A Cunt, Between Melville and Fitzgerald
Ronit Sky

“The responsibility sits between our legs,” say Inga Muscio in the first page of her cunt lovin’ book Cunt. Her bold decision to talk about the un-talked-about, to laugh about the unseen, to invest the hidden, to love the unloved is what makes this book a book that all women and men should read.

She doesn’t spend pages and pages bitching out men and our patriarchal society, she spends maybe a page and a half. What she concentrates on is ways in which we, as women, need to love and protect ourselves. Like the quote above, she explains ways in which we can become stronger and take responsibility for every aspect of our lives.
She spends a chapter concentrating on rape. The preceding chapter is solely about building communities of women around each of us. These ideas of community and rape go hand in hand. Through the suffocated silence of most rape victims, all women suffer. She inspires the reader to build friendships with many different types of women in your surrounding communities. Through numbers we can suffocate rape.
She pulls herself out of the typical “author” role and embarrasses and teaches her mistakes and triumphs to the reader. This book deserves more than praise by a critic, it deserves all of us to read and then re-read it!

Ronit is a Theatre and a Women’s Studies Major at Santa Monica College.