LET'S HEAR IT FOR THE F-WORD

Advice to parents: Don't let your children read
this--unless you are prepared to answer their
questions why adults treat sex as dirty.

Do you think this country went through a sexual revolution back in the 60s and early 70s? Apparently there are people--I don't know how many--who think we did. But I wonder. . .

I have trouble thinking something fundamental in our attitudes toward sex hasn't changed. Something lurking in the way people talk about sex. It's the age-old association of sex with dirt and violence.

"Love hath built its temples in places of excrement," Montaigne once observed. Can you think of a better way to degrade sex? It's like building a playground over a leaky sewage treatment plant.

I had a sister I used to think of as the crypto-fascist in the family. One day in her house I used the word “fuck,” and she blasted me. “If you want to use language like that, Mister, do it in the bathroom!” So I went in the bathroom and shouted, “FUCK.”

But why the bathroom? Because that’s where we get rid of dirt we don’t want to have around, according to Murray Davis ("Smut"). Not all dirt, you see, is dirty. Dirty dirt can embarrass you: it’s not supposed to be seen or heard in polite company.

Dirty talk requires washing out your mouth--or having someone do it for you, as parents supposedly used to do with their children. “Gutter talk” is another label for it; “filth,” is a favorite, as is “garbage.” The English language has over 1,000 words for copulating and some 1,500 synonyms for our genitals.

Jesse Sheidlower--an editor at Random House at the time--put together a dictionary of "every sense of fuck, and every compound word or phrase of which fuck is a part," which he found in use in the U.S. From "absofuckinglutely" to "tit-fuck," it runs over 200 pages. He titled his book, "The F Word."

As one writer observed, sexual functions and body parts must be extremely important to us. Yet, the most direct and unambiguous words for them are called dirty and banned from public, "polite," company.

And so we resort to those god-awful euphemisms: “doing it,” “having sex,” “getting it on,” “being intimate,” "hooking up," on and on. What are people referring to when they talk about “having sex”? What, indeed, do people mean by “sex”? Bill Clinton isn't the only one who thinks oral sex is not sex. A lot of young people don’t either. Some people don’t think masturbation is sex either, and when they say there’s no such thing as safe sex, they never mention it.

Am I the only one who thinks that this doesn’t sound like people who are comfortable with sex?

Back in the early ‘60s, Edward Sagarin brought out “The Anatomy of Dirty Words.” It was a serious scholarly work, but like "The F Word," you can have a lot of fun reading it.

For example, how we carefully use the word “balls.” Many people are named “Ball,” but no one is named “Balls.” Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan Ball are not known as “the Balls.” Expressions like “she is on the ball” or “he carries the ball” are positive, but not “he carries the balls.” Yet when you say “he’s got balls” and “she’s got balls” you are being complimentary (in a sexist sort of way). California's governor recently assured us his chief aide--"governess," people call her--"has balls."

But of all the proscribed sexual words, “fuck” still remains supreme. In one version or another, the word is known in all cultures; it’s hated, feared, revered and loved, but not free of its taboo. It is the four-letter word. Even when we see it written as “f- - - ,” or referred to as the "f-word," we know right away what is meant. (The New York Times at one time used to print “sex” as “s-x.,” and we all knew what it referred to.)

So why can’t the full word be used? No other word in the English language, Sagarin thought, is so readily understood without being explained . . and it’s still not decent.

Here's a dude telling his buddies what he did the night before:

“So I finish my fuckin’ work for the day, get home and like shit, shave, shower, shampoo and shinola, get in my fuckin’ car and you know pick up my fuckin’ girlfriend. We eat at like one of those fuckin’ roadside places, you know, a fuckin’ beer and fast food joint, then we pick up a fuckin’ six-pack and like go to the fuckin’ motel and we have you know like sexual intercourse.”

Ånd what about the first-grader, looking at how his classroom had been trashed over the weekend, pointing at his desk and blurting out, "Look! Someone wrote 'fuck' on my desk"?

"You can read!" his teacher says in wonderment.

And what are we to make of “mother-fucker”? A comedian once said he had once thought “mother” was only half a word. “Mother-fucker” is found in most West African languages, and was brought to this country by slaves. But when I first heard it in the Navy, it was used by whites. I was appalled--probably because of its connection with the incest taboo. And when my fellow Swabbies used the word, they meant nothing good by it. But no one thinks someone is being accused of fucking their mother when it’s used these days. Do they?

Then there’s the use of “fuck” as a violent expletive--as in “fuck you,” “fuck off,” “don’t fuck with me,” or “he fucked her over.” Here is the word most clearly and closely associated with sex used to express something bad, violent, wrong, undesirable. It's a popular way of attacking someone. When someone tells you, “Fuck you” there’s no mistaking that.

Is it only coincidental that the word is one of the more violent epithets that we have? Why isn’t “don’t mess with me” as good as “don’t fuck with me”? Or “get lost” not as good as “fuck off”? I have to admit when I am really angry there seems to be no other word that says what I want to say. Why is that? Is there some sort of hidden connection with sex that makes fuck-epithets more powerful, more violent?

Sexual language is widely associated with male power. When men suffer the horrors of what clinically is called erectile dysfunction, it is commonly referred to as impotence. No potency, no power. Right? Fucking-- usually meaning penile-vaginal intercourse--can be an exercise of power over a woman by a man “Ken fucked Barbie” is okay, but “Barbie fucked Ken” can have a jarring effect, though people may not be quite sure why that is.

Why is calling someone a prick a common way for dumping on them? (And note it is “prick” and not “penis.”) Sex in our society, some still claim, is penis-oriented. So Sagarin invited his readers to imagine a society in which calling someone a prick is considered complimentary.

He would be a well-rounded personality, firm, have a great sense of rhythm, with an excellent sense of direction. He is firmly determined, unbending and inflexible once he has set out to accomplish something. But he could still--if he is perfect--withdraw at will into himself without losing confidence that he can regain his full stature.

He must be a man of stature, gregarious, well liked but never imposing himself on others. He rises to every occasion, a true pillar of society, but power is only a means to an end. For he aims to please, and because of his remarkable self-control he terminates his encounters with others only when mutually agreeable.

If women are still having trouble with the male orientation in the way we treat sex--not just in the way we talk about it, but the way we do it--why is it that depictions of an erection are so forbidden, but soft ones are not?

To call someone a cunt or a prick is to say something very malevolent indeed. Or can it be argued that the genital- and fuck-epithets are purged of all sexual meaning--like “bloody” as an epithet is purged of all association with blood?

Why are our favorite expletives sexual? While the alleged sexual revolution was supposedly underway, there was another movement calling into question our reliance on schools for educating people. “Skools,” their critics called them; dangerous unhealthy places--especially for the young (sound familiar?). In some quarters “skool” was a dirty word. It could replace “fuck”--as in “skool you,” or “don’t skool with me,” and “skool off, will ya?”

Nope. We don't appear to be ready to give up sex as dirty dirt, and with it all those fucking--er, dirty expletives.