Calling a woman a skank, tramp, bitch, whore, stripper is still misogyny

[meadowlander]

188. I agree,

but I also think that the awfulness of slurs is informed by the systems of institutional oppression that sit behind them and by their historic context.

Why is "nigger" worse than "dick"? Because we had hundreds of years of slavery in this country and because African Americans are still regularly racially profiled and discriminated against in the job and housing markets and are routinely gunned down by police for the crime of "walking in public while black".

Why is "bitch" worse than "prick"? Because we had thousands of years of women being viewed as property and because they still don't get equal pay, face sexual harassment at work, have their opinions ignored while we talk about how they dress, and are raped at a epidemic level and then blamed for it because they were walking outside at night or not dressing appropriately or talking to the wrong person.

Bitch when applied to a human being means someone who takes a submissive sexual position (which is implied to make them bad or lesser than the person who takes a dominant sexual position) or someone who, because they are relatively powerless, snipes at those who have more power behind their backs (which is implied to make them bad because they don't "have the balls" to attack the other person to their face). The fact that that term is applied to women speaks to society's view of them and to their historical reality. It is generally used to tell women who are expressing their opinion to shut up and sit back down or women who are being assaulted to relax and take it.

I don't think you can take the term out of that context and compare it to a term like "prick" or "dick"- meaning a man who is being overbearing, rude, inconsiderate or annoying because of over-confidence and entitlement and who is being told by society that he needs to be more considerate of other people or tone down his level of aggression. The level of baggage with those terms is just not the same.

All insults are mechanisms of social control but they do not all exert the same level of force. It actually does matter who is pulling the levers, who is on the receiving end, the levels of institutional and historic "machinery" trying to push us into behaving in a certain way and the motivations behind that social control.