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I have an interesting question which has got me thinking lately. You see, there are some nouns that I have always seen be used as masculine such as the words "fucker" and "motherfucker" (which I am sorry for mentioning). So to keep it short, I would like to know whether they can be used as feminine or not. Like always used to insult men and not used to offend women.
I understand this can be taken as rude but I just thought I would ask.
Technically, it's possible to use these terms for any gender. The definition in the dictionary will generally support that, as Max cited. However, there are strong cultural dimensions to these terms.
It has been observed for a while that insults are divided by gender. In a 2011 article entitled "The Name Game: Using Insults to Illustrate the Social Construction of Gender", a researcher talked about a game he had often used in his classrooms. The method was to ask students to come up with all the names they could think of for men and women. The female and male students were also divided during this exercise and wrote their responses on opposite sides of the board.
Some of the findings they came up with: both men and women came up with more insulting names for women than men; men tended to insult women based on sexuality more than they did themselves; and the same sexual behaviour that was an insult when applied to women turned out to be a compliment when applied to men (e.g. slut vs. player). There were various similar findings.
As Catija and P.E.Dant note in comments on another answer, there are other terms that mean something quite different depending on whom they're applied to. "Bitch" as applied to a woman (one of the most common insults) conjures up mean-spiritedness, pettiness, ambition, but applied to a man it implies weakness and subordination. Why does it mean that for men? Because it's associated with women, and terms that seem to diminish masculinity are apparently some of the hardest-hitting. In that article above, most of the male students ranked "homo" (=gay) as the most offensive thing they could be called.
Meanwhile, some terms only seem to be applied to men or women; here is a page from a book that lists some of the differences. You'll notice that on that page, all of the insults for women fall under an analysis of their sexual behaviour. Even terms that semantically appear to be neutral tend to be used for one gender primarily (e.g. high-maintenance for women). Similar lists can be constructed for men, such as this one. Chris H's answer also shows how you can use Ngrams to find "He is a ----" vs. "She is a ----" collocations.
One of the interesting things we find is that terms indicating unapologetic, inconsiderate behaviour seem to cleave most closely to men. Among these are jerk, asshole, dick, douchebag, bastard, prick and, yes, fucker and motherfucker.
From what I recall of my linguistics education, many of these patterns hold true when examined across languages. One of the most reliable phenomena is that terms that simply mean "woman" are pejorative. There are obvious and disheartening societal reasons for this.
Despite these trends, however, the way we use these terms may change someday. Many things are in flux, including gender roles. Perhaps in the same way that terms like "actor" have come to be unisex (instead of "actor/actress"), our insults will become more "egalitarian" too.
To address your question as posed in the title, there are some (nearly) masculine-specific insults:
1. Bastard is an insulting word which some people use about a person, especially a man, who has behaved very badly.
...
3. A bastard is a person whose parents were not married to each other at the time that he or she was born. This use could cause offence.
(all definitions from Collins)
To look at how this is used with respect to gender we can use Google ngrams for he's a bastard vs she's a bastard:
which indicates that it's used almost exclusively for men.
6. If someone calls a man a prick, they are indicating that they do not like him and that they think he is stupid.
...
7. A man's prick is his penis.
Ngrams finds not a single use for she's a prick in its corpus, so this can be regarded as exclusively male.
There's a long history of insulting men by saying they have a liking for other men, or even that just that they come across as feminine. There's too much baggage to go into detail here. I can only suggest that you avoid using such terms. Even as character dialogue writing a story you have to be careful.
Cuckold
A cuckold is a man whose wife is having an affair with another man.
This is often, especially recently, shortened to cuck. The use is evolving fast but it currently seems to be mainly used online by men who could are anti-feminist and/or far-right.
Yes, we can call a female person a fucker or a motherfucker. These two words are not restricted to males. The two roughly mean a contemptible person, without regard to one's gender:
- a person who fucks: a vulgar use
- an unpleasant or contemptible person: considered vulgar by many
- any person or thing: considered vulgar by many
motherfucker
Slang, Vulgar
a person or thing regarded as remarkable, despicable, contemptible, unpleasant, difficult, etc.(YourDictionary)
For example,
There's this fucker at work. _____ is always complaining about the customers and it's really annoying.
The worker could easily be a man or a woman, meaning "he" or "she" can go in the blank.
I think most insults are like this, at least the ones I can immediately think of. For example, whore and bitch. You might think these only apply to women, but men can easily be called those insults too.
