Mom: “Inga, It’s very important not to get a bad reputation. Letting boys in your room and closing the door is one way to get a bad reputation.”

Dad: “When your girlfriends come over, you can close the door, but when boys come over, keep it open.”
 Little did my parents know, it was me and my girl friends who engaged in sexual activity. At age ten, I’d remotely entertained the notion of kissing boys, while at least three of my girlfriends and I had figured out how to make each other come …”

 
“Cunt” is, as Inga Muscio points out in her declaration of independence “arguably the most powerful negative word in the American English language.” She posits that women are taught to fear their own cunts as something mysterious and smelly. She advocates a philosophy of cunt love. This “womanifesto” encourages positive action toward realizing your potential as a woman. It covers topics like menses, birth control, orgasm and rape. Muscio struggles with issues like abortion and prostitution. I found the section on acrimony among women poignant. Why is it that women automatically distrust each other?

 Muscio also shares the influential women in her life from Pipi Longstocking to La Femme Nikita. She battles with a professor to include Remedios Varo in an art history course and hips us to the Guerrilla Girls who advocate poetic terror art to expose sexism and racism in the culture. After reading this book you will want to go to the art museum and count the nude portrayals of men and women. Why are there ten times more naked women? After reading this book, you’ll want to take another look at Pipi Longstocking and take a self-defense class. You’ll want to subscribe to W.I.G. magazine. After reading this book you may want to call up the radio station and challenge the dj to play an equal amount of songs by men and women. You might want to spend an entire year reading books only by women. After reading Cunt, you may want to read Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Bitch which covers many of the same topics with more analysis on women’s roles in the Old Testament. You may want to throw a menarche party to celebrate a girl’s first shedding of the blood. If you are a woman, you may want to go to the Michigan Womyn’s Festival and surround yourself with cunt love for a weekend. Imagine going for 72 hours without the male dominated culture sticking its penis art in your face?  If you’re a man, you might want to invest in a woman-owned corporation (if you can find one.)

 This book educates best when Muscio recounts her personal experience (the story of her three abortions, the story of her mother’s rape.) Be prepared for a struggle when you try convince the women in your life to stuff organic sea sponges up into their cunts at period time instead of man-made tampons, or to better get in touch with themselves by tasting and smelling their own cunt juices on a regular basis. Did you know that different textures of the fluids in your cunt can tell you when you’re ovulating, and when your about to shed your endometrium? The book finishes off with a fine recommendation of books, magazines, films, stores and websites for further exploration of the cunt in all of us.

Cunt / Inga Muscio / Seal Press / 277 pages / $14.95

This review previously appeared in The Gay & Lesbian Times

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