Pussy (pronounced poos-ee or puhs-ee)
(1) In
informal use, a cat, especially a kitten (also as puss & pussy-cat).
(2) In colloquial use (now rare), an
affectionate term for a woman or girl, seen as having characteristics
associated with kittens such as sweetness or playfulness.
(3) Anything soft and furry; a bloom form; a furry catkin,
especially that of the pussy willow
(4) An
alternative name for the tipcat (rare).
(5) In
slang, a disparaging and offensive term referring to a timid, passive person
(applied almost exclusively to men).
(6) In
vulgar slang, the vulva (used as an alternative to the many other slang terms
which includes beaver, box, cunt, muff, snatch, twat poontang,
coochie, punani, quim & slit); considered by some to be the least
offensive and probably the one most used by women.
(7) In
vulgar slang, sexual intercourse with a woman
(8) In
vulgar slang of male homosexuals, the anus of a man who
is the passive participant in gay sex (ie “the bottom” as used by “the top”).
(9) In
slang, a disparaging and offensive term for women collectively, a form of
reductionism which treats women as sex objects.
(10) In
medical use (pronounced puhs-ee),
something puss-like or something from which puss emerges; containing or
resembling pus.
(11) As
pussy bow (or lavallière, pussycat bow
or pussy-bow) a style of neckwear worn with women's blouses and bodices. A bow,
tied (usually loosely) at the neck, the name is though derrived from the bows
owners sometimes attach to their domestic felines (pussy cats).
1580s: The construct was puss + -y (the diminutive suffix). It may be from the Dutch poesje, a diminutive of poes
(cat; vulva), akin to the Low German pūse
(vulva) and the Old English pusa (bag). Puss was probably
from the Middle Low German pūs or pūskatte or the Dutch poes (puss, cat (slang for vulva)),
ultimately from a common Germanic word for cat, perhaps ultimately imitative of
a sound made to get its attention and therefore similar in origin to the Arabic
بسة (bissa). Some sources declare puss in the sense of
"cat" dates from the 1520s but this is merely the earliest known
documented source and use probably long predates this instance. The same or similar sound is a conventional
name for a cat in Germanic languages and as far off as Afghanistan; it is the
root of the principal word for "cat" in the Rumanian (pisica) and secondary words in the Lithuanian
(puž (word used for calling a cat)), the
Low German (puus) and the Irish puisin (a kitten). It was akin to the West Frisian poes, Low the German Puus & Puuskatte, the Danish pus, the dialectal Swedish kattepus & katte-pus and the Norwegian pus. The form is known in several European, North
African and West Asian languages and may be compared with the Romanian pisică and Sardinian pisittu; there is also a Celtic thread,
the Irish pus (mouth, lip), from the Middle Irish bus. The noun plural was pussies.
The French village Pussy sits on the eastern slope of Mont Bellachat above the left bank of the Isère, 5½ miles (9 km) north-west of Moûtiers; it is part of commune of La Léchère in the Savoie département of France. The name is from Pussius, the owner of the region during the Roman occupation of Gaul.
Pussy
was first used as a term of endearment for a girl or
woman in the 1580s and (by extension), was soon used disparagingly of
effeminate men and) and applied childishly to anything soft and furry. The use to refer to domestic cats &
kittens was exclusive by the 1690s but as early as 1715 it was applied also to rabbits. The use as slang for
"female pudenda" is documented from 1879, but most etymologists don’t
doubt it had long been in oral use; perhaps from the Old Norse puss (pocket, pouch) (related to the Low
German puse (vulva)) or else a
re-purposing of the cat word pussy on the notion of "soft, warm, furry
thing. In this it may be compared with
the French le chat, which also has a double meaning, feline and genital. The earlier uses in English are difficult to
distinguish from pussy, “pussie” noted in 1583 being applied affectionately to
women. Pussy-whipped in the sense of "hen-pecked"
seems to date from 1956, a gentler form perhaps than the fifteenth century
Middle English cunt-beaten (an impotent man).
Despite the feeling among many that the history in vulgar slang is long,
etymologists note the rarity (sometimes absence) of pussy in its ribald sense
from early dictionaries of slang and the vernacular before the late nineteenth
century and the frequent use as a term of endearment in mainstream literature.
