Swearing
Swearing as a category of language that at some point felt inaccessible to me, and representative of an difficulty I felt connecting my inner affective selves with my outer performance of self.
My parents swore enough that I was used to hearing the words around the house. Some of the big ones — fuck, shit, piss — and some of the lesser ones — hell, bugger, bloody. No cunts. I wasn’t prohibited from swearing but discouraged, and my parents clearly felt some guilt or shame at using these words. They were different from other words, and uttered only in anger or frustration, and followed up with some light apologia.
My friends and peers began to swear in their early teens, once we’d started at the big school. Here swearing was a sign of maturity, a display of confidence, and a way of fitting in with the power brokers — those kids who were willing to engage in physical violence, had some form of charisma, and those who offered social belonging with their approval. Swearers were willing to break the rules set by adult society, and deserved respect. Swearing was a shibboleth, a symbol of belonging.
I did not belong, and so I didn’t learn to swear at school. I remember quite clearly the two occasions that I let a swearword slip. Aged 13 or so, I referred to an acquaintance in their absence as a dick. The immediate and powerful wave of shame and guilt I felt at having done so stopped me from ever doing it again.
The second time came during an emotional outburst. I had lost the ability to mask following a prolonged bout of teasing, and I let loose with a furious ‘fuck off’. Everyone did, to be fair to them, fuck off. I felt extremely ashamed and embarrassed at having revealed my anger and frustration.
‘fuck off’
I never made a conscious decision to avoid swear words. There was something more affective at play. Swearing felt like a display of emotional vulnerability — these were words with power, that conveyed some strong affective experience; the visible fruiting body of hidden inner feeling. These feelings — anger, fear, joy — so powerful and scary, were something I was desperately trying to mask.
Societal rules around swearing can be confusing for a young autist. “Thou shalt not swear” joins a host of other social rules set for children by adults, who proceed to break said rules with gay abandon. Some types of people can clearly get away with swearing nearly anywhere, and swearing can be acceptable in certain locations amongst certain company, or at certain times of day if you’re on British TV.
For younger Laurie, it seemed that breaking the unspoken and apparently arbitrary rules around swearing and acceptable language more broadly — slang was difficult for me too — would lead to shame, guilt and humiliation, the affective punishments for unacceptable behaviour that I was familiar with and terrified of. It was easier for me to swear off of swearing completely, to avoid having to think about and process this contingent social acceptability, facing the risk of internal affective discomfort upon miscalculation.
This complex infusion of affect could only be understood as a message that this form of language should be avoided as much as possible.
At some point, inertia kicked in and I became ‘someone who doesn’t swear’. For me to then start swearing felt impossible, even when it became something I had some desire to change. I didn’t like that there was a whole section of language inaccessible to me. I also felt envious of people who had the freedom to swear. It wasn’t just that the language appealed to me (it did): I was envious that they didn’t seem to need to restrict the way they communicated for fear of social judgement. My inability to swear became emblematic of my inability to convey my inner self — to become my inner self.
I learnt to swear only in my late teens or early twenties within the confines of my relationship with Ward, where I felt able to perform a wider range of selves; including a self with the freedom to swear. Within this relationship it seemed safe to reveal the emotional vulnerability that swearing implies, to allow my feelings about things to be seen more fully. I had been more involved in the cocreation of the relational landscape, and so I felt confident that it was acceptable for me to swear. I didn’t feel the fear of humiliation and shame in this (unwittingly) neuroqueer relational environment.
But even though I had learnt to swear, and was relieved to have done so, I had created another rule for myself. I could now swear when I was with Ward, but nowhere else.
As I began to unmask outside of this relationship, exposing myself to the wider world, this rule slowly began to fall away as well. My desire to meet the contextual standards of social acceptability diminished. I began to care less about the rules that I could see, occluded and confusing though they still were [are?], and to care more about expressing all parts of my self in a way that fostered the kinds of relationships that I desired, rather than those that we are suggested to pursue.
I learnt to worry less about revealing myself, as positive things came from baring my weird, autistic, queer inner self to my own gaze and others’. It turns out that performing emotional vulnerability can actually be enjoyable or relieving, and it can foster connection rather than scaring people away. It is pleasurable to offer and receive the intensity of a swear word, a small hint of some affective experience beneath, a transference with a little frisson beyond polite language.
[I like it when you curse]
Fuck is a wonderful word — it has a delicious mouthfeel and is full of meaning, metaphor, and resonance. An uttered ‘fuck’ is not completely removed from the physical act. One contains an echo of the other.
I enjoy swearing for the same reasons that I originally felt unable to — for the emotional vulnerability that swearwords convey, and the emotional power contained within them. When I swear, I engage in an naked act of affective communication. It is appropriate then, that swearing is often referential to body parts and functions; to our waste products and our most intimate sexual parts in isolation or in action. Swearing is a taboo act, and swearwords often refer to taboo subjects — where there is taboo, there is the potential for the visceral erotic.
Swearing is also harder to appropriate than most other language. Brands and corporations still feel somewhat bound by the vague social rules that structure what language is appropriate in ‘professional’ settings. McDonalds will not tell you that Big Macs are fucking great. Pepsi will not tell you that Coca Cola tastes like piss. Yet. For now, these can be OUR words, little defiant spells against the incessant commodification of everyday life. The more obscene and graphic the imagery evoked, the greater the spell of protection. Reclaimed slurs fulfil the same function even more powerfully.
Byung Chul Han argues that the unwritten societal rules that stop us swearing freely in public represent a social tie: something that binds society together, therefore constituting society itself. For some of us — autists — such implicit rules can be confusing, creating a society that excludes and ostracises. Perhaps the explicit acceptance of swearing as a legitimate form of affective language is an agreement that could help bind another section of society together? This agreement might be for the sake of those of us who wish to be ourselves within a collective context; to express ourselves with emotion and feeling; to convey affect, in favour of sublimating it into civilised etiquette.
Rather than seeking to bind ourselves together with social rules that refer back to the stories of the past and tradition that is full of dominating logic designed to maintain hierarchical power relations, perhaps we can come up with new ones that derive from a collective desire for freedom and the absence of non-consensual power relations? Soft and gentle rules that allow us to clearly offer and withdraw consent to their knots, without fear of ostracisation and punishment.
A more explicit future in all senses of the word!
How do you relate to swearing? Are there other forms of language or expression that feel difficult to access because of confusion around the social rules that govern them? How could we communciate and interact in ways that are less informed by deference and etiquette, and more concerned with relating in ways that reflect our affective experience of being in relational connection — whilst remaining considerate of varying levels of intimacy that exist within different relations, and commonly held boundaries?
With love and solidarity
This brought back such a vivid memory of experimenting with swearing in middle school and having a [very religious] friend tell me it wasn’t Christian and was making her uncomfortable. Oh, the shame!!!
My kid curses like a sailor in the house. I set our house as an experiment zone where she could play with language and then talked about how curse words are the absolute most satisfying sometimes, but in some places can be too “expensive”/risky and/or lose their value and impact sometimes if used too much. I was really amazed at how intuitive she seemed to be about when and where it felt good to use those words…but maybe I just taught her to mask outside the house? 😂
It's so interesting that your experience of cursing (swearing) is that it shows more vulnerability. From my observations, at least some of the time and depending on the context, people curse in order to cover up vulnerabilty - putting on a tough facade rather than showing a more vulnerable side (hurt, sadness, shame, etc.).