it stirred up a lot of fuss,” Henley says. “It was terribly popular, but very hard to find an outlet for. When we finally convinced a bookshop in Victoria to stock it, people would queue for hours to get a copy.”
Readers were encouraged to send in photographs of themselves in their favourite outfits, resulting in a woman in head-to-toe rubber before a mantelpiece with a photograph of the kids on it, a man hosing down a caravan in leather waders and a gas mask, or a rubber-clad man on a ladder, by a shed, apparently engaged in some sort of sadomasochistic DIY. AtomAge introduced the uninitiated to such diversions as wading (walking through a river at night encased in rubber) and total enclosure. E.E.D. of Middlesex claims in a reader’s letter that after sitting around the house for an hour or so in head-to-toe rubber, he feels “wonderfully relaxed and at peace with myself”…’
Full article here.