The pleonastic noun pussy-cat (also pussycat) which describes a domestic
cat or kitten dates from 1773 and came soon to be applied to people although
there appears to be no written record prior to 1859. By the early twentieth century it came to be
applied to smoothly running engines, the idea being they “purred like a
pussycat”. The noun pussy-willow was by
1835 a popular name of a type of common American shrub or small tree, so-called
for the small and very silky catkins produced in early spring; in the 1850s the
tree was also referred to as a pussy-cat but use soon faded. To “play pussy” was World War II Royal Air
Force (RAF) slang for "take advantage of cloud cover, jumping from cloud
to cloud to shadow a potential victim or avoid recognition." The medical use, the other (disgusting) adjectival
forms of which are pussier & pussiest, dates from circa 1890 although in this sense Middle English had the mid-fifteenth century pushi, a variant of the Latin pus (definite
singular pussen or pusset) which in pathology describes the yellowish fluid associated
with infected tissue.
Kate Moss in pussy bow blouse on video link.
As a set-piece event, about the only thing
which could have added to the spectacle of the Depp v Heard (John C Depp II v
Amber Laura Heard (CL–2019–2911)) suit & counter-suit defamation trial in
Fairfax County, Virginia, might have been Ms Heard (b 1986) afforcing her legal
team with Rudy Giuliani (b 1944).
Whatever difficulties Mr Giuliani has had with judges, he was good with
juries and may have been better at persuading the tribunal assembled in
Virginia to ignore the many irrelevant revelations which so tantalized those
running commentaries on social media. As
it was, there was something in the trial for just about everyone and one thing claimed
by some to have exerted a subliminal influence on judge and jury was what model
Kate Moss (b 1974 and appearing as a character witness for Mr Depp (b 1963)
which whom she’d enjoyed a predictably well-publicized relationship during the
1990s) wore for her brief testimony. That she appeared at all was because Ms Heard made the mistake of mentioning her name during testimony, thereby permitting Mr Depp's counsel to call her as a witness. Looking
stunning as expected, her appearance was quickly deconstructed and pronounced
as crafted to convey “authority and authenticity”, the key points being (1) a
simple hair-style, (2) an “authoritative jacket”, (3) “natural make-up” and (4)
a blouse with a pussy bow “casually tied” to avoid the appearance of a contrived
“court appearance look”. In other words,
she’d been styled to look like a witness appearing in court, not an actor playing
a witness appearing in court. Her three
minutes on the stand via a video link should not, according to some lawyers, have
been treated by the jury as substantive but what attracted most comment was her
choice of a white, spotted pussy bow blouse, a feature described in one gushing
critique as “…subtly subversive” with an origin as a kind of feminist
battledress for those beginning the march through the institutions of male
space; a challenge to the “traditional dress codes”.
Lindsay Lohan wearing what may be the last word in pussy bows (left), photo-shoot for Vogue Arabia, March 2026 (right). Note the stiletto pumps, optimized for toe cleavage.
Items recognizably pussybowish had been worn for centuries but the
re-purposing as alleged political statement is traced to the early 1960s when
Coco Chanel (1883-1971) added more voluminous bows to silk blouses, the bulk
and projection of the fabric off-setting the more severe linens and tweeds with
which they were paired. From there, the pussy bow
as feminist statement is held to have become overt in 1966 with the debut of
Yves Saint Laurent's (1936-2008) Le
Smoking design which legitimized the presence of the pantsuit in catalogues
and, increasingly, on the catwalk. The
1966 piece was a revived tuxedo, tailored to the female form, in velvet or wool
and notable for being softened with a silk pussy bow blouse which was
interesting in that had it been combined with the traditional tie worn by men
(which wouldn’t then have been anything novel), it would probably have been
condemned, not as subversive but as a cliché.
As it was, the pussy bow lent sufficient femininity to the redefined
pantsuit for it to be just radical enough to be a feminist fashion statement
yet not be seen as too threatening. Despite the claims of some, it wasn’t the
first time the pussy bow had been paired with trousers but it was certainly the
first appearance at a mainstream European show and it proved influential
although YSL, so pleased with his models, perhaps didn’t envisage the look on
latter-day adopters like crooked Hillary Clinton.
Whether the judge or jury in Virginia were
pussy bow-whipped into finding substantially for Mr Depp isn’t known but it was
certainly interesting Ms Heard lost in the US but won in the UK in 2020 despite
both trials being essentially about the same thing: Did Mr Depp subject Ms
Heard to violence and other forms of abuse?
