Why is a Woman’s Body our Favourite Gaali?

When two Indian men get into a fight, they rarely insult each other’s bodies or actions. Somehow, the argument quickly travels elsewhere. “Beh**od.” “Mad****od.” Suddenly, the mother or sister of the man standing opposite becomes the target. The woman may not even be present, yet her body becomes the battlefield. Why is that? Why does an insult directed at a man so often require the sexual degradation of a woman? And why, when language wants to humiliate, does it so frequently reach for the female body?

Kangana Ranaut has spent years being slut-shamed for her relationships, choices, and unapologetically outspoken persona. Photo source: Hindustan Times

We grow up hearing words like “slut”, “bitch”, “characterless”, “randi”, or their regional equivalents as jokes, insults and everyday gaalis. They are so familiar that we stop questioning them. Linguistics has a name for part of this pattern: semantic derogation-when words associated with women acquire increasingly negative or degrading meanings. 

Look at “master” and “mistress.” Once linguistic counterparts, both could denote authority or a person in charge. Yet “master” still suggests expertise and power, while “mistress” is now commonly associated with a sexual relationship with a married man. And it isn't an isolated case. A bachelor can sound like an independent man enjoying his life, while a spinster carries the baggage of a woman who supposedly failed to marry. Then there is “slut”, which originally referred to a dirty or untidy person before becoming strongly associated with a woman’s sexual behaviour. 

The pattern can hardly be ignored. A woman can be called loud, ambitious, independent or “too modern”-but when the insult wants to hit hardest, it often circles back to sex: who she dates, what she wears, how many people she has been with, whether she is “pure”. It is almost as if society has created an unwritten dictionary where female sexuality is the most efficient synonym for shame.

This is where language begins to intersect with rape culture. When women’s bodies are repeatedly treated as sites of shame, possession or humiliation, sexual violence becomes another language of power. And that becomes even more disturbing when the body belong to a minor, a literal child. The recent case involving a 16 year old girl allegedly raped on a bus reminds us that this is not simply a conversation about words. Watch this reel for context.

And it is not just women who are targeted by this vocabulary. Many insults directed at men work by comparing them to women. Take “pussy”, for instance. Its power comes from associating a man with femininity and weakness. The true message lies underneath which implies being “like a woman” is itself supposed to be humiliating for a man.

We see the same policing today, especially online, where a woman’s visibility can become an invitation for sexualised judgement and abuse. As we explored in The Hidden Cost of Being a Woman Content Creator in India, women can be sexualised before anyone even engages with what they are actually saying. The vocabulary may be old, but the mechanism is still alive.

The Indian context makes this even more uncomfortable because some of our most familiar gaalis turn women into proxy weapons between men. When two men fight, the insult moves towards his mother, sister or wife- women whose sexual violation is imagined as a way of attacking his masculinity. The woman becomes a boundary around the man: to degrade her is to challenge his control and dominance. 

This hierarchy becomes even more complicated when caste enters the picture. Gendered gaalis can intersect with caste-based insults, while sexually degrading language has historically been weaponised against women from marginalised communities. And then comes the contradiction we barely notice: we place “mother” on a divine pedestal while using “maa” as the doorway to some of our ugliest abuse. Even ageing exposes the double standard. Men are often allowed to become “distinguished”, while women are pushed towards words that mock their appearance and desirability.

Our insults have histories. And those histories reveal what society has repeatedly decided should make a woman “less”. Maybe that is why the history and semantic expression of words matters.

We often treat language as harmless because “it's just a word”. But words do not exist in a vacuum. They carry histories, assumptions and ideas about who deserves respect and who can be reduced to an insult. So the main question arises: what would it take for us to stop making women the vocabulary of humiliation?

Because before culture changes in the streets, on screens or in our homes, it often changes in the words we decide we are no longer willing to use.