A limp controversy putters over the ostentatious deployment, in Kick-Ass, the movie of the comic of the fantasy, of the epithet ‘c*nts’ by an 11-year-old girl. The ‘debate’, whether it is outrage at the viralling of profanity or eye-rolling insouciance at the squares’ foofaraw, man, is about vulgarity.

Far less noted is the sheer national misplacedness of the imprecation. To Brits, c*nt means, as an English lexicographer has it, ‘an unpleasant or stupid person’. In American dictionaries & ears, however, it is, ‘a disparaging term for a woman’. 

Hit-Girl, the psychopath (American) child vigilante of Kick-Ass, uses it, seemingly inexplicably, against (American) men. The line is an import from the comic, itself set in New York. One may perhaps impute error to the (Scottish) comic writer (Millar) & (English) screenwriter (Goldman), but that no one else at any stage of the process would point out the linguistic unrealism & potential confusion among US audiences demands explanation. What does this major but unheralded shift portend? 

When used as an epithet on either side of the Atlantic, c*nt has been invaluable to a misogynist agenda. There has, however, always been something explicit, & thus both exact but socially limiting, about the American version: used to attack women by describing them as their supposedly self-evidently loathsome vaginas, the cuss proclaims itself the woman-hatred it is. The British (& Antipodean) tradition, by contrast, in designating the vulva the telos of shittiness indiscriminately, though it may blunt the sheer stiletto specificity of the sexism, allows for a multitasking of spite: against a particular person, usually a man, predicated on that against an entire gender. 

This latter is clearly more functional to the dynamics of modern misogyny than the alternative open & self-celebrating gynophobia (precisely because previous political triumphs put that on the defensive). The resulting ‘abstraction’ can also be seen in the recent successful mainstreaming, via various vernaculars (online, hipster, ‘humorous’, filmic &c), of the word ‘bitch’. With familiar exonerations at hand if entirely necessary - barely-effortful irony, accusations of humourlessness, heroic political incorrectness - the word walks with its baggage into arena previously inaccessible to it. 

(Remember, incidentally, the scale of concern the use of ‘bitch’ in rap music occasioned, & compare the current commodification of the very same slur in the mouths of white ‘celebrities’.

See also the strictures against the use of homophobic slurs among black people compared to the official imprimatur given a white broadcaster continuing the enslurification of the previously non-derogatory term ‘gay’.)

To c*nt. Commissars of misogyny in the US must have been gazing jealously at their British counterparts, aware that the word that most & most uncontroversially expresses despite against women, precisely in expressly doing so, has self-limited on their soil. They now have reason to celebrate.

Undoubtedly such cultural shifts are often the results of explicit & deliberate campaigns, but whether or not one imputes overt motives in this case is moot. Think what one will of Hegel’s cunning of reason, the cunning of reaction is thorough. It is hard to disagree that Kick-Ass ‘kicks the c-word into the mainstream’, though not merely in the way the journalist suggests.

This is not cultural-linguistic cackhandedness but trailblazing, the John-the-Baptist of a slew of US films in which ‘c*nt’ will be used against people irrespective of their genitalia. & where before the (American) word attacked women, soon it will attack men &/or women, on the basis of always-already attacking women.