“I’m driving to the office this morning and some guy rolls down his window and calls me a ‘dumb bitch,’” Carolyn, a writer friend, tells me by e-mail. “I couldn’t decide what was more offensive: ‘dumb’ or ‘bitch.’ Truth is, I am a bitch — if you consider women who want things done right bitchy. But I am certainly not dumb.”

That’s the kind of shift in thinking Lisa Miya-Jervis likes to hear. When she started Bitch: A Feminist Response to Pop Culture with her friend Andi Zeisler in 1996, some bookstores refused to carry the feisty magazine because of the name. Now, Miya-Jervis says, “we definitely get fewer raised eyebrows.”

“Our magazine is all about speaking your mind, even if people are offended,” says Miya-Jervis, who feels that snatching the word from its former status as an insult helps remove its sting.

She’s not the only one. Alongside back issues of Bitch, my bookshelf also houses the second edition of Cunt: A Declaration of Independence by Inga Muscio; Slut: Growing up Female With a Bad ReputationBitch: In Praise of Difficult Women by Leona Tanenbaum; and by Elizabeth Wurtzel. I visit bookslut.com for smart book reviews and pithy columns. And just last week I saw a young woman wearing a T-shirt that read “100% Slut.”

So she likes sex. Is that so wrong?

Words that would’ve had our grandmothers washing our mouths out with soap have become “cool,” and, dare I say it, empowering.

According to Cunt author Inga Muscio, there is real power in using words that have always been used against you. In a historically misogynist society, all the words for women’s sexuality are derogatory, for example. But why let centuries of powerful men define what “cunt” means?

 “The word ‘cunt’ brings out this primal, ‘fuck you’ attitude,” Muscio says. “It comes from deep inside. You can’t say it in a high-pitched baby voice.”

Muscio sells “cunt” T-shirts and stickers on her on her website, KaliKunti.com (a reference to the carnal power of the Indian goddess Kali), and she feels it’s about time the word’s meaning was returned to its rightful owners. “Throughout history,” she says, “in India, China, and Ireland, versions of the word ‘cunt’ were used as a powerful adjective to describe priestesses and goddesses.”

Not all of us are quite there yet.

“‘Cunt’ has always been the curse word on reserve,” says a publicist friend of mine. “That still has shock value for me. But I’d call my friends bitches in a second. It’s become a word of endearment.”

Common usage of such terms also frees them from being gender-specific. Now men can be called bitches and sluts too. “I understand it as a kind of revenge on men in general,” a straight male law librarian tells me of his “slut” status among his gal pals. And popular culture has long influenced the evolution of language. Remember how we laughed back in the ’70s when Saturday Night Live’s Dan Aykroyd made “Jane, you ignorant slut” a household phrase?

But it gets complicated. When everyone uses a word in a certain context, it changes its meaning, but there is never any consensus on words that hold such a negative connotation. So while a show like Sex and the City made references to cocks, tits, sucking, and fucking much more mainstream and cool, young male rap artists popularized less-than-enlightened uses of terms like “bitch” and “ho.” On the other hand, look at terms like “fag,” “dyke,” and “queer” — former insults that plenty of, well, fags and dykes now freely use to refer to themselves.

Obviously, when it comes to volatile language, context is everything. If a guy calls me a cunt, for instance, it’s safe to say he’s not trying to empower me.

And just because a term becomes hip, that doesn’t make it cool. “When I see girls wearing T-shirts emblazoned with words like ‘slut’ and ‘whore,’ I wonder if she really understands the significance,” my professor friend says. “I’m very skeptical that she’s wearing it to reclaim the word. On the other hand, seeing these words on t-shirts integrates them into mass culture and takes away some of their crassness.”

Perhaps. But as another female friend puts it, “I’m not sure I want the lovely man at the 7-11 shouting out, ‘What up, bitch?’ as I enter.”