Technically, there were differences, Mr Depp in the UK suing not his ex-wife
but The Sun, a tabloid newspaper
which had published a piece with a headline describing Mr Depp as a "wife
beater". By contrast, the US case revolved
around an article in The Washington Post written
by Ms Heard, the critical passages being three instances where she alleged she
had been a victim of domestic abuse. Mr
Depp sued not the newspaper but Ms Heard, claiming her assertions were untrue
and (although he wasn’t explicitly named as the perpetrator), that he’d thus
been defamed. The jury agreed Ms Heard (1)
had indeed implied she was the victim of Mr Depp’s violence, (2) that her
claims were untrue, (3) that purposefully she was being untruthful and (4) that
her conduct satisfied the legal standard of “actual malice”, a critical
threshold test in US law (dating from a ruling by the US Supreme Court in 1964
in New York Times v Sullivan) which imposes on public figures the need to prove
statements (even if anyway technically defamatory) were made with the knowledge
they were false or with reckless disregard of whether they were false or not, before
damages may be recovered.
Melania Trump (b 1970, US First Lady 2017-2021 and since 2025) in pussy bow blouse, Federal
Partners in Bullying Prevention (anti-cyber-bullying) summit at the Health
Resources and Service Administration, Rockville, Maryland, 20 August 2018.
More
significant still was probably that in London, the trial took place before a
high court judge who ruled on both matters of law and fact. By contrast, in the Fairfax County
Courthouse, the judge ruled on matters of law but it was the jury which alone
weighed the evidence presented and determined matter of fact. Thus in London one legally trained judge
assessed the evidence which hung on the issue of whether Mr Depp subjected Ms
Heard to violent abuse during their brief and clearly turbulent union. The judge found he had whereas seven lay-people,
sitting as a jury concluded he had not. The
two processes are difficult to compare because judges provide written judgments
(comprising the ratio decidendi (the
reasons for the finding) and sometimes some obiter
dictum (other matters of interest not actually critical in reaching the
decision)) whereas juries operate in secret and what was discussed in the three
days they took to deliberate isn’t known although there are hints in the list
of questions they presented to the judge before delivering the verdict. Those hints however hardly compare with Mr
Justice Nichol’s (b 1951) ruling of some 67,000 words.
Sue Lyon (1946-2019) in pussy bow blouse in the film Lolita (1962) (left) and with pussy (right) in an image from a pre-release publicity set for the film, shot in 1960 by Bert Stern (1929-2013).
What happened in the two trials was not
exactly comparable. In the US, much was
made of several statements earlier made by Ms Heard which, although not
directly concerned with the matters being litigated, once proved untrue, were
used by Mr Depp’s legal team to undermine Ms Heard’s credibility. The matter of the US$7 million divorce
settlement was for example mentioned by Mr Justice Nichol as an example of Ms Heard’s
credibility because she didn't profit from divorcing Mr Depp, citing her
announcement that she would donate the settlement to charity. That she failed to do and perhaps remarkably,
it wasn’t something at the time challenged by Mr Depp’s lawyers so the judge
accepted it as fact. Whether, had the
judge known the truth, his findings would have be different will never be
known. Of interest too is that as a
matter of law, Ms Heard's lawyers were not allowed to tell the jury the result
of the UK trial and that in London Mr Depp's lawyers had made it clear they
felt it unfair they were compelled to sue the newspaper and not Ms Heard. In Virginia, as a defendant, Ms Heard became
the focus and it did seem much of what was presented to the jury discussed her credibility,
not of necessity relating to the substantive matters of the case but also of
previous statements and conduct. When
the judgment in London was appealed, that was rejected by two judges of the
Court of Appeal which may encourage Ms Heard.
Proceeding with an appeal in the US is a high-risk business and there
are financial impediments even to lodging the papers but it is something which
will not involve a jury, decided instead on points of law and procedure by
judges less likely than jury members to be influenced by films they’ve seen, pussy bows
or other extraneous material.
Tiresomely difficult though some find the process (made more difficult by manufacturers using different conventions to
express sizing), an expert will always find a bra with a perfect fit.
A pussy bow
is thought either a fashion accessory or accoutrement depending on the way one thinks
about things but however classified, the things intrinsically are
ornamental. However, because of their
placement, if made with a sufficient volume of material, they can also be a
modesty device on the model of the fig leaves hurriedly adapted by Adam &
Eve in the Garden of Eden after committing mankind’s first sin, the tale
recounted in the Old Testament’s Book of Genesis:
Genesis
3:1-24 (King James Version of the Bible (KJV, 1611))
(1) Now the serpent
was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he
said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the
garden?
(2) And the woman
said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:
(3) But of the fruit
of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not
eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.
(4) And the serpent
said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
(5) For God doth know
that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be
as gods, knowing good and evil.
(6) And when the
woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the
eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof,
and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.
(7) And the eyes of
them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig
leaves together, and made themselves aprons.
(8) And they heard
the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and
Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the
trees of the garden.
(9) And the Lord God
called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?
(10) And he said, I
heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid
myself.
(11) And he said, Who
told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I
commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?
