When You Call a Cunt a Cunt, It Doesn’t Make You a Good Person (FIELD NOTES)

A friend said something to me over lunch recently that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about:

“When you call a cunt a cunt, it doesn’t make you a good person.”

That conversation sent me back to a summer afternoon at a local poetry reading, where I overheard two conversations that have stayed with me ever since.

One was a man explaining how much easier women have it these days.

The other was a joke about women’s bodies.

Neither conversation was unusual. That’s part of what bothered me.

In this short solo episode, I reflect on sexism, nostalgia, the stories we tell ourselves about the past, and what happens when you hear something you know is wrong but aren’t quite sure how to challenge it in the moment.

Sometimes feminism looks like marching in the streets.

Sometimes it looks like sitting quietly at a poetry reading, listening, and wondering whether to speak up.

And sometimes it looks like coming home and making a podcast instead.

Content Note ~
This podcast gets into bodies, panic attacks, trauma, sexism, mental health, and the occasional emotional sinkhole. Please look after yourself only listen when you feel safe to engage with potentially triggering material. 
Also, I swear.

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Credits
Recorded on the lands of the Ramindjeri and Ngarrindjeri peoples.
Sovereignty never ceded.

Recorded & edited at Ridley Farm Studio by Luke Ridley
https://ridleyfarmstudio.com...

