To Replace “Pussy”
In memory of Crewmember Dudley DeGruy
He really loved the Sea
In an attempt to update its lexicon to contemporary social norms, the American Scatological Society requires a replacement for the euphemistic insult “pussy.” The Society maintains the lexicon in service to today’s youth so they might have a diverse and robust verbal armory for any social or political exchanges requiring an emphatic rebuke. The Society adds and replaces words from the lexicon based on linguistic and cultural need. Just last year, the Society was proud to add “hipster” as an officially sanctioned pejorative and “libtard” as a probationary-insult (despite some contention). The Society also removes words. Most recently, it purged “midget” from the lexicon in recognition of Peter Dinklage’s second Emmy win for Game of Thrones. The Society will not re-litigate here the misogyny that afflicts “pussy” with so many negative connotations. Suffice it to say, the Society’s position is that vaginas (and cats) deserve a reprieve from the incessant comparisons to cowards. Further, the Society acknowledges that so long as there are people who throw away expired milk without first smelling it, so there will be a need to brand those people with an effective, non-violent expression of loathing and betrayal.
The Method
Pendleton’s Three Rules of Reproach define the criteria by which pussy’s replacement should be chosen. These rules, originally enumerated at the Society’s third N-word summit, ensure the replacement’s effectiveness; An American Scatological Society sanctioned insult must first be easy to say. If the insult cannot be declared the instant someone tucks tail and votes to bail out banks instead of — and at the expense of — the people, then the insult serves no purpose. This rules out potential insults like “Mr. Speaker” and “Senate Majority Leader.” The insult must also be unambiguous. Does the sycophancy and proselytizing of long discredited ideas make one a coward, a glutton, or an imbecile? The answer is impossible to know when one uses non-sanctioned insults like those based on supply-side economics or climate change denial. Finally, the insult must instill the appellated with dread and shame. Any Society sanctioned replacement for pussy must compel the appellated to reflect — likely at night, alone, under cold, sweat-soaked sheets, masturbating furiously — on those past-actions that lead to the appellation, followed by a pledge to be mindful of future actions or choices that could produce a similar outrage. By determining pussy’s replacement according to these criteria, the Society ensures not only will pussy eventually be free of its misogynistic (and anti-cat) connotations, but the world will have gained a better way to insult cowards.
Opposition to Pendelton’s
A few critics of the Society have complained that Pendleton’s Three Rules of Reproach are too tedious and too restrictive. They argue that the criteria unnecessarily handicap the Society when America needs it most. They believe that while women are slandered and the lily-livered reign supreme, the Society squanders precious time deconstructing “dickhead.” Their solution is to ignore Pendleton’s and to replace pussy with what they say is the next best thing: “asshole.” They claim that since a pussy is a kind of asshole, transposing its connotations should be as quick and easy as draining a swamp to build a lagoon.
In fact, the Society cannot replace pussy with asshole because it has already tasked asshole to replace “cunt” and “bitch.” Minus the gender-slur, these terms were nearly synonymous with asshole, and statistics demonstrate asshole’s usage has increased at the expense of cunt and bitch. In a recent survey, 64% of those polled said they preferred a bitch or a cunt to an asshole. That is ten points higher than last November. Progress!
The dangers of replacing pussy with asshole
Even if the Society were to replace pussy with asshole, it would only be a partial replacement. Pussy’s usage must be supplanted entirely across all parts of speech. Otherwise, some of pussy’s negative connotations could remain intact, and — worse — asshole could possibly contaminate pussy’s literal and figurative meanings. While asshole could assume pussy’s usage as a noun or as an adjective with little trouble, as a two-part phrasal verb, asshole would be worse than inadequate. “To puss(y) out” is one of pussy’s most popular usages, yet asshole has no reasonable equivalent. Were the Society to impose an incomplete replacement of pussy with asshole, the two terms and their meanings could become conflated in a cataclysmic metonymic shift. The consequences would be dire for pussies and assholes. Language scientists report there is a small but significant chance that should asshole to be implemented as an incomplete replacement for pussy, the average American, by 2057, would be uncertain as to which of their orifices produced excrement; a significant few would be uncertain as to whether men could even produce excrement at all.
Replacing pussy with asshole would also do much harm to certain undeserving assholes. These assholes should be respected for performing a service to society no one could or would perform but them: The asshole who eats the last crumbs in a chip bag so it can finally be thrown away, for instance, or the asshole who risks national security to warn the public about risks from the National Security. Associating these assholes with cowardice would only discourage the kind of selfless acts civilization depends upon. The world needs the asshole who tells their friend they look like two scoops of peach-vanilla melting over a pair of skinny jeans. What the world does not need are cowards who think they can hide their crimes under the cloak of assholism.
