So, I figured my “cunt” entry needed a companion piece, and what’s a better companion for “cunt” than “cock”?
I’d like to go into something that I noticed when I was listening to some Dirty Blues songs, but I imagine this requires a little bit of backstory. It’s been long enough that I don’t remember how exactly I got into the Dirty Blues, but I can give you a brief run-down on what exactly that means. As simply as I can put, it’s blues music that rivals mainstream hip hop from the 1980s to the 2010s in its raunchiness. This seeming incongruity between the time period of recording and the propriety we associate with the early 20th Century seems to be an appeal for most listeners (as I know it is for myself). In fact, it’s all to easy to comments to the effect of “And people complain about today’s music being too raunchy!” on uploads of nearly every Dirty Blues song on YouTube.
There’s not much accessible literature out there on the subject of the Dirty blues, as far as I can find, outside of a Wikipedia article and the handful of sources that it cites. Allmusic describes the genre as “simple country blues with taboo lyrics” (“Dirty Blues,” allmusic.com). Most songs in the genre are like “My Girl’s Pussy,” “Please Warm My Weiner,” and “Hot Nuts (Get ‘Em from the Peanut Man)”: they play with double entendre and metaphor to communicate the taboo subject matter characteristic of the genre. One singer, however, had a couple of recorded songs where she didn’t play around with any of that delicacy. Elijah Wald explains what makes Lucille Bogan’s “Shave ‘Em Dry” so special:
[…] It was performed by a woman and … it is by far the most explicit blues song preserved at a commercial prewar recording session. (Presumably made for the amusement of the producers, it circulated only in private, underground pressings until being rediscovered and issued on LP in 1969.)
The Dozens, p. 60.
He’s right–you can’t get a whole lot more explicit than a woman crooning about how much she wants to get down with little to no foreplay. While modern and, presumably, contemporary audiences were amused by songs like “It’s Tight Like That” and “What’s That Smells Like Fish,” those songs tiptoed around the kind of explicit language Bogan used outright in “Shave Em Dry.” What interests me, however, is that two of Lucille Bogan’s songs, both “Shave ‘Em Dry” and “Till the Cows Come Home,” have our female singer referring, as a female narrator, to her cock. Wait, what? To clarify, let’s look at what is arguably Bogan’s most infamous song, “Shave ‘Em Dry,” recorded in 1935. We can hear the quoted portion below from 2:55 to 3:14.
Lucille Bogan, “Shave Em Dry“
My back is made of whalebone
And my cock is made of brass
And my fuckin’ is made for workin’ men’s two dollars
Great God, round to kiss my ass
Oh! Whoo, daddy, shave ’em dry
We hear something similar in “Till the Cows Come Home,” also by Bogan (0:34 to 0:50 at the link):
I told him I gotta good cock
Lucille Bogan, “Till the Cows Come Home”
And it’s got four damn good names
Rough top
Rough cock
Tough cock
Cock without a bone
You can fuck my cock
Suck my cock
Or leave my cock alone
As has maybe been made clear in previous posts, I’m a twenty-something white girl in Virginia, living in 2019. In my life up until I was made aware of Lucille Bogan’s music, I had never noticed anyone referring to women’s bits as their cocks. It made me do a double take when I heard it in “Shave ‘Em Dry.” Then I heard it again in “Till the Cows Come Home,” where Bogan also refers to sucking a man’s dick. I went through some more of her songs to see if both “dick” and “cock” both held the same ambiguity re: genitals, but no such luck. So, as a fan of all things salacious, I asked myself: what’s all this talk about “cock” about, then? Can I find more examples of women talking about theirs? No other songs in Bogan’s discography used the word “cock” this way, so I headed toward the Oxford English Dictionary.
Turns out, “cock” has been used historically for nearly 200 years to refer to women’s genitalia or sex with women, specifically by speakers of AAE and Southern English. OED’s earliest attested use of the word is from a story called “Turncock” in a collection of rude literature called “Regular Thing, And Make No Mistake,” questionably dated 1833: “Her husband used to do her jobs, but since he closed life’s business, Her cock had been neglected” (OED, “cock, n.¹ and int.”). The most recent usage given, dated 1964, uses “cock” to refer to the act of sex, specifically sex with a woman from a man’s point of view and is from Roger D. Abrahams’ Deep Down in the Jungle: Black American Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia: “Sam, you have been slaving for me ever seen you came out of your mammy’s cock” (ibid.). So we have use ranging from 1833 to 1964, with recorded oral use in music as early as 1935 or thereabouts.
