jthorn65 at sbcglobal.net wrote:
>
>
> I've heard my students use the term slut for males as much a females. This is a change from when you
> were teaching. The word has the same meaning but cannot carry quite the same contempt since our culture
> praises sexually active males and not females. Sluts are no longer exclusively female.
[Note: My post was originally written in response to a specific situation on marxmail, and apparently Charles responded to it on this list by mistake. But I guess the general topic is appropriate at any time.]
Some students always did suggest "slut," but while language is pretty malleable, it's not in this instance. What the word "slut" would mean applied to a male would be "You are just as bad as all those females." It just doesn't come close to carrying the load that, for centuries, "slut" has carried. The difficulty of finding slur words that aren't gendered is a dramatic image of the history of gender relations.
Carrol