Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words are micro-aggressions — especially if the word in question is the original Anglo-Saxon term for the female genitalia. Comedian Samantha Bee used it to describe Ivanka Trump, causing right-wingers to collapse on their fainting couches, like — as they’d say in Scotland — a bunch of right cunts.
Why the word has this power is something of a mystery. Its usage is first recorded in 1230 AD, when London’s red-light district had a Gropecunt Street (OK, they didn’t have red lights then, but you get the picture). It appears not infrequently in Chaucer with a different spelling (in the “Miller’s Tale,” for instance: “Pryvely he caught her by the queynte,” clearly talking about a forerunner of Trump). In Australia and the UK, especially Scotland, it’s regarded as a gender-neutral term, much like Americans use “asshole.”
In the U.S., though, no word is more taboo than “cunt,” not even the n-word, which is taboo only for whites. Larry David made a whole episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” about the repercussions after Larry calls a poker player who folds his hand a cunt. In that episode, the players, all liberals, are the ones who are shocked by the use of such a misogynist word. (Just btw, I’ve heard very little liberal criticism of Bee on this, so maybe, like the n-word is OK for rappers to use, it’s not misogyny when a woman uses the c-word.)
Right-wingers are always on the lookout for evidence they’re the real victims, and they think they’ve found some here. There are calls for TBS, which hosts Bee’s show, to fire her, much as Kathy Griffin was quickly shunned for showing a “decapitated” Trump by holding up a rubber mask of the nation’s biggest right cunt. Given the typical left-wing response to such affronts — ask ACORN (oh, wait, you can’t because Democrats acted like a bunch of cunts and went along with defunding it) or Al Franken (oh, wait, you can’t because Democrats acted like a bunch of cunts and threw him out of the Senate for playing grab-ass during photo shoots, while ignoring Bob Menendez’ thievery).
I didn’t see the segment in question, but it sounds as if Bee was just using the word as a throwaway insult, in which case she used it incorrectly.
Ivanka Trump is not a cunt. She’s a twat.