You should smile more…

…you’re so much prettier when you smile.

The public response to this blog is something that I have thought about often during its creation, and throughout its evolution I was prepared for people to read it and think:

“What the hell kind of burn-your-bra, hear-me-roar, I’m-an-independent-woman-who-don’t-need-no-man shit is this?”

But the fact of the matter is, shockingly enough this blog is not rooted in extreme feminism. Its beginnings are so much more meager than that – to put it simply, a man called me a name. Men called women that I respect and love and admire this name. What’s that name, you ask?

“Cunt.”

And the men who called us this name continued on with their daily lives unaffected, blithely unaware that there is now a permanent black mark on the women they’ve just verbally bludgeoned. And in the time it took for these women and I to move on with our lives a little more bruised and a lot more pissed off, this blog post was born.

This is an effort at healing. To explore what the word “cunt” means to me and how it has affected my self-worth. To explore the hundreds of thousands of ways that girls and women are victimized today. And I am not talking about the overt ways like sexual assault, though those are incredibly serious problems we face whether cis-white-hetero-male-politicians (or any man for that matter) want to acknowledge it. I’m talking about the passive aggressive, covert ways that we are minimized and treated as “less-than.” The subtle ways we are dismissed that can be devastating to a female. Instead of being pulled into a dark alley and taken advantage of in a violent and abrupt way, the more subtle sexism we face is a slow torture over the course of our lifetime. And the word “cunt” is but one part of it.

We live in a world full of hierarchies, but one of the most ancient is that women come secondary to men. Socially. Sexually. Financially. Every bit of financial and legal paperwork, no matter what it’s about, still reflects my husband’s name first and mine second despite my exclusive handling of all such matters in our home. Our society was built around the working man and his homemaker wife. The breadwinner and the child-rearer. The suit-and-tie versus the dress-and-apron. And no matter how much progress we have made since the 1940’s, these mentalities are still so clear in how girls are taught to behave, and the treatment they’re forced to accept when they grow up to be women.

The relatively new female tendency to resist sexism has created a new environment for us. One that is inherently more violent. During the time when “The Feminine Mystique” was published, women seemed to simply accept their place in the home while their husband went to work. The nuclear family dominated, and she understood her role at the helm despite it being generally more labor intensive and even less visible. But today, times have changed. Women are less likely to default to a stay-at-home wife and mother role, and are far more likely to join the workforce or the military and exert dominance in ways women historically haven’t. Women are also far less likely to put up with sexual harassment and assault, and fighting back has led to a climate of “rape culture.”

When a man hears the word “no” he immediately goes on the attack:

“She’s a bitch…”

“What a cunt…”

“She must be a lesbo…”

When a man hears the word “no” and then takes what he wants anyway, he victim blames:

“She was wearing a short skirt…she was asking for it…”

“She was drunk…she shouldn’t have taken those shots…”

“She said no, but I know she really wanted it…”

Even as I sit here writing this, I am still vaguely aware in the back of my mind that some readers will roll their eyes and dismiss this as hormonal hysteria, an exaggeration of the female experience, even with some of those readers being women themselves.

Men have been conditioned over centuries to believe that their desires trump those of women, and anything that challenges their desires is a threat to their masculinity. Boys raised without boundaries are being taught that their personal space matters more than another’s. Boys who are not taught how to handle rejection are learning how to be selfish, because their needs are the only ones that matter. And boys who are raised to be entitled to anything they want end up being Supreme Court Justices, apparently (but SERIOUSLY with that fucking calendar, though).

There’s a reason that little girls are taught that boys are the enemy, men are dangerous, and it is up to them to ensure those boys and men don’t prey on them. Rather than teaching young boys to be responsible for their actions, we teach little girls not to provoke them. Girls are raised to hold their keys facing outward in their hand if they walk alone in public, or carry pepper spray in their handbag, or check the backseat before getting into their car, or cross the street if there’s a man approaching from the other side, or to never behave too friendly with a man because she may “send the wrong message.” We continue to covertly tell girls that they are responsible for their own safety DESPITE the men around them, when we should be telling them that nothing they do makes them deserving of assault or abuse, and assault or abuse should be blamed only on the assailant or the abuser.

To call a woman a cunt is to demean her. It lessens her worth in a way that goes so far beyond that moment. When “cunt” is used to insult her it is telling her that her “cunt” is so worthless, it can be used as the most shocking insult. It is telling her that her body is a weapon that can be used against her. It is telling her that men have ownership of it, and they can do with it what they please.

So let’s start changing the message. Take the power away from the man who thinks he owns the word, and teach girls that it can only hurt them if they allow it.

And if any man tells you that you’re a cunt, just tell him to fucking smile. He’s so much prettier when he smiles.