“Whore” Gender-Neutral

Joanna Weiss on Meg Whitman being called a whore: “You have to have been living in a 1940s movie not to know that the word is now applied in a gender-neutral way.” “In politics, it’s far more instructive to search for words and attitudes that are truly gender-loaded, and suggest deeper truths about the candidates who use them. The slur from Brown’s aide seems far more benign than when Mitt Romney told Shannon O’Brien, his opponent for Massachusetts governor in 2002, that she was acting ‘unbecoming’ for trying to pin down his stance on abortion.”