亚洲网紅露点

It takes two people to have an affair. Despite this fact, there is a clear disparity in the way the public generally discusses extramarital relationships. Heterosexual men who have affairs are just heterosexual men who had affairs. But, the women with whom they have those affairs quickly get labeled with another term, one for which there is no effective male equivalent in English: mistress.

As for the听Poynter Institute for Media Studies, the word听mistress听made prominent appearances in early 2019 thanks to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s alleged affair with anchor and actor Lauren Sanchez鈥攐r his听mistress, as many headlines dubbed her. Another notable so-called mistress听was听Lucero Guadalupe S谩nchez L贸pez, lover of听Joaqu铆n Guzm谩n, the drug lord better known as El Chapo.

What does the word听mistress imply about women, and why is it problematic?

First, what is a mistress?

Mistress is recorded in English around the 1300s, when it originally referred to “a woman who has authority, control, or power, especially the female head of a household, institution, or other establishment.” Think the headmistress of a school.

The word ultimately comes from a French female form of maistre, meaning “master.”听The title Mrs. is an abbreviation of mistress, first recorded in the early 17th century, as mistress was used as a respectful term of address for a married woman.

By the mid-1400s,听mistress was naming a听“woman who has a continuing, extramarital sexual relationship with one man, especially a man who, in return for an exclusive and continuing liaison, provides her with financial support.” Over time, mistress narrowed to this sense鈥攁 word with no real male counterpart, perhaps ironically for a word that began as one.

滨蝉听尘颈蝉迟谤别蝉蝉听offensive?

Referring to someone as a mistress may seem more acceptable if there were a similar term we could apply to men, but there isn’t quite one.

Lover can apply to all genders, as does the more stilted- or literary-sounding paramour. For these reasons, many see the word mistress as outdated, sexist, and moralizing.

In the wake of the February 2019 reporting of Sanchez as Bezos’s mistress, journalist Emily Peck听wrote a piece for听HuffPost听titled “” She argues: “It鈥檚 a loaded term, meant to suggest that a woman is subordinate to the man with whom she鈥檚 having a relationship. The word also implies that her behavior is immoral.”

To use mistress to describe Lauren Sanchez can seem to imply that she is responsible for the affair, while Bezos’s behavior is more accepted or even overlooked entirely. Last year, amid debate over the word, the Associated Press (AP) Stylebook听advised journalists to use听尘颈蝉迟谤别蝉蝉听only in circumstances in which an affair took place over a long period of time and involved financial support. However, the 听that, whenever possible, “phrasing that acknowledges both people in the relationship is preferred: ‘The two were romantically (or sexually) involved.'” At the time, this phrasing suggested mistress had evolved as a more general term for a married man’s girlfriend.

The AP has now amended its stance and advised journalists to avoid the term altogether: “We now say not to use the archaic and sexist term ‘mistress’ for a woman in a long-term sexual relationship with, and financially supported by, a man who is married to someone else. Instead, use an alternative like companion or lover on first reference. Provide details later.”

The problem with mistress, for many, is its implications regardless of intent.听Mistress, they argue,听almost always labels a woman as an outsider, a seductress, a threat.听Mistress听paints women as being solely responsible for the transgression of having an affair while also framing them as submissive to the wills of their male lover. The word seems to allow men to retain power even in a situation in which they are also culpable.

Are there other words only gendered as female?

Warning: There is some strong language featured in this section.There are a number of words in the English language used to describe women, particularly when it comes to sex and relationships, that don’t have a male equivalent.

Spinster, for instance, is an offensive term for “a woman still unmarried beyond the usual age of marriage,” but we don’t have a similar insult to describe an unmarried man. In the 1300s,听蝉辫颈苍蝉迟别谤听simply meant “a woman who spins” wool for a living. This type of job was typically reserved for single women, according to scholar Claudia Goldin, because unmarried women had more incentive to excel at work and performed better. Spinsters were initially admired for their independence, but in the 1900s, they came under fire for not adhering to social expectations of marriage, transforming the word听spinster into an insult.

Men, on the other hand, don’t have a term that derides them for being unmarried. Unmarried men are called听bachelors, a word that conjures images of hunky male celebrities and is听often preceded by “most eligible.”

There are yet more insulting words applied to women’s sexuality (and not men) as a result of cultural double standards.

Women who are perceived as promiscuous鈥�“characterized by or involving indiscriminate mingling or association, especially having sexual relations with a number of partners on a casual basis”鈥攈ave often been referred to as sluts, whores, and tramps.听All of these words are disparaging terms for a “sexually promiscuous woman,” yet there is no equally disparaging term for men.

The term f**kboy has become popular in recent years, but that word more so skewers men for being contemptible and irritating in some way. This can include seeking sex without relationships, but society doesn’t condemn men for this behavior as much as it does women, hence words like slut and whore.

Outside of the bedroom, the way we label women also depends on their proximity to men. Consider poetess or prophetess, female forms of听poet听or听prophet听that have largely become archaic as we鈥檝e realized we don鈥檛 need to mark gender in these contexts. Or, a听woman who stays home to care for her family is a housewife, but a term like househusband (recorded in the 1800s) doesn’t have the same currency鈥攐r baggage. Similarly, we refer to mothers who work as working moms, but working dad听is far less common. When we say that a woman is a听working mom, the subtext is that the woman is somehow defying a norm by having a career, whereas it’s automatically assumed that a man will have a career, regardless of fatherhood. Then, there are terms like stay-at-home dad, which often praise men for being modern; compare that to stay-at-home mom, which is so often scornful.

There’s also the fact that women are referred to as听bitchy when there is no similarly loaded word to describe the behavior of a man. B**ch is used as slang to describe “a malicious, unpleasant, selfish person, especially a woman,” originally disrespecting women by likening them to female dogs. When a man is unpleasant, he may be called tough, strong, no-nonsense, a straight-talker鈥攏ever bossy, which almost always seems to target assertive women. He might be called a dick, but that doesn’t have the same force as听b**ch or听b**chy.

So much of the language describing women is rooted in shaming their sexuality or reinforcing the idea that a woman’s value is determined relative to men. 亚洲网紅露点s like听mistress and听housewife aren’t just descriptors: they are labels that reflect an undercurrent of听sexism in society.