The census of the wayward and unchaste

[slipjig3]

Chatting with belgatherial the other night, in response to a statement from her that I do not recall, I playfully referred to her as a "trollop." She replied that no, she was not so much a trollop as a strumpet, as the latter term seemed to connote more of a playful joie de vivre. Naturally, as all good sex talk should, things devolved into a trip to the thesaurus.

The list we found and considered (not as all-inclusive as it could be) was as follows:

hussy, minx, coquette, tease, seductress, Lolita, Jezebel, slut, harlot, loose woman, floozy, tart, vamp, tramp, trollop, jade, strumpet

We quickly agreed that the various terms for wanton women have pronounced qualitative differences, and devoted the next chunk of our Skype date to trying to delineate them: A tease is someone who says she will but doesn't actually, unless she's French, in which case she's a coquette. A harlot takes her sluthood as a tacit religious calling, while with a Jezebel, the only religious one is the one using the term in the first place. Minx, tart and hussy are merely variations of the same thing, arranged in order of distance from floor to hemline. A tramp is a seductress after four cheap beers, and a floozy is the same with a substantial IQ reduction. belgatherial felt strongly that "loose woman" should be reserved for scullery-maids in nightstand Victorian novels, the sort who keep getting backed into armoires and bent over dressing tables with little protest: "Oh, Lord Cronenweth! How scandalous!" We disagreed on "vamp"—she thinks "Goth club rat," while I go for "noir femme fatale."

But this is all purely subjective, I'm well aware, so I'll open the floor to discussion. Ignoring for the moment whether or not the difference between such terms for men and such terms for women is wrong and unfair (SPOILER: it totally is like whoa), how would you categorize the terms above? Is there anything that the preceding list from the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus woefully omitted?

Comments

[theloriest.livejournal.com]

Vamp is totally noir femme fatale!

I love this discussion!!

[intuition-ist.livejournal.com]

I like your definitions. Especially the distinction among minx, tart, and hussy. :)

The descriptiveness of several of those words is date-dependent (the use-by date of floozy passed somewhere in the mid-20th century, for example, and harlot and Jezebel evoke older, more religious times).

There's also differentiation depending on whether the word is used more often by a man or a woman: words like hussy and floozy and tart are usually insults thrown by another woman, whereas tease, slut, and harlot are usually thrown by men.

[cluegirl.livejournal.com]

You're both wrong on Vamp. Look to the root word; vampire. The vamp is the woman whom men know damned well is going to eat them alive, and utterly destroy them sexually, and yet they flock to her helplessly despite it. She is the woman whose sexual power is terrifying to men, and threatening to women, and worse yet, she is comfortable in her role as predator, so she doesn't even have the grace to seem ashamed. She has no loyalty from man to man any more than a vixen has loyalty from rabbit to rabbit.

Vamp is Cougar, is Black Widow, is Dragon Lady, is Kali, is Hecate, is Lucy Westerna.

Vamp is the woman whose sexual power is greater than one's own, and so she must either be destroyed, or allowed to destroy you. And if you choose the latter, you will die happy, at least. And tired.

[spoothbrush.livejournal.com]

I think "wench" should be in there, though I could't tellyouwhy.