“With a cunt”

This chapter highlights the poets at the sixteenth-century Scottish court who use obscene misogyny to foster homosocial community and teach one another codes of masculine sexuality. It details the discussion of insult poetry, in which men use obscene misogyny to teach one another to refrain from intercourse altogether. These exchanges in the literary insult battles known as “flytings,” dislodge the primacy of copulating with women from models of exemplary masculinity. In the code espoused by Chaucer's faction, not having sex is unmanly, while for the flyters over a century later, intercourse imperils one's masculinity and bodily sovereignty. Ultimately, the chapter reveals how flyters draw on three separate but overlapping misogynist cultural traditions to teach their lessons about sexuality: the internalized misogyny in women's criminal quarrels that accuses women of breaking patriarchal rules governing sexual conduct; the literary misogyny articulated by aged male lyric voices that views women's bodies as devouring men's virility; and the clerical misogyny that encourages men to eschew matrimony by invoking women's inherent lasciviousness and moral depravity.