In “Definitely, Maybe” (which is a lousy movie, BTW — and not just because it’s a chick flick) the Abigail Breslin character asks her dad “What’s the male version of ’slut’?,” to which her dad replies, “They haven’t invented that one yet.”
I’ve heard that sort of comment before. We’re supposed to think, “Oh the injustice of it!” The great patriarchal board of word creators that sits in their leather hunting lodge smoking cigars, watching ESPN and inventing words to further the patriarchy has simply hasn’t missed that one. It’s so unfair!
But there are a couple words that come pretty close. There’s “cad”. And “masher” comes close as well. They’re just not popular words.
And why is that?
If you plug “Cad” into the thesaurus there are plenty of other words for male miscreants: “boor, bounder, creep, cur, dastard, heel, louse, lout, rascal, rotter, scoundrel, villain, worm,” and if you follow some of these you get plenty more, including “clod, goon, bumpkin, oaf,” etc. So there’s no reluctance to criticize men for falling short. The question is just what we criticize them for.
When the offended feminist asks why a man isn’t called a ’slut’ we might ask why a woman isn’t called an ‘oaf.’
The feminist will complain that the disproportionate usage is because it’s “okay” for men to be promiscuous, but when a woman is promiscuous she’s called bad names.
I don’t think that’s quite the point.
It’s not “okay” for women to be clumsy (”oafish”) and it’s not “okay” for men to be promiscuous (”slutty”). Rather, women are expected to be reserved and modest in their sexuality. When they fail they’re sluts. Men are expected to be reserved and coordinated with their strength. When they fail they’re oafs.
We use words differently because we have different expectations for men and women. But this isn’t some conspiracy by the men. Women haven’t invented the male version of slut either. And nobody’s stopping them. I don’t think the patriarchy has managed to get a member on the Cosmo editorial board yet (but we’re trying).
Someone will say this is a “double standard” (as if that’s a bad thing), and … of course it is.
We all have different expectations for women than we have for men. That’s why there is no common word for “male version of slut” — because even if the patriarchal word committee invented one, nobody would use it.