Lakoff And Johnson's Analysis

By examining ordinary expressions used in everyday language, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) have demonstrated that people very often talk and reason about an entity or event in terms of another, that is in a metaphorical way: they compare a phenomenon they are more familiar. Hines (1994, 1996a, 1996b, 1999, 2000) uses Lakoff and Johnson’s theoretical framework to describe the metaphorical usage of terms technically belonging to domains such as desserts (e.g. tart, sweetie pie, honey) and animals (e.g. filly, chick, bunny) to talk to or about women. Her analysis reveals a “rule-governed” pattern of “lexicalisation”: once the conceptual parameters have been established through cross-domain mappings, the choice of terms from the source domain to be

women are considered mere objects of sexual desire more often than men are (more numerous and more varied terms are available to refer to women in sexual terms);
b. women are degraded by being treated as equivalent to animals that are hunted and possessed and/or eaten (which shows the conflation of sex, appetite and control);
c. women are also more often conceptualised as unreal, fabulous seductive or destructive creatures than men are (consider, e.g. mermaid, enchantress, harpy; see Hines 1996b: 305-307). Hines’s work mainly focuses on metaphorical expressions applying to women to be found in the English language, but previous research has shown that the semantic derogation of women is attested in French (see Guiraud 1986 [1967], Yaguello 1978, Michard 2002) and Italian (see Sabatini 1987, Delmay 1990),

Evidence for this can be found in the following linguistic practices: sexual derogation of terms identifying women, which is not as evident, or not immediately, for the corresponding terms identifying men; e.g.:
1. It. zitella originally “girl” then “spinster” It. cortigiano “man of court” vs. cortigiana “courtesan-(fem/sing)” Fr. maîtresse “lover” vs. maître “master” Fr. coureur “runner” vs. coureuse “slut” Fr. entraîneur “sport coach” vs. entraîneuse “a girl working in a bar, call girl” asymmetric use of terms for comparable female and male body parts; e.g.:
2. It. fica “cunt; woman, girl” vs. cazzo “penis” (i.e. the synecdoche is not available for the term referring to the penis)
Fr. con “cunt, idiot” (for both sexes/genders) vs. neologism conne “idiot” (for females only; a similar usage for male parts is attested less frequently as in tête de noeud “idiot”) sexualisation of the meaning of common adjectives when they collocate with the words for “woman” but not with the words for “man”;