If we’re going to analyze what the word slut really means, where it comes from, and why we say it, the next natural step is to ask the same questions about the rest of the gendered words we habitually use without thinking, like woman, man, female, male, guy, girl, she, he, etc. Why do gender and sex, as opposed to any other identifying qualities, play such a fundamental role in how we talk about people? Why is singling out a person’s gender through language so important to us?
