Where Does the Word Pussy Come From, and Should We Be Using It?

A few years ago, I was working with a sex therapist who exclusively used the word pussy to describe her vulva and that of her clients. In her view the word had been reclaimed from the misogynists, and it was our job to keep it that way by maintaining its circulation with a fresh and positive meaning.

I tried hard to embrace that sentiment and used the word with her, but my heart wasn’t in it. I grew up in the late 90s and early 2000s when pussy was used almost exclusively by boys to diminish other boys. They threw the term around like a grenade along with all the other ‘bad’ words their big brothers and sisters had taught them to see what damage they could do. It was mission accomplished as far as I was concerned – I thought this most private part of me was a dirty secret.

It didn’t occur to me until many years later that I didn’t have to rely on adolescent boys to tell me what to think about my own body. And a while beyond that before I realized grown men didn’t have the final say either. The connotations, however, remained but then every word for vulva divides the crowd. What’s clinical for one is respectful for another; one person’s vulgarity is another’s empowerment.

When deciding if you like a word or not it can help to understand its origins. The beginnings of pussy to describe genitalia is contested, but there are a few theories. By the 1580s people had begun to use it as an affectionate nickname for girls and women with characteristics associated with a cat, such as being soft and sweet. The feline meaning of the word puss is likely to have come from the Middle Low German pūs and is also imitative of the psss noise you might make to call a cat’s attention.

It wasn’t until over a century later in 1699 that the earliest sexual example appeared in A Choice Collection of New Songs and Ballads, by the English writer Thomas D’Urfey. He wrote,

“As Fleet as my Feet Could convey me I sped; / To Johnny who many Times Pussey had fed.”

Over the next couple of centuries, the word gradually shifted from describing a woman’s endearing personality to describing her genitalia. Some linguists suggest a parallel origin in Old Norse with the word pūss, meaning pocket or pouch, or in Old Saxon where pūse means vulva. By the 1960s and 70s pussy was widely used in porn to describe the vulva and evolved as an insult to mean coward. From that point on the term spread as ubiquitously as porn itself.

I had been unsure about the empowerment of pussy, but one thing I’ve always loved is a pun. I also enjoy putting vulva-inspired imagery into the world to counter the onslaught of phallic symbolism that dominates skylines, popular culture, and the English language. Skyscrapers, rockets, guns, and cigars are all symbols of male authority and potency, while words like seminal (derived from semen) and hysteria (from the Greek hystera, meaning womb) all perpetuate the idea of men as important and women as weak.

What I love about the double entendre of pussy in today’s lexicon is that the word cat refers to two things; sweet fluffy purring kittens, and their ferocious big cat cousins. The Pussy Cat collection takes tigers, cheetahs, jaguars, snow leopards, panthers, and lionesses, and puts them all in their own luscious ecosystem of full blooms, vines, and subterranean landscapes. Inside these paintings the word pussy stops being a shameful and objectifying word and becomes a dominant predator leaping towards a celestial figure in the sky. Each painting is intricate, vibrant, and above all, demands respect. That’s a version of pussy I can get behind.