Cunts
L’Origine du monde by Gustave Courbet, 1866
Facebook’s banning of the posting of this painting and the subsequent legal wrangle in the French courts got me thinking about where I first saw this painting and the impact it had on me, on my understanding of myself as female, and the strange social aversion we seem to have to our genitals.
I don’t really want to get into an anti-Facebook rant. I had a fight with them about five years ago over a Modigliani painting. I want to prompt a dialogue about our strange ambivalence over our bodies.
The first time I saw Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde (The origin of the world), I was 13. I honestly cannot remember where I saw it, which is odd. It would have been 1975, so I would have been in London, and as far as I know, the original painting was in the private collection of – you’re going to laugh, I certainly did – Jacques Lacan. He bought it at auction in 1955. It wasn’t installed at the Musée d’Orsay until 1995, but it was ‘toured’ on a few occasions between those dates. So perhaps I saw a reproduction. All I know was that my mother took me, and it was in a public space, because I remember feeling embarrassed to be looking at a cunt with a whole load of strangers.
But I have a very precise memory of what that picture did to my psyche. It didn’t look like my barely pubescent cunt at all. I told my mother and she said: “That’s because you’re not a fully grown woman yet. This is it. This is where you came from and it is going to be part of you. You can choose to hate it, or you can decide to love it. And how you feel about yourself as a woman is going to depend on the choice you make. So look again.”
And I did. I looked again. Moreover, my mother’s words did sink in. And I decided this was something I would decide to love. How can you fear or hate or find ugly something you’re born with? How can you make something that is such a fundamental part of your body into a problem? Cunts go beyond beauty – which is the assessment of the other. It’s not right, or logical, or sane to ‘other’ a part of your own body. But as I grew up, I noticed pretty much the entire world was hell bent on trying to make me see it as something apart from me. Since viewing that picture, I’ve been exposed to more than 30 years of images that pornographized cunts, that put them to purposes that were not mine. Shamed, hidden, mystified, medicalized, brutalized, venerealized, powdered, sprayed, shaved, waxed, pierced, idolized, worshiped, classified, mutilated.
Now I look at this cunt and I think… it’s beautiful. I can smell it. I can taste it. I know it in all its physicality. I’ve lived with this cunt a long time and, recently, in a very odd way, I’ve moved past it. I remember the first time I found a grey pubic hair and cried for a day. But that, it transpired, was nothing. It’s only when you begin to hit menopause that you get the scary news about what happens to your cunt once you stop producing female hormones. The skin grows thinner, you tear more easily. It isn’t as robust anymore. You’re faced with the spectre of letting nature take its course, or using hormones to artificially keep it in stasis. There’s tremendous implicit social pressure to maintain your cunt in ‘working order.’ But working for who? It’s perfectly happy as long as someone doesn’t plan on treating it like a battleground. Apparently your clit never stops working, which is good to know.
But what I’ve found more curious is that these encroaching realities have forced me to realize that, although I’ve always been on very good terms with my cunt, it never was the place my sexuality or my eroticism resided anyway. And I really don’t need it to be an erotic being, or express my sexuality.
