There are pirates in their fetid galleons
Daggers in their skivvies
With infected tattooed fingers
On a blunderbuss or two
Signs of scurvy in their eyes
And only mermaids on their minds
It's from them I would expect to hear
The F-word, not from you
We sit down to have a chat
It's F-word this and F-word that
I can't control how you young people
Talk to one another
But I don't wanna hear you use
That F-word with your mother
From F-Word by Lou and Peter Berryman
Some of you may have noticed an occasional use of non-G-rated language on my site. (You have certainly seen non-G-rated subject matter unless you haven't been here before, or haven't read anything in the poly section.) Of course, it's pretty occasional, so some of you probably didn't notice at all, because you're so used to such things. But I'm not, and there's a story, and I'm going to tell it - after all, this is my site, and I get to tell stories if I want to. (And you get to not read them if you like.) In case, you're wondering which words I mean, I'll list a few: fuck, prick, cunt.
The fact is, I was quite late in even coming to any knowledge of what any of this stuff meant. I remember being teased back in grade school by kids who did know, or who at least liked to use the words; I disavowed all knowledge of them. (A hard thing for someone who was otherwise known as the school genius to have to do, by the way.) But I was growing up in a small town in northeast Pennsylvania (a part of the world that is in a serious cultural time warp), in a Catholic town and attending Catholic school, and I wouldn't have had the faintest idea where to turn to find out such things. The dictionary was, of course, no help; although some current dictionaries such as the American Heritage Dictionary do list the words, the ones available to me at the time did not.
High school wasn't really much improvement. Between 8th and 9th grades for me, we moved to Long Island. It was clear that I had fallen with such a group of cultural sophisticates that asking them such naive questions was out of the question. But eventually I discovered the private shelf of the school library, where they kept all the "dirty books". I wouldn't have had the nerve to ask for them, but I founded and ran the school chess club, which met in the library after school, and the librarians were gone! Gods, what a little nerd boy I was!
Still, that made a late bloomer, and so between the lack of knowledge and the cultural training that swearing in speech was a bad thing (though in Catholic school, they were more concerned with taking the Lord's name in vain and the like), I never got into the habit of using any of these words as expletives. Nor am I now; I don't find myself needing expletives much anyway.
Since then, of course, I have become a lot more educated still. In particular, reading gay writing will educate you thoroughly about sexual language - it's usually much more straightforward about it than heterosexual literature is. For instance, I have seen the different versions of AIDS education posters that the AIDS Action Committee produces. The ones for the straight community say "Wear a condom every time you have sex". The gay version says "Wear a condom every time you fuck". Same message, but very different language.
you let me violate you, you let me desecrate you
you let me penetrate you, you let me complicate you
help me i broke apart my insides, help me i've got no soul to sell
help me the only thing that works for me, help me get away from myself
i want to fuck you like an animal
i want to feel you from the inside
i want to fuck you like an animal
my whole existence is flawed
you get me closer to god
you can have my isolation, you can have the hate that it brings
you can have my absence of faith, you can have my everything
help me tear down my reason, help me it's your sex i can smell
help me you make me perfect, help me become somebody else
i want to fuck you like an animal
i want to feel you from the inside
i want to fuck you like an animal
my whole existence is flawed
you get me closer to god
through every forest, above the trees
within my stomach, scraped off my knees
i drink the honey inside your hive
you are the reason i stay alive
Closer by Nine Inch Nails
I do find myself using the words in their real meanings (as terms for sexual activities and anatomical parts). Those little Anglo-Saxon words have a power that the more refined Latin ones lack - just right for describing physically and emotionally powerful experiences. When you get down to it, when you're trying to describe an intense session of the old in-and-out, phrases like "have intercourse" or "make love" don't capture the intensity of the moment the way fuck does. Would the song quote above have the same impact if it said "boff you like an animal"? (BTW, the version you hear on the radio usually has the word "fuck" partially blanked out, but it's not like that on the album.) And which sounds hotter: licking a "vagina" or a cunt?
I think that using these words as expletives is a bad thing. It attaches negativity to things that should be powerful positive, life-affirming images. (The ancients worshipped the cock and cunt as fertility symbols, after all. In our modern world, we may not be so concerned with fertility - but what about worshipping them as pleasure symbols?) Overuse trivializes things that we should value highly. Our sexuality is such an important part of what we are as human beings; we should treasure it, not trivialize it.