kept woman

this term is highly offensive because of the woman's supposed passivity (she is "kept") and because of the lack of a word to describe her partner. Although two people are involved, only one is labeled pejoratively—or even labeled at all. The assumption is that the man is behaving "normally" and thus is still just a man, while the woman's behavior (no different in important respects from his) is "deviant" enough to require a special term. In the 1980s, Estée Lauder president Leonard Lauder decided against buying advertising space in Ms. Magazine because its readers weren't right for his product; Estée Lauder sells, he explained, "a kept-woman mentality." When Gloria Steinem pointed out that 60% of his customers worked, he said, yes, but they would like to be kept. It is not known whether this insight into the female mind was based on market research or something else. See also gigolo.