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I had lunch with one of my very best friends last week. I'm really lucky that her son lives in the same region that I do. She lives in the outback, but she comes down to where the region I live in two or three times a year, and we have a nice long lunch normally and catch up and talk about how surprised the people that knew me back when I first met her are very surprised that I say the word cunt. But I definitely wasn't relaxed. So maybe I was a bit uptight. But um I just like to think it's probably my inner bogan, my inner Mali girl sort of got shoved down inside me when I went to a very posh private boarding school and then to Adelaide University and sort of I don't know, I think I tried to live a life that belongs to other people and not me. Anyway, when I was having lunch with my friend, she said the best saying to me, she said, you know, Catherine, when a cunt calls a cunt a cunt, it doesn't make you a good person, or something like that. When you call a cunt a cunt, it doesn't make you a good person. And I think that's part of the problem with feminist activism, is that sometimes I feel like on this podcast and in my life, all I'm doing is calling out misogyny and sexism. Um, but anyway, here we are again. Welcome to a brand new episode of The C-Word with Catherine Redden. It's just a short one today. It's just me on my own, it's a solo episode. Last summer I went to a poetry reading afternoon. A local bookstore. Umce a month, they have a poetry reading afternoon, and you you go and grab a coffee and slice of cake to support the business that put it on, and then local poets read their poetry. And it's a great afternoon, and and I was surprised, and this reflects poorly on me and not on the other participants, but I thought that it was going to be an afternoon of bush ballads, given that I live in regional South Australia. Look, and I I grew up on bush ballads, but it's not something that resonates with me now. But I was blown away by the contemporary poets and poems that were read out. They were they were phenomenal and people were very welcoming. I mean, yes, there were some bush ballads, and there's a guy, a local guy, well, there is actually a couple of local guys who've had volumes and volumes and volumes of what I would call nostalgic poetry published, hankering for a time that never existed. But that's okay too, you know, like I know that that's what you get in creative communities. During this poetry reading, at the table next to me, and I cannot remember the context for this, but the perhaps someone had read a poem about washing machines. And then at the table next to me, a a man who was in the generation above me, so a baby boomer, said there was a woman and a man sitting at his table. He said, you know, women have really got it easy these days. You know, before in the 40s and 50s, they had to do all the hand washing, you know, and use the I forget what that thing was called. My grandma had one, used to rub clothes on it, and you know, he said, they've really got it easy now with these modern conveniences, and I hadn't yet heard my friend saying, which was when you call a cunt a cunt, it doesn't make you a good person. Um but I thought to myself, holy shit, there is so much wrong with that comment, mainly because it hasn't made women's life easier, it's made human life easier, and women are still doing you know, 70 or 80% of housework, unpaid housework, and they are bearing the brunt of unpaid housework, and it it is harder on their bodies, our bodies physically, it's harder mentally, and it leaves them much less room to get a career and keep a career and enjoy their career. Um, and so for this man to sit there and he pontificated for a long time about how women today have it a lot easier than his mother's generation. What's really on top of all of that that we that we often don't think about, but that before the first world war, a lot of people had help in their houses. So servants um and staff, whether it was live-in staff or people came and helped out in the home, and it was really, really common. Um, and actually, I just want to give you a little anecdote about how that shows out in developing countries. The last time I was in the Philippines um with a taxi driver, he was talking about his nanny, and so it's still common in other cultures for there to be layers and layers and layers of women and men, but mainly women doing household tasks, household jobs, household chores. And after the First World War, what happened is there was a that sort of also there was industrialization was happening, and so women, there were less people employed in service, meaning if you watch Downton Abbey, you'll know what that means, but there were less people employed in making a household run, and so then the jobs, those jobs fell to the women. So, what had happened by the 40s and 50s is that married women, married middle class and upper middle class women were doing the bulk of household chores that previously were probably done by staff. But due to a lot of things like industrialization and establishment of labor unions and more fair pay, it wasn't as economical and there weren't as many people to that you could employ as staff. So women took on those roles. So for people to sit in 2025 in summer in a poetry reading and say within my earshot that women had it easy today is not to understand history and is to be nostalgic for a time that didn't exist. Did I say anything? No. And what happened straight after that is the MC for the afternoon made a joke about the double D's. Apparently, there were two men whose first name started with D, that became a ho about boobs right in front of me. And I really didn't know how to take that either because it's not funny to talk about women's breasts in public like that. It's not if I talked about a man's penis size the way they were guffouring about a woman's breast size in public, I would be asked to stop. So they were just two things that I noticed in my community, and I didn't really know how to deal with it. I I wasn't sure what to do. I hadn't actually started recording podcast episodes at that time, but it is something that stayed with me. Um, I am a bit of a magpie when it comes to other people's conversations. Um, I do listen, makes me sound creepy, but I do listen to what people are saying. I'm often in public reading a book or having a coffee on my own or whatever, and so I'm often not with other people in public, so I have so I have a different kind of range of hearing, I guess. And yeah, it's um misogyny and sexism is alive and well, it's alive and well, and I don't know what to do about it. I don't know, you know, like should I interrupt that conversation? Should I just do a podcast? Should I write a substack? Um, I I don't know, you know, and I keep coming back to that thing that Malcolm Turnbull said, which was something like I'm probably going to misquote him, you know, not all disrespect ends in violence against women, but all violence against women starts with disrespect. And I think until we learn how to respect each other in the words that we choose, and and we learn how to be self-reflective enough and vulnerable enough to or I'm just less pig headed to let people live their life the way they want to live it. It's none of my business if someone wants to be a pony or change their gender, or it's it's none of my business, and I celebrate all of that diversity. Do I understand it all? I mean maybe, but I don't have to understand it. You know, I don't I just have to live and let live, you know, that's a really important value of mine. I I really hope that I am not racist and that I am an LGBQTI ally. I mean, I think we all know that I'm a feminist. Um, but I it's really important to me to accept people from all cultures. And if you want to believe in a mythical being in the sky or on earth that is helping you through life by you saying affirmations to that mythical being or beings, then I fully support that. It's just I don't want you to force me to live by the rules that your mythical being has made. So I don't know really where this podcast, I mean, I know where it started. It started with me overhearing two conversations that were sexist and misogynistic and not and being shocked by them and not knowing what to do, you know, not not I wanted to say, what the fuck are you talking about? But I knew that would come across as aggressive and just sort of play into what they all possibly already think about angry feminists, so I didn't say anything. Came on a podcast instead. But I would say if you're a person who talks about women's life being easier in 2026, and you're a man, and you're a baby boomer man, I guess I'd ask you how much housework you do at home, and how much have you done? How much child rearing did you do? Do you do, and how much have you done? You know? And I'd say that as a man, you don't know anything about what it is to be a woman in 2026 and raise kids and have a job and maintain a relationship and maintain ties to community and maintain you don't know what it's like. So you should shut the fuck up. Okay, well, there we go. That is another episode of the C-Word, just a short, sharp, what the fuck episode. Um, I hope you're all well. It is cold and rainy and fantastic on the Flurio. My favorite time of year is winter. Um, wherever you are in the world, I hope that you do not have to overhear dumb conversations about men, but uh about men talking about how easy women's life is. Okay. Bye. Thanks for listening.