Cowards should find no refuge in assholism. They deserve a unique insult that shames them for betraying themselves and others. There should be a distinct name for the coward who eats the testicles of endangered species because he cannot work out his sexual insecurities at Cinnabon like everyone else. There should be a distinct name for the coward who keeps pets only to blame them for farts. The world can only reject what it can recognize, which is why the world must make clear, by name, the distinction between the coward and the asshole. The world must always and emphatically name the kinds of people who, to preserve Christmas, will not investigate if that odd smell from Grandpa’s basement is Grandma. Asshole is not up to that task.
If not asshole, then what?
To answer this question, the Society spent countless hours and monies pursuing pussy’s replacement. It scoured the planet for loan words from every human language, it consulted xenolinguists about the possible methane-based slurs that would be used on Saturn’s moons, and it positioned a submersible language laboratory in international waters to create “robadobo,” “thwad,” and “mudcum.” Unfortunately, none of these endeavors produced a single usable insult, much less a replacement for pussy. Robadobo actually encouraged petty acts of cowardice just because test subjects liked being called robadobo. Thwad was the Society’s lone experiment with a monosyllabic insult. However, thwad never sounded quite right to test subjects, and it killed one of the submersible pilots during clinical trials. Researchers thought they had finally nailed it with mudcum until the Department of Homeland Security urged the Society to cease and desist using Secret Service codenames. While the Society was ultimately unable to create a new euphemism, it gained one important insight: it is far easier to replace an old insult with a lightly used one than it is to replace it with a completely new one. Once that was settled, the American Scatological Society wasted little time in identifying, observing, and testing pussy’s new replacement: “piece of shit.”
Piece of shit’s malleability
At the symbolic level, a piece of shit describes a coward quite well. The piece of shit is distinct, fractured, crumbled, apart from the greater turd body. Similarly, the coward is divorced from society, cleaved from the people and the institutions who trusted them most. The metaphor’s precision denies any comfort to the piece of shit without harming those assholes who help civilization function. The piece of shit will not be able to hide behind asshole when people learn they watched porn on a coworker’s computer, and the asshole will not dread being called a piece of shit after mercifully pulling the plug on Grandpa the potato clock. Beyond piece of shit’s metaphorical connotations, the physical and psychological responses it provokes are instilled and reinforced practically from birth; before they can say mommy and daddy, most babies have developed a near-instinctual hatred of being surrounded by pieces of shit.
Linguistically, piece of shit brings much to the insult table. Its trimeter of stressed-unstressed-stressed syllables creates a natural crescendo when shouted, and it has a simple but emphatic cadence for chanting at rallies, marches, and town hall meetings. Piece of shit is also portable to a variety of contexts. To people on internet message boards, its level of profanity expresses a casual “Hey, you suck! But I’m reasonable about it” sort of attitude. Deployed as a handy, non-expletive acronym, POS is appropriate for more formal occasions like office parties, performance reviews, and court-ordered counseling.
Piece of shit’s grammatical and metaphorical flexibility will allow it to assume all of pussy’s negative connotations. It replaces pussy’s euphemistic duties as adjective and noun, connoting, but not limited to, cowardice and inferiority. The two part-phrasal verb “to pussy out” is replaced with the two-part phrasal verb “to shit oneself” (I shit myself, he shits himself, she shits herself, they shit themselves, we shit ourselves, I shat myself, he shat himself, etc.). In addition, to lessen some of asshole’s burdens, piece of shit will now be applied to those who are assholes because they are cowards. They are now pieces of shit. Assholes who won’t get their kids vaccinated, assholes who end long term relationships by completely vanishing, and assholes with the flu who refuse to take a sick day are now pieces of shit. Other pieces of shit include assholes who want to ban all guns, assholes who want to carry guns everywhere (there is still some internal debate on whether this is assholism by cowardice or assholism by sexual dysfunction), and the Every-Asshole-for-Themselves asshole found in most zombie films and Wal-Mart Black Friday sales. All pieces of shit.
Conclusion
The American Scatological Society has a profound and abiding respect for its duty to maintain the lexicon of pejoratives, insults, and slurs. Acting in this capacity, the Society deemed it necessary to replace the pussy euphemism with the piece of shit euphemism, in accordance with Pendleton’s Three Rules of Repudiation, as detailed above. The Society has the utmost confidence that piece of shit will prove itself a more than capable replacement for pussy.
With neither pride nor shame, the Society recognizes pussy as one of its most used insults but also as one of its most destructive. Pussy has motivated many to acts of courage. It has suppressed cowardice, and it has expanded people’s physical, mental, and emotional limits. It has also demeaned women and sex, it has encouraged and justified violence against women and femininity, it has corrupted masculinity, and it has unfairly maligned cats, who have been witnessed defending their humans against bear attacks. While the society has never imposed language codes upon its members or enforced exclusive adherence to the lexicon, the Society asks its members, and all others, to consider if their use of pussy reflects someone who promotes loving kindness and dignity or someone who is just a piece of shit.
