Well, you have to call it something.
Today was a really porny day on my friendslist, between dashakay 's very helpful smut-writing guide and icedteainthebag 's anonymous fanfic kink meme. One is helpful; one is hot and amusing. But, in any case, it was this line of Dasha's that got me thinking:
Try to avoid words that many people find offensive whenever possible-many (but not all) women hate words like cunt, hole, snatch, etc.
Well, OK, snatch is definitely not a word to be used during sexytiems, I agree, but cunt?
I'm curious about this in particular because I have been half-assedly following the latest round of RaceFail, and there has been an interesting tangent about the use of gendered language as a means of attacking people, particularly calling someone a "bitch" or a "cunt." Now, I agree unreservedly that the use of such language as a means to denigrate someone who disagrees with you is pretty awful; and being called a cunt by someone who is angry with me, or who is attacking me, or degrading me in some way, is definitely fucked-up, angering, and offensive not just to the person being so addressed, but other women and feminist folks in the immediate vicinity. But I've also seen comments where people have expressed the same opinion as Dasha above--that the use of cunt as an anatomical descriptor is offensive to most or many female readers.
In my experience--which is limited, irredeemably biased towards queers, and towards people under 30--cunt seems to be more common, and, in fact, sexier than, say, pussy. As anecdata, let me report a conversation between my wife and her best friend which occurred sometime during the late 90s, probably, like, junior year of high school, in my wife's car.
Best Friend: I don't know, I don't really like the word pussy. I mean, to talk about the vagina.
Leigh: Me neither. I think I prefer cunt.
Best Friend: Yeah.
Leigh: It just rolls off the tongue. Um. I mean.
Best Friend: *dies of embarassment, and then fails to show up for our wedding eight years later*
And, as you could tell from my oeuvre, I have no problem using the word cunt in my smutfics. In fact, I think I use it nearly exclusively to describe either general-vulva or vagina. (I have a slight problem in that, semantically, I think cunt is probably closer to meaning 'vagina' exclusively, where 'pussy' is probably closer to 'vulva,' but I handwave this with ease.) But I'm irredeemably picky with my sex-talk: I also can't use any word but cock for penis, for instance.
But now I'm curious where other people fall on these questions of language. So I'm going to try to make a poll. Hopefully it will function.
Poll Dirty Words