Ben Westoff of LA Weekly interviewed our old friend of American Tongues fame, OED Editor Jesse Sheidlower, who suggests either semantic broadening or metaphor as a potential etymology for cock-as-vagina. Option one: “cock” comes to refer to all genitalia in the same way that “guys” can be used to refer people of any gender. Option two: it’s a shortening of the English word “cockle,” for shellfish, originally a borrowing of the French “coquille” (/kɔ.kij/, “shell”), in a similar metaphor to “clam” (Green, “clam n.¹”) and “oyster” (Green, “oyster n.¹,” and Westhoff, “‘Cock’ is ‘Vagina'”). In fact, there is documented French use of “coquille” as slang for “vagina” (and a related word, “coquillage,” for the virginity of a young woman), according to folklorist Vance Randolph (Westhoff).
As an aside: while not in American English, Green’s Dictionary of Slang indexes an earlier use of the word as it refers to sexual intercourse rather than genitalia is found in British author Hannah Cowley’s play “The Belle’s Stratagem,” as catalogued by Green’s Dictionary of Slang: “Oh, what hours of Elysium shall we enjoy, lock’d in love’s sweet embraces […] until morning, even until the tenth cock]” (OED, “cock, n.3”). This use, though, makes sense from a language change perspective when considering that we could be looking at an example of metonymy, where we use a closely attributed word to refer to a separate concept. For example, consider the modern use of “dick” as a substitute for “sexual intercourse” à la “I’m gonna get some dick tonight” or the use of “sex” to refer to one’s genitalia, à la “And the black cypresses strained upwards like the sex of a hanged man” (OED, “sex, n.¹”). This pattern is similar to one proposed by Sheidlower and Westoff in that. in this instance, we have related concepts of sex and genitalia (or, in Westoff’s example, virginity and genitalia) being used interchangeably enough that a new meaning of the word develops.
While it seems that the use of “cock” to refer to women’s bits has declined in prose, its legacy continued in hip hop and rap throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In 2 Live Crew’s song 1988 “HBC,” the all-male rap group uses the word this way in the chorus (and the title): “Head, booty, and cock / what you like, fellas?” Other mainstream hiphop artists of the past thirty to forty years who referred to a woman’s cock include Ice Cube (“We Be Clubbin,'” 2:51-3:03) and Lil Kim (“Queen Bitch,” 2:17-2:28).
LA Weekly’s article on the evolution of “cock” as it refers to women’s genitalia, where I was able to find numerous references to this use of “cock” in modern hip hop, posits a theory as to how we got here. While OED suggests that the more generalized “cock” usage was primarily a Black American trend, there is data that suggest that the word was used this way in a general Southern American English context, by both Black and White Americans. The Dictionary of American Regional English (1985), for example, points out an isogloss for the different gendered uses of “cock” falls along the Mason-Dixon (Westhoff), where Southerners used it to refer to vaginas et al and Northerners used it strictly to refer to penises. While Jesse Sheidlower and others interviewed in Westhoff’s article “insist” that white Southerners use “cock” in the yonic context, others will say that it’s less and less likely to be used in a song because of its conflict with mainstream usage. Simply put, mainstream hip hop artists use the term less because they “don’t want to be seen as gay.”
The unfortunate lack of documentation of these lexical variants can be attributed to the taboo nature of the language–sex talk wasn’t typically seen as the language to be studied in any academic sense or even talked about in the mainstream until relatively recently. I’m liable to draw a handful of conclusions from this shallow dive into the history of cock-as-vagina. For one, we owe it to ourselves to devote time and research to taboo language because public attitudes have caused regional and ethnic varieties of English to be censored through a lack of documentation (consider that Lucille Bogan, given the context of what I have discussed, was most likely not an isolated case in her genre, yet she is the only female artist recorded using her language the way that she does). And, second, these same public attitudes toward regional and ethnic use of taboo language evolve to reflect new biases (hence cock-as-vagina not being used as often in hip hop from the 2010s for fear of sounding “gay”). While these are all completely natural parts of language change and, yes, language change is inevitable, it is of interest to historians and linguists to document the history of these regionally- and ethnically-distinct taboo terms as we have documented language change as it applies to any other non-taboo semantic domain.
Works Cited:
“cock, n.¹ and int.”. OED Online. September 2019. Oxford University Press. Link. (accessed 21 Oct., 2019).
“Dirty Blues.” Allmusic. Last modified 2019, accessed 21 Oct. 2019. Link.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, s.v. “clam n.¹,” by Jonathon Green, accessed 21 Oct., 2019, Link.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, s.v. “cock n.³,” by Jonathon Green, accessed 21 Oct., 2019, Link.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, s.v. “oyster n.¹,” by Jonathon Green, accessed 21 Oct., 2019, Link.
“sex, n.¹”. OED Online. September 2019. Oxford University Press. Link. (accessed 21 Oct., 2019).
Wald, Elijah. The Dozens. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Westhoff, Ben. “‘Cock’ Means ‘Vagina.’ Let Us Explain.” LA Weekly (Los Angeles), 9 Jan. 2014. Accessed 21 Oct. 2019. Link.
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