Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

by Amanda Montell

like how the term penetration implies (and reinforces) the idea that sex is from the male perspective. Like sex is defined as something a man does to a woman. The opposite might be envelopment or enclosure. Can you imagine how different life would be if that’s how we referred to sex?

If you want to insult a woman, call her a prostitute. If you want to insult a man, call him a woman.

master and mistress: These terms came to English by way of Old French, and initially both of them indicated a person in a position of authority. Only the feminine term contaminated over the decades to mean a sexually promiscuous woman with whom a married man, as Schulz puts it, “habitually fornicates.”