Most of us who have ever been to a club or a gig will have experienced the fun of waking up the next morning with a slightly blurry ink stamp on your hand which refuses to come off with just one shower and so leaves you with a sort of mucky blotch for a day or so. In most cases, that stamp just has a random image or pattern, or maybe the club's logo. This is generally all pretty innocuous. But what if you wake up with something a little more...controversial on your limbs?
Yesterday journalist Sinead Ryan tweeted about her discomfort when her daughter returned from a night out with the word "cunt" stamped on her arm in what I have to say is a rather nice font.
The club, on South William Street, is called C U Next Tuesday - hence the classy acronym. The club issued a statement saying that the stamp was optional and that clubbers could ask for another stamp if they didn't fancy walking around with "cunt" on their arm (which probably wouldn't go down well in most workplaces). Though one wonders how many attendees want to be the ones who ask for the other stamp.
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The thing is, I find it hard to be shocked and appalled by all this. I don't have a problem with the c-word, depending on context. I wrote my M.A. thesis on the 1960s and 1970s underground magazine Oz, which had a special Cuntpower issue in 1970, edited by Germaine Greer, and I always knew the word could be used by feminists. The C U Next Tuesday people declared that "has long since lost any misogynistic connotations in Ireland, where it is used liberally in all sorts of contexts", and they have a point, this is pretty much true - unlike the U.S., where the c-word is only really aimed at women and definitely misogynistic.
Of course, that doesn't mean I want someone else to stamp it on me, and I do understand why Sinead Ryan was very upset when her daughter came home with it emblazoned on her arm. However, my main objection to this whole thing is that using the word as an element of a club name and stamping it on people's arms for supposedly outrageous shock value just seems so...adolescent to me. It's lazy. It's so "tee hee, it's a rude word!" Why yes, so it is, how shocking. But at the end of the day, this club isn't a youth club - it's a club attended by adults. And if they want to have the c-word stamped on their arms, who am I to tell them it's the equivalent of doodling rude words on the school toilet doors?
So what do you think? Are you offended by the door stamp? Would you want to go to a club that did it? And what would you think if your son or daughter came home with the stamp?
