“He’s such a cunt,” one person says to another.

“Oh, I know,” the other responds in an admiring tone of voice. “I wish I could be as amazing as him. He’s a real wanker, I tell you.”

Both sigh enviously, thinking of that wonderful man they know.

Okay, so that dialogue sounds a bit farfetched. But my hope is that one day we’ll start hearing conversations like this.

I teach literature and translation at the University of East Anglia. Both during class and outside it, I regularly hear my students – even female ones – use the words “pussy”, “twat”, and “cunt” in a derogatory manner, i.e. they say, “She’s such a twat” when they mean “She’s so mean/stupid.” But don’t worry: my students aren’t sexist in their offensiveness. Oh no, they are all for equal opportunities when it comes to disparagement. They use words referring to male genitals, such as “dick” and “cock”, for similar purposes, claiming that this author or that teacher is clearly “a real dick”, by which they mean that that person is unpleasant. Plus, in related slang, they happily refer to someone as a “tosser”, a “wanker”, or a “jerk-off”, which suggests that there’s something shameful and repulsive about masturbation, which is in fact a health part of sexuality.

But let me point out that it’s not just young people who use such language; I hear it from friends and colleagues, who range in age from their twenties through their sixties, and I’ve heard it in book groups, gender studies groups (seriously!), and even in the queer community. These places include people of all ages. It’s nice, insofar as anything about this is “nice”, to know this slang is not something we can simply blame on the youth of today.

Personally, I find such language offensive. I’m always quick to make that clear whenever I hear a “cock” or “cunt” used casually. It’s not that I’m the language police or that I’m eager to tell people how to speak. It’s simply that I fear that people aren’t always aware of what they’re implying when they employ words in this way and I want them to consider their word choices a bit more carefully.

Out of all the possible genital-related words, I’d say the one I hear most often by far is “twat”. By referring to female genitalia in such a way we’re implicitly saying that women’s bodies are unacceptable, weak, disgusting, and worthy of being disparaged and belittled. When we say someone is acting like a twat, we’re suggesting that there is something wrong with being a twat. By logical extension, that implies that there’s something wrong with having a twat, i.e. with being a woman.

Often, when I point this out to someone who’s abusing twats in this manner, the person rolls his or her eyes and moans, “But you know that’s not what I mean.” I shrug; how can I know what that person actually means? And how can that person assume that anyone who hears him/her speak knows what’s going on in his/her mind? That’s not how communication works. I think it’s better for us to try to be as clear as we can when we’re talking to other people, and this means not making assumptions or guesses or expecting others to do so.

Also, of course, we can’t act as though words have no relationship to their original meanings or etymologies. We can’t call someone a “twat” and then pretend that we weren’t referring to “twat”, the part of a woman’s body, but rather “twat”, some new word that means “obnoxious” or “impolite” or “annoying”, and that the former has no connection to the latter.

Language changes, obviously, but we can’t pretend that it has changed when it hasn’t, and we can’t pretend it doesn’t have meanings that it does actually possess. It’s rather sneakily disingenuous to casually announce “that’s not what I meant” when the association is quite clearly there. It’s a way of not taking responsibility.

What I’d like is for us to reclaim these terms and make them positive rather than abusive, the way we have done with “queer”. Maybe we can start using such words as compliments and we can thereby imply that cunts, twats, pussies, dicks, and cocks are body parts of which we are proud and with which we are pleased. If we profess confusion when someone uses these words negatively and if we stand up to those who denigrate our bodies, we might force them to rethink their understanding of language and, by extension, of genitals and gender. My hope is one day we’ll reach a point where when someone says, “Oh, he’s such a twat,” the response will be, “Sounds like he’s a great person, then, because twats are wonderful, beautiful things.”

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If you think BJ’s a twat and you’d therefore like to compliment her on this piece, please make your comments below, or contact her through www.awaywithwords.se