Sluts, bitches & hos: Women, the last bastion of denigration

As we have learned in the last few weeks, making racist, racially charged, or anti-gay comments or slurs is now a punishable, or fireable, offense. Or at the bare minimum will incur the collective wrath of social media, celebrities, bloggers, Liberals, the main stream press, and, on occasion, even Republicans.

But it is still fine to slur, denigrate, demean, or slut-shame women! 

I know, PHEW! Right, bitches? I mean, we wouldn't want Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly to lose his job or be suspended, right*? And what would life be like without rap music?

And lest you think that guys are the only ones getting away with saying awful, humiliating things about women, just check out all the press around Monica Lewinsky this week.

While society has taken steps to ban or punish bullying in other arenas (at school and online), apparently it is still a-okay to denigrate or humiliate, or "slut shame," a woman for something stupid and naive she did, consensually, with a married man who should have known better, at the age of 22.

And you know who are the worst offenders? Women! WTF? Seriously, WTF, ladies?

Shame on us.

I'm not saying that it's okay for women, of any age, to go around seducing, or trying to seduce, married men. It is not. But find me one college age or slightly older female who hasn't lusted after a married professor, rock star, celebrity or famous person, who wouldn't have jumped at the chance to have "sexual relations" with that man.

Indeed, at Hillary's alma mater back in the 1980s, trying to seduce the (often married) male professors was a sport.

We women can be such hypocrites.

And it's not just the Monica Lewinskys who get the abuse (deservedly or not). Any woman who is deemed too flirtatious, too aggressive, too threatening, or too whatever, especially if she is attractive -- even if she hasn't done anything wrong -- is fair game.

We women can't win. You turn down a guy, you're a bitch (according to the guy). You don't turn him down, you're a slut (according to other women).

By the way, of the 201 slang words for women, the majority are derogatory and have to do with sex (and loose morals), while there are only 72 slang terms for a man, the majority of which are not really pejorative, mate.

And while I applaud society cracking down on racists, bigots, and homophobes, I wish sexism and misogyny, vicious anti-female comments and slurs, were greeted with the same ire and intolerance. (Ditto anti-Semitism, but that's another blog post.)

*For the record, former shock jock Donald Imus was not fired from WFAN back in 2007 because he jokingly referred to the Rutgers women's basketball team as "hos." It was because Imus called them "nappy-headed hos," i.e., he used a racial slur. (Just Google "Donald Imus firing." Almost all the articles cite Imus as using a racist or racial slur, not the fact he called the women hos.)