(12) And the man said,
The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did
eat.
(13) And the Lord God
said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The
serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.
(14) And the Lord God
said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all
cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and
dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:
(15) And I will put
enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall
bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
(16) Unto the woman he
said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt
bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule
over thee.
(17) And unto Adam he
said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of
the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed
is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy
life;
(18) Thorns also and
thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the
field;
(19) In the sweat of
thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it
wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
(20) And Adam called
his wife's name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.
(21) Unto Adam also
and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins, and clothed them.
(22) And the Lord God
said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now,
lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and
live for ever:
(23) Therefore the
Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence
he was taken.
(24) So he drove out
the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a
flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.
There is
much in Genesis including (3:7) the fig leaf inspiring the aprons Freemasons
wear to hide their shame, (3:13) women are to blame for everything (a notion
which has underpinned much of Christian theology for over 2,000 years) and (3:16)
a woman is but a man’s chattel.
Brooks
Nader in pussy bow and other items, Paris, July, 2025.
Sports Illustrated model Brooks Nader (b
1996) was in July 2025 photographed leaving Paris’s Laperouse restaurant is a
sheer back top, what lay beneath not so much (partially) obscured by an
over-sized pussy bow as accentuated.
Some thought obviously went into the ensemble because the pussy bow was neither
small enough to be superfluous nor sufficiently bulky to be fig-leafesque. So, in failing in both roles it succeeded as
a piece of click-bait which was of course the design brief. Interestingly, the pussy bow wasn’t the only
(nominal) modesty piece worn by Ms Nader, a pair of “nude” silicone nipple
pasties also discretely visible with the pussy bow working as a kind of focus-point
for the assembled paparazzi. Other than
that, she was close to unadorned and that was a good decision because she
looked so good accessories would have been a needless distraction.
Perhaps curiously,
despite the early appearance of the motif, in the art of Christendom, for
centuries the fig leaf wasn’t “obligatory” although they appear often enough
that at times they must have been at least “desirable” and in other periods and
places clearly “essential”. Once case of
practical criticism was the edict by Pius IX (1792–1878; pope 1846-1878) that extant
male genitalia on some of the classical statues adorning the Vatican should be “modified”
and that involved stonemasons, sculptors and other artisans receiving commissions
to “modify or cover” as required,
some fig leaves at the time added. However,
the late nineteenth century revisionism was restrained compared with earlier
artistic pogroms, the most infamous the “Fig Leaf Campaign”, a crusade against nudity in
art (especially male genitalia) initiated by Pope Paul IV (1476–1559; pope
1555-1559) and continued by his successors although it was most associated with
the ruling against “lasciviousness” in religious art made in 1563 by
the Council of Trent (1545-1563). It was
something very much in the spirit of the Counter-Reformation and it was Pius IV
who commissioned artist Daniele da Volterra (circa 1509–1566) to paint over the
genitalia Michelangelo (Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni; 1475–1564) had
depicted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, appending draperies or
loincloths; to his dying day Romans nicknamed Volterra “Il Braghettone” (The Breeches
Maker). As late as the nineteenth
century Greco-Roman statues from antiquity were still having their genitals
covered with fig leaves (sometimes detachable, a trick the British Museum later
adopted to protect Victoria’s (1819–1901; Queen of the UK 1837-1901) delicate
sensibilities during her infrequent visits).
However, it’s a persistent myth popes sometimes would be seen atop a
ladder, chisel in hand, hammering away for not only did they hire contractors
to do the dirty work, what was done was almost always concealment rather than
vandalism. What was consistent however
was that popes seen very much to have been penis-focused; despite in stone,
marble and on canvas there being many bare breasts in the Vatican’s corridors and
museums, there’s no record of pontiffs ever ordering them covered with pussy
bows.
Pussy Riot band members Yekaterina Samutsevich (b 1982, left), Maria
Alyokhina (b 1988, centre) and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (b 1989, right) in glass-walled dock during a court
hearing, Moscow, Friday 17 August, 2012. Mr Putin (Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin; b 1952; president or prime minister of Russia since 1999) is not a fan.
My darling Pussy: The letters of Lloyd George and Frances Stevenson, 1913-1941, (1975), edited by the English historian Alan John Percivale (A.J.P.) Taylor (1906–1990).
