Now That Amy Schumer Can Say Pussy on Comedy Central …

There’s no elegant way to say this, so I’m going to let Jessi Klein do the honors.

“We can say pussy now!” the head writer and executive producer of Inside Amy Schumer announced over the weekend during a panel discussion for the New York Comedy Festival. “Can we talk about that? It was a great moment in U.S. history.”

Obviously, she was being funny here, but the crowd certainly approved. And while it won’t go down in any history books, the show’s fight to say the word “pussy” on Comedy Central did get quite the round of Internet applause and a firm endorsement from Lady Twitter.

As you probably know if you’ve spent more than a half hour watching Comedy Central, they drop the word “dick” pretty liberally for comedic effect. And this didn’t seem right to Schumer and her team, who — in addition to being advocates for equality and free speech and other noble notions — didn’t want to interrupt a sketch about meerkat pussies with a clunky “bleep.”

“Halfway through the first season, we started to realize that a lot of the show was addressing women’s issues and gender politics,” explained fellow executive producer Dan Powell during the panel discussion. “I’d written a letter, sort of like what I’d write to my congressman, and I guess it struck a chord.”

Outlets such as the New York Times will never have this problem, as they have decided to keep things extremely classy and avoid all questionable words — sometimes very creatively, as documented by the hilarious Fit To Print Tumblr.

But when you open the door to some curses and some more vulgar terms, in the name of comedy or otherwise, you have to do it across the board. It’s ingrained in us that everyone has the right to say what they want — even when it’s offensive, even when it’s awful — and any compromise on that feels somewhere between patronizing and criminal. When you start restricting words, in this country at least, people get uncomfortable. (Why hello, Muzzle Mumia supporters. Nothing to see here, carry on. I grew up in this city and know better than to open your can of crazy.)

Now, “pussy” isn’t a word I particularly like, but that’s almost entirely due to the fact that it also means “cat.” But the basic premise, yes, I can get behind: If “dick” isn’t such an offensive, ugly and threatening term that it has to be censored on Comedy Central, then “pussy” shouldn’t be either.

And that, friends and former friends, would bring us to the dreaded C-word.

The last time I didn’t take the word “cunt” seriously on the Internet, two very angry women sent me a box of personalized T-shirts from the veritable Awesome Dudes Printing suggesting that I was one. Please don’t do that again — it stressed my mom out, and she is a nice woman who is already coping with the fact that this is what her daughter does for a living.

I get it, ladies — I do. It’s been hurled at us as an insult for too many years, and very specifically at women who dare to move around this world as if they were entitled to equal rights and opportunities. The nerve.

But, here’s the thing: We look pretty ridiculous celebrating the right to say “pussy” in the Comedy Central boys’ club while freaking out every time we hear the word “cunt.” Although not necessarily synonymous, the basic principle is the same. Both terms turn an anatomical feature into an insult — just like the counterpart that we’re somehow more comfortable with, “dick.”

The one difference, perhaps, is that we more frequently call men who don’t conform to expected gender roles “pussies” and women who don’t “cunts.” But I’m pretty sure this isn’t a line of Delicate Flower reasoning we want to get behind while demanding equality. (Then again, you never know — stranger things have happened in the comments section.)

A couple of years ago, a British colleague with a penchant for swearing asked me, earnestly, why the term was so offensive in America. I didn’t have a good answer circa 2012, and I have less of one now that we’re so psyched on the word “pussy.” But my advice to him would still be the same: It’s no worse than any other swear — but don’t be a dick about it.

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