Does the gender of the insulted effect the likeliness of using gender specific ?

The three most “popular” insults overall were , bitch and dick. Bitch and dick are both very obviously gendered—bitch referring to a female, and dick referring to the male anatomy— while asshole is a relatively neutral term (I assume both genders have ). When participants ranked the likelihood of using bitch depending on the target individual, females received a ranking of 2.0 (with 1 being most likely and 11 being the least likely) while males received a ranking of 5.7. For dick, males received a ranking of 3.0 while females received a ranking of 7.1. Asshole, the gender neutral , received a ranking of 3.4 for females and 2.2 for males. The rest of the gendered insults followed the same trend (female gendered insults were more likely to be used at females and male insults were more likely to be used at males) and the gender neutral very little discrepancies. I used bitch, dick and asshole as examples because they were the most popular choices. Douchebag was an anomaly, I wonder if there was a male hygiene equivalent, would it be used against women more than men, like douchebag is used more against men than women?

From these findings it appears that gender plays a large role in what insult will be used against a person as the discrepancies are very large between males and females when it comes to gendered insults. Interestingly, the most popular female insult was female specific but the most popular male insult was gender neutral. When gender of the target isn’t the focus, “male” words can be used as gender inclusive—ex: like fireman, mailman, etc. — but when gender of the target is the main focus, females are attributed to their gender (by using female specific insults) more so than males. This could mean a multitude of different things. The most prominent is that men are thought of as the “default” so when thinking of the most likely insult to use against a man, the participant thinks of the most likely insult to use in general, and asshole can be used universally, so it is the highest attributed insult. To back up the claim a bit more, bitch was ranked at 2.0 while the highest male gender insult, dick, was ranked at 3.0, so the data shows that more people picked the female specific insult as the most likely insult for a female than the male insult for males.

Not entirely related, but interesting, is the “friends” group. Only 3 of the 11 insults received a rating under 5 and the three were male specific, female specific and gender neutral. If I were to look deeper into this, I would want to know the gender of the person who answered each “friend” category (looking at the data, I can only attribute actual answers to sexual orientation, while I only have a gender count of how many male or female participants took the quiz). Does this trend mean that when gender isn’t specified, people are less inclined to think about gender linguistically when interacting with friends? Or could this be attributed to the harshness of insult itself (an example of harshness meaning bitch, dick and asshole are all acceptable to use on cable television, while using cunt might get a show censored and using would seem like too harsh of an insult even if the insult is not serious) that when gender isn’t an issue, the least harsh insults in general will be the most used?