Good afternoon.
Your mother’s cunt.
(Applause)
Let’s analyze that phrase.
Public: Bald! Bald! Bald!
Let’s analyze that phrase.
Not “good afternoon,” nor “bald” but “you mother’s cunt.”
What does that insult mean?
What do we say to someone?
We point them to the place of origin, right?
Where they came from or should’ve been born.
When I was a kid there were many guys
that when told “your mother’s cunt” said:
“Don’t dare mess with my mom.”
Ridiculous, right? Oedipus complex.
That common place of seeing your mom as someone immaculate, without sex.
I always thought it was ridiculous this “don’t dare mess with my mom.”
Even when I realized that my mother had sex.
An insult can get so absurd
that the cunt can belong to your mother,
but also to your grandmother, to your aunt, to your sister.
Another thing that called my attention was guys saying:
“Your sister’s cunt,”
“I don’t have a sister, I have fun with yours.”
(Laughter)
There I realized that the sister, although she’s not the mother,
there’s also something obscure about messing with the sister.
I don’t know, I don’t have one.
And truth is, I didn’t come here to have fun with anybody.
Anyway, the most revealing insult of my childhood
was not something said, but something I read.
There was this old car in Pompeya, my childhood neighborhood,
on Pirovano Street.
I think it was abandoned, very dirty,
and it had written with a finger over the dust of the windshield:
“Wash me, dirty.”
And on the hood, also with a finger:
“Fuck the reader.”
(Laughter)
To see those two writings in a car was revealing for me.
Imagine a kid, 6 or 7 years old,
I was just learning to read and saw that a car
had all that to tell me.
So I realized that there was two things there, different.
On one side, the “Wash me, dirty.”
The “Wash me, dirty” was, clearly, a message from the car.
It was the car that was talking to the owner.
It was demanding something.
The car putting the owner in evidence.
“Fuck the reader” was something different.
Because nobody said it, it wasn’t the car speaking there.
It gave the impression that it was a message from nobody.
Which implies that it can be a message from God.
(Laughter)
It was at that time when an atheist like me,
raised by a Marxist mother and father,
understood what a miracle is.
(Applause)
No one writes “Fuck the reader,” I thought.
Because if someone writes it, reads it.
That is, you can’t write without reading.
There were then two options:
whether it was God
or someone cracking up at me,
at whoever reads that, at humanity as a whole.
And since I didn’t become a believer, I went for the second option,
for the mockery, for the irony.
And irony is one of the keys of an insult.
With insult comes wit, mischief, creativity.
An insult is a sophisticated thinking exercise
at the service of something crappy.
(Laughter)
The excitement of the one who writes “Fuck the reader”
lies in thinking what will happen to whoever reads it.
That is, excitement, imagination.
A wanker!
(Laughter)
Therefore, an idealist.
When I read that phrase on that dirty car,
I not only had a revelation but also a command.
I felt it like a command.
On one hand, I had to write a book titled “Fuck the reader”
and on the other, I had to create a dictionary of insults
to plunge into that shit.
That’s how I wrote
“Fuck the Reader:
Argentine Dictionary of Insults, Name Calling and Expletives.”
(Applause)
It is strange what happens with insults.
Because if we are what we eat,
we are also what we discard, the waste we make.
And if language is food, the insult is excrement.
And there comes a problem because if the insult is excrement
it means that we like coprophagy.
There are some confusions in regard to insults.
Think of a text that includes the words
“dick,” “pussy,” “fuck,” “ass” and “shit.”
(Laughter)
Some may say even technically,
if a movie contains that, it’s “adult language.”
No! No! It’s not adult language, it’s children language.
My fascination when I read “Fuck the reader”
on that dirty car was a childhood fascination.
To insult is to go back to childhood,
is to re-activate those mechanisms of ingenuity
and also of emotion.
It’s to rediscover the world with the intensity we do
when we are kids.
Another thing that’s said: the insult is irrational.
No! It’s rationality.
The insult is part of our rational side.
A childish rationality if you will, like in “fuck the reader”,
yes, but rationality in the end.
Surely, it is the last station, the frontier of rationality.
Because an insult is violence.
A representation of violence.
It can be violent, but it is a representation.
Beyond the insult, there’s the punch.
And that is objective violence.
That’s why we need to insult.
(Applause)
But of course, how do we do it when we know that
many insults are racist, macho, homophobic,
sexists and classists?
And many times the insults
serve as a pretext or theoretical sustenance
or social acceptance for these aberrant crimes,
like femicide, easy trigger, repression,
enforced disappearance.
(Applause)
How to fight this rampage?
A few years ago, in his wonderful presentation
in the Spanish Language Congress,
the master writer Roberto Fontanarrosa
asked for pardon for the bad words.
So, back to that idea,
I come here today to propose that we think about a program
for the mitigation of damages of insults.
Mitigation of damages, that is, to give technical information
for responsible use.
Like with drugs.
But for that we must be aware that,
if we are going to replace an insulting word,
it has to be with another as blunt
as the one we replace.
Not this silly and cheap political correctness.
A serious and courageous program
for the mitigation of damages of insults
should take into account
that we are not going to destroy machismo until we don’t find
a word to define cunnilingus —
oral sex to women —
as we have “blow job” for fellatio.
(Applause)
Currently, there are reasons to think
that a paradigm shift in insulting is possible.
Mostly, when we see
that some insulted groups take charge of the insult,
use it and thus neutralize it.
Think of the terms “fag” —
with the Peronists fags in the lead —
the term “bitch” —
with the feminist bitches in the lead —
or “black slums”
and the slum pride of the slum music.
(Applause)
Something that had already begun with soccer teams.
Think about it: shitholes, chickens, lepers, rogues, crows,
“quemeros,” “tatengues,” niggers, etcetera.
They are all terms born as insults,
that fans of those soccer clubs took charge of.
But there are also reasons to think otherwise,
that a change is not possible in the insulting paradigm.
Because the insult became so massive that it can become innocuous.
Social networks eliminated the fear and calculation
that insulting in person implied.
You had to be careful when you insulted someone in their face.
Social networks created the virtual insult.
Then you can say anything from anonymity.
And virtual insult is to insult
what virtual sex is to sex.
It is not the same to tell someone “your mother’s cunt,”
from a false Twitter profile, than saying
“your mother’s cunt” in their face,
like I am saying it to you at this time.
(Applause)
Insults are the sewer of the language.
And the sewers, even if they can’t be seen,
are necessary, they are essential.
The insult is a fundamental expression of language.
That is why it’s absolutely necessary to plunge into the sewers
if you want to understand a language, to begin with,
but also the depth of the human soul.
They say what defines best a society
is how it treats its outcasts.
So rather than looking at the streets,
the buildings, bridges, hospitals, etc.
we must go and see how people live in prisons and madhouses.
From this idea, we can think that in order to understand how we talk,
more than reading poems, novels,
listening to songs and watching movies,
we have to see how we insult.
We are what we insult.
Let’s admit that we are capable of creating and believing in God,
but that we are also capable to shit on God.
Let’s admit that the only thing we care for in this life
is to keep being children.
Let’s take charge.
Your mother’s cunt!
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
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