Editor’s note: Post contains strong language. Reader discretion is advised.
While chilling on the sofa after work today, I was thinking about jerks, and how I invariably only assign that appellation to males.
jerk 1 |jərk|noun
2 informal a contemptibly obnoxious person.
The dictionary definition makes no mention of the term being gender-specific, but I can’t think of a single female I’d call a jerk, though I have known women who exhibited jerk-like qualities.
It begs the question, just what do we call a female jerk?
Bitch doesn’t quite cut it for me. When I think of a bitch, I’m thinking of a woman who exhibits a calculating meanness that the common male jerk doesn’t possess. Of course men can be bitches, too, but the word has a decidedly different connotation when used in the masculine sense. It’s curious that I wouldn’t call a male with bitch-like qualities a son-of-a-bitch, but rather a bastard.

Bitch and bastard, then, go hand-in-hand in my book, but the lady jerk still has me flummoxed.
Is a jerk the same as an asshole, and if so, can we simply call female jerks assholes?
No, I don’t think so! To me, there’s a lot more deliberateness to everyday assholery than what you encounter with garden-variety jerkishness, so I’d never substitute asshole for jerk, whether it’s a male or a female that I’m attempting to label. But maybe that’s just me.
None of this is getting me any closer to a solution. To me, a jerk is a male who’s sort of a pest, but doesn’t really do too much harm. What do we call his female counterpart?
I love your choice of art in your post about assholes/jerks.
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I could start a whole new series of cuss words and feature his picture in every one.
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I think you should give “bitch” another chance. Works in a lot of other ways for me. ☺
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Just seems too severe to me, but I’ll defer to you!
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I vote for a new term “Jerkette”…
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You are the reigning expert on the subject. Jerkette does have a nice ring to it!
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I could have gone all day, and far into the night, without seeing that photo of Stinky.
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Long may he suffer with an incurable disease.
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Jerkette sounds good!
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That’s two votes for Jerkette!
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