Even
though it was well into the twenty-first century and the nation had long since succumbed
to decadence, Boris Johnson (b 1964; UK prime-minister 2019-2022) still raided
a few eyebrows when he and his girlfriend moved into No 10 Downing Street, the
Tory Party’s few remaining blue stockings outraged because not only were they
the first couple to take up official residence there without benefit of
marriage but he was at the time still married to his second wife and the mother
of four of his children. History however
recalls things had been more debauched, David Lloyd George (1863–1945; UK
prime-minister 1916-1922) sharing the house during his premiership with not
only his wife bit also his mistress, Frances Stevenson (1888–1972), the former
usually ensconced upstairs in the prime-ministerial bed while her husband
enjoyed his younger companion’s affections a few floors down.
The
very modern-sounding arrangement was made possible by Ms Stevenson having been
appointed by Lloyd-George as his secretary while he was chancellor of the
exchequer, a job offer which was conditional upon her accepting concubinage as
part of the job description and it’s never been doubted Lloyd-George was an
earlier adopter of KPIs (key performance indicators). The press were
aware of the situation but things were done differently then and not a word of
the unusual domestic setup appeared in the papers and surprisingly, even foreign journalists turned
a blind eye when Lloyd George attended the Paris Peace Conference (1919) in the
company of Ms Stevenson and though the rumor mill among the diplomats would
have worked as efficiently then as now, the fiction she was “just his secretary” publicly was maintained by all. In the lovers’ private
conversations, she was his “Pussy” and he her “Tom Cat”, the feline theme taken
up in his son’s 1960s biography when he noted of his father: “…with an
attractive woman, he was as much to be trusted as a Bengal tiger with a gazelle.” In 1975, Weidenfeld and Nicolson
published My darling Pussy: The letters of Lloyd George and
Frances Stevenson,
1913-1941, edited by A.J.P. Taylor.
Ffion
Hague, Baroness Hague of Richmond, DBE.
Flawed like
us all, Lloyd George was one of the great characters of twentieth century
politics and one of the more noted political machinators, his life continuing
to attract historians. In writing The Pain and the Privilege: The Women in Lloyd George's Life (2008) Ffion Hague (b 1968 and the wife of William Hague
(b 1961; leader of the British Conservative Party 1997-2001)) was, as a Welsh
nationalist, perhaps biased and in much the same way A.J.P. Taylor’s hero-worship
of Lord Beaverbrook (Maxwell Aitken, 1879-1964) made his 1972 biography of the
press lord so vivid, Lady Hague’s views are not so much between the lines as
the lines themselves but this is not a criticism of what is a most readable
text. Whether or not Lady Hague was a
feminist was something some once felt compelled to debate although there is
little to suggest she much dwelt on the matter but in declining to censure Lloyd
George for his exploitive sexual relationships with women, she doubtlessly
disappointed some of the sisterhood. Her
take on his many conquests was that things were really symbiotic; the women
involved being well-informed individuals who knew what they were doing and ultimately
gained from the relationships, brief though often they proved. Her book was certainly a change from the
tradition of treating Lloyd George’s proclivities as cynically and shamelessly transactional
but, of course, as has long been known, there may also have been something of
the physiologically deterministic in it.
When Albert James (A.J.) Sylvester (1889–1989; principal private secretary
(PPS) to Lloyd George, 1923-1945) in 1947 published The Real Lloyd George, drawn from his diaries, the entry which drew
most comment an admiring comment about the Welsh Wizard’s penis: “…the biggest I
have ever seen.” Disappointing some, Mr Sylvester didn't burden his readers with the details or extent of the observational history which made his comparison possible but it's presumed he was on some basis an empiricist.
Horizontal integration: CHAZZ Pussy Chips.
Formed in
2018, CHAZZ Chips is a Lithuanian company with origins in the Trakai district. The operation describes itself as a “crazy young team” which was inspired to
enter the potato chip (crisps in some places) business because of “totally boring and unhealthy snack shelves!”,
thus the goal to “bring a variety of bold
flavours and offer a healthier alternative to snacks.” Using potatoes, beetroot & carrots grown on
Lithuanian farms, the range of flavours is wide including some the company
describes as being “things that most
people probably wouldn't even dare to think about!” That approach (“different, bold, inventive, proactive”) yielded the “first and only Putė and Pimpalo flavored
chips in the world” but CHAZZ became most famous for their skandalingi-produktai
(scandalous products) such as the (1) the Virginity Set (including the flavors Pussy &
Dick), (2) the Naughty Valentine Set, a gift box which included the
Virginity range as well as ChoClits and Sparkling Willies and (3 & 4) a brace
of Libido Booster chips, the two recipes advertised as “for him” and “for her”
which seems anachronistic given both could be gifts for him or her depending on
their proclivities and some might enjoy both, even simultaneously. There is much science to the development of taste and smell in the food
business but CHAZZ unfortunately don’t document the processes involved in
creating (and presumably taste-testing) the Pussy and Dick flavours.
