SEXUAL PROFANITY TABOO: A VICTORIAN INVENTION

Today I was thinking about why so much foul language has to do with sex.

Swedish maledictologist Magnus Ljung distinguishes between the Genital Motif, könsorgansmotivet ("dick," "cock," "cunt," "tits," "coño", "polla", "cipote", etc.) and the Coital Motif, samlagsmotivet ("fuck," "bugger," "shag," "knulla," "joder", "foutre", etc.), but both have to do with SEX.

My puritanical maternal granny told me these are Very Ugly Words, and I should avoid them like the plague. I have followed her words to the T until NOW.

I was curious: why is sex ugly/disgusting? why does so much foul language have to do with it? And why did Renaissance and Baroque literati have no qualms about it? Where did the sex taboo come from?

At last I have sated my curiosity! And all my qualms are GONE, fwoosh!

Let's discuss Renaissance and Baroque literature and start with the GOAT of it, the One and Only Bard of Avon. As I read Othello and the Henriad I am surprised that Shakespeare has no qualms. The Moor calls Desdemona a strumpet, Iago has quite the potty mouth (no surprise given that he is a non-commissioned officer), as has Mercutio, Hamlet, though well-read, asks Ophelia about country matters, and even the prim and proper French Princess Catherine de Valois gets shocked during her English lessons that the very Saxon word FOOT sounds just like the French F-word.

Moving to Spain and to the king of conceptismo, Quevedo also throws sex words left, right, and centre with carefree abandon in his satirical verses:

los mando degollar, y no jodellos, (he had them slit their throats, and not fuck / shag them)

[...]

di: «Requiescat in culo, mas no in pace.» [Say "rest in the arse, but not in peace"]

Jane Austen, during the Regency or Napoleonic era, has her notorious "Rears and Vices" blue joke, about the keisters and queer immoralities of old Royal Naval admirals, and it has aged like a fine sherry.

But the biggest surprise came from my dad's country. Nowadays all Swedish profanity is infernal, and Swedes are so cowardly that they use euphemisms like "jäklar," "farao," and "Hälsingland" (poor Hälsinglanders!) instead of the real infernal profanities. Swedes never swear about sex in the present day. Even Fredrik Lindström gets in on the act, he says: "why do we Swedes swear like chickens?" Is this a Protestant thing? It isn't. Let's go back to the Baroque period...

...when the Court Bard of Queen Christina herself, George Stiernhielm, wrote an ode to the Peace of Westphalia and one of its major causes, the marriage of a Spanish Habsburg queen to a French Bourbon king (something unheard of until then!) The title? Kungens basse och drottningens mus, The King's Dick and the Queen's Beaver! Here are the main verses, translated from the Swedish:

The King's dick must be praised,

for it brought oss peace and joy!

The Queen's beaver must also be honoured,

for it brought us dear peace!

If kings had no balls,

we would still be firing cannons...

[...]

A French dick and a Spanish beaver

taught us how to find peace:

may they by the LORD's grace, all days,

shag as much as they please!

With poems like these at a Protestant court, it can't be a Reformation thing! What is this taboo then?

A Victorian bourgeois thing...

The Wikipedia article on "Profanity" talks about:

a dichotomy between the use of highbrow religious swears and lowbrow anatomical swears.

So, sex words are "lowbrow" (lower-class, working-class). Is it a bourgeois prejudice? This YouTube video confirmed my suspicions: 

The Victorian bourgeoisie saw sexual profanity as a class marker, and they avoided and loathed it to distinguish themselves from the working class! There's the rub!

I was not only raised by a Catholic granny, but I also pride myself on being "highbrow / high culture," on liking Shakespeare, Gilbert and Sullivan, Giuseppe Verdi, fantasy set in the UK (or counterpart UKs like Westeros), cultured Disney villains (like Scar who says "quid pro quo," for example), Dark Academia, etc. But the literati of the ancien régime didn't have such qualms about sex words... Neither did, in 20th century Spain, Camilo José Cela, one more of my favourite authors!

So yes, I can be highbrow AND NOT squeamish about sex words. As I will be from now on...

PS. The Puritans also played a key role in the sex word taboo. Cromwell and his cronies thought that people saying, hearing, reading, or writing words like "cunt" or "fuck" would awaken forbidden, indecent lusts!