An Ode to the F word
Sorry if I lured you here with the promise of poetry. Not today.
Recently I heard through the grapevine that a family friend objected to my use of the word fuck in my novel Blood Vine. I certainly don’t mind, and she’s entitled to her opinions. She’s always been delightfully supportive of me, and I think its sweet she hasn’t wanted to hurt my feelings by sharing her complaint. But hearing it got me thinking.
Her objection, as it was reported to me indirectly, is that the word fuck connotes the violent side of sex. She is a victim’s advocate—a woman who works with women who have suffered violence, and so I understand where her concern is coming from.
I too am a feminist, deeply concerned about violence against women.
As a writer, I think hard about the relationship between sex, consent and violence. I also think about the way experiences of trauma effect people’s desires. Good sex writers are mindful of issues of consent—they may explore the issue, but they do so with intention. Readers tell me they are very sensitive to anything that feels even slightly like a rape. It’s no wonder, given the astounding statistic that 1 in 4 or 5 American women will be the victim of sexual assault in their lifetime.
But to me, the word fuck does not equate to rape. It has many connotations. As the fabulous Pam Rosenthal/Molly Weatherfield said to me on Twitter about the word: “I love it for its clarity. Love optional; shaken not necessarily stirred.” Love optional is precisely the way my characters use the word fuck in Blood Vine, and it’s meant ironically from the start, as I hope the reader knows Andre and Zoey’s attempt to resist love will be laughable.
And yes, I thank God we are finally at a point in our culture where we accept that women and men are allowed to enjoy sex for the pure animal pleasure of it, that shakes our body without stirring our hearts. Even people that love each other might occasionally (or frequently) just fuck.
A clergy friend of mine said, “I love the word fuck because it contains so much power and so many nuances. You can say it to express rage just as accurately as to express awe, but you can never really use it to express mediocrity.” He makes a great point. It is precisely this power that makes it so appealing. Our awe about the base power of sex is called up, and in a way violated, when we use it as a curse, for the same reason people like to say Goddamn–we cross a sacred line when we say it.
That power is the reason, as Kristin said on my Facebook page, it makes us “feel better just by screaming it out a few times.” Kristin goes on to rhapsodize about the many meanings of fuck: “rage, pure and utter confusion (in a WTF sense), desolation.” Ah yes. WTF. Have there ever been three more delightful letters strung together in a text or tweet?
I remember as an adolescent, first delighting in the naughtiness of profanity, and trying to grasp the logic of the many facets of the word fuck. Perhaps you’ve heard the joke that fuck can be used as almost every part of speech, noun, verb, adjective, etc. But it’s more than that—it’s that it can mean good and bad, reverent and irreverent, angry (fuck off) and ecstatic (fuck yeah). The lowly four letter word shit falls flat in the face of fuck.
There is a tension in all religions between reverence and irreverence—both are tactics for approaching spirituality and relating to the divine. You probably won’t be surprised to hear that I fall on the irreverent end of the spectrum. I’m a fan of the mystics like Rumi and Hafiz who show their affection for God in profane (as in every-day, stuff-of-life, including sexual) language in order to make God more relatable. And as a devotee of sex, I take the same approach.
I realize others fall on a different place on this spectrum. I’m pretty sure I never heard my mother say the F word until I was an adult. Now she frequently says it in my hearing. But she raised me to be able to code switch between banter with my friends, the work place and “polite society”. For sure, the F word doesn’t belong in every conversation. And so I plan to raise my own children without saying fuck in front of them.
And for people like my family friend, no amount of argument will change an instinctive response to a word (I know, because for much less valid reasons, I loathe the word impactful). She may just never like my writing, because of the way I use the word fuck, and that’s okay. We’ll still be friends.
To me, the word fuck is beautiful and essential because it brings with it our incredibly powerful and complicated feelings about sex, and allows us to express a vast range of emotions about the world. And, as my writing friend Jennifer Davis says, even the way it sounds is wonderful. There’s just “something about the clacking of the ck.”
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