Lindsay Zoladz ponders its place in the lexicon (as does Louis CK in the very NSFW video above):
As modernism challenged Victorian customs of repression and censorship, plenty of other once-forbidden words entered the modern lexicon. So why did "cunt" remain so taboo? It’s hard to pinpoint a simple explanation, but in a 2006 segment of the BBC’s etymology-themed TV series Balderdash and Piffle, Germaine Greer proposed that the condemnation of "cunt" was an inevitability in a patriarchal culture with a fear of female desire. "For hundreds of years, men identified female sexual energy as a dangerous force," she noted. "And unlike other words for female genitals, this one sounds powerful. It demands to be taken seriously." The vilification of "cunt" doesn’t just cast female genitalia as something that should remain unspoken (as did "nothing," a popular and proto-Freudian slang term for ladyparts back in Shakespeare’s day), but it erects restrictive boundaries around expressions of female desire—remember that the more "polite" word, vagina, does not encompass the part of the cunt responsible for pleasure.
The Dish 