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I'm interested here, because I've noticed that there's a loophole to the gendered nature of "asshole": I wouldn't call a woman that because of what she's done to me, but if she offends my wife, we might agree that she's an asshole. I'm not sure if that's a common usage or not.

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There's a general process going on in Western culture where male-associated words are losing their gendered nature and are being used for everyone. For example, many of the male counterparts of the -tress words for women are now acceptable to use to describe women, like actor.

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