CONCERNING SWEARERS

The masses, or what may be termed the militant lumpen core of the proletariat, are highly prone to swearing, particularly within the confines of bourgeois/proletarian civilization. The words one hears most often from their lips are sexually explicit four-letter ones. Why, it may be wondered, do such words figure so prominently on many proletarian tongues? Arguably a good question and I intend to answer it from two points of view - namely a negative and a positive.

First the negative answer. These proletarians generally lead hard lives under the capitalist/socialist yoke and, when various personal and/or environmental circumstances are taken into account, haven't a great deal for which to be grateful. Hence the abusive recourse to four-letter words, the psychological smear or denigration which they cast over the object of abuse patently testifying to an aggrieved mentality. Often the object in question is transcended in a general reference that embraces everything and anything, turning life, for the swearer, into an affair worthy of permanent denigration, and casting an ugly psychological smear over whatever he thinks or says. The mentality of the habitual swearer is probably too familiar to most non-swearers to warrant further exegesis here.

So let us turn to the positive answer. We know what the words are, but do we sense any underlying implication in their use, any refutation or belittling, it may be, of sex? I, for one, do; though that doesn't make me any more partial to their use than before! To sense that either the female sex organ or the actual sex act is being denigrated, if unconsciously, by certain of these words ... doesn't necessarily make them any sweeter to the ear. But it does throw a new light on their use, a light which suggests that perhaps the proletariat, for all their professed addiction to sex, are privately disgusted by it and anxious, in consequence, to verbally belittle it whenever opportunity or circumstances permit. Someone described as a 'fuck*** cunt' is worse than just a 'cunt'; he is a sexually active 'cunt' - an active sex organ. This, clearly, is one of the lowest possible things that anyone can be described as, and it indicates, I think, that the user of these words has an instinctive class aversion both to the object in question and to its active use, an aversion which, if not conscious, at least indicates a potential for post-atomic sexuality, such as the proletariat can be expected to uphold in the transcendental future. It also reflects the fact that the user in question lives in a broadly homosexual/masturbatory culture which, though relative, precludes any genuine respect for the female sex organ. Even petty-bourgeois liberated women tend, more often than not, to negate their vagina in a fixation on phallic oral sex, which conforms to the masculine bias of the times. Were we living in an age the converse of our own, it would be the penis that served as a term of abuse on the lips of the proletariat.

If most liberated women are averse to the employment of four-letter words themselves, the same cannot be said of the majority of proletarian women who, despite their sex, are as prone as their menfolk to denigrate others, and by implication their own sex organ, through the liberal use of such words. On superficial accounting, this strikes one as singularly odd. But when, applying a positive viewpoint to this tendency, one investigates the subject in greater depth, it occurs to one that, unlike liberated females, proletarian women are potentially Supermen, and will therefore be more inclined to take a masculine view of their sex organ and to employ it as a term of abuse, with an underlying implication of self-denigration in attendance. The average proletarian woman of today no longer regards herself as a creature entitled to sexist respect but unconsciously, if not consciously, behaves as if she were already generically a Superman. Hence her willingness to demean her sex organ by employing it as a term of abuse!

Having tackled these two answers, we may generalize that the one implies the other, that without the negative the positive side would not exist; that the denigration of the female sex organ is implicit in the primary use of four-letter words as stringent criticism of some adversary which springs from a deeply aggrieved, aggressive, and resentful psyche. On the surface, the object of abuse is being reviled, but the reviler is acquiescing, instinctively or otherwise, in the fittingness of the term employed in this abuse. He is acting on the principle that there is nothing lower, from a human angle, than the organ from which the term has been extrapolated and to which it indirectly applies, compliments of the victim of such abuse who, willy-nilly, becomes that lowness in the reviler's imagination, since, as the direct focus of abuse, he symbolizes the lowness in question. To act on this principle is to turn against the feminine root, to negate complacency in dualism and, by implication, to affirm the moral superiority of a post-dualistic society. Such a person, of whatever sex, can only be the crude clay, so to speak, from which a post-sexist, truly saved humanity will be moulded.

It is my opinion that swearing of the four-letter variety one hears, for example, in England is more prevalent among the proletariat of a bourgeois/proletarian civilization than among proletariats in socialist states, and largely because it reflects the oppression of the masses under a capitalist/socialist system. The exploited swear both as a reflection of their exploitation and to avenge themselves, one way or another, on the objects of their oppression, either symbolically or actually. Probably this isn't the whole truth, but I am firmly convinced that it is a significant ingredient in that truth. Unless they are mad or incorrigibly bad-natured, ill-tempered, or youthfully exhibitionist, people swear from an aggrieved mentality, which may well be connected with capitalist and/or socialist oppression. Some, admittedly, swear all the time. But they are more to be despised than pitied!

Of course, socialist societies aren't entirely immune to swearers, but will take measures, if genuine, to curb swearing and make it a kind of offence against the People, since it could be construed as reflecting poorly on the socialist system which, in theory if not always in practice, is designed to ameliorate the living standards of the masses and thus reduce or remove any excuse for swearing - a habit which, whilst it may be justified in a capitalist/socialist society, should have little or no place in a genuinely socialist one. Thus the negative aspect of swearing becomes increasingly unacceptable, since there shouldn't be too many causes for grievance in a society run on behalf of the People by their elected servants. That leaves - does it not? - the positive aspect, which has more to do with the belittling of the female sex organ than with the slandering of an opponent.

A socialist state, if not an absolute civilization, is potentially such a civilization. In other words, it is a state in which proletarian women are almost, though not quite, Supermen. It is a state, in short, that denies relativity. For while the implicit denigration of the female sex organ may be acceptable in an extreme relative state, the same cannot be said of a state tending towards the absolute, where denigratory references to the female sex organ would suggest a sexist relativity incompatible with a bias for the absolute. Hence, even on positive grounds, swearing would become unacceptable, because involving sexist discrimination. Doubtless as the socialist state matured towards or was converted into a transcendental civilization, swearing would become even more unacceptable, since by then those who, as proletarian women, had been potentially Supermen would have actually become Supermen, and all references to the female sex organ be taboo, not least of all because Supermen were indisposed to using it in a relative context, their vibrator sexuality being absolute - the vibrator becoming a kind of artificial penis rather than simply a penis substitute.

So a day will come when, because all men are brothers and sexist discrimination has been overcome, the use of four-letter, or equivalent, swear words will be outlawed, their continual employment by some people becoming a crime against the People which, like other such crimes, may well be subject to corrective discipline.