I don’t know if Maureen Dowd could get more irrelevant. I haven’t read a column of hers since the New York Times put her behind a paywall. Now, Raw Story shows me what I’m not missing. I’m not missing Dowd’s analysis of the word ‘slut’.

“After eons of being a summary judgment that a woman is damaged goods, the word slut has shifted into more ambiguous territory,” Dowd writes. “It can still be an insult, especially since there is no pejorative equivalent to suggest that a man has sullied himself with too many sexual partners.”

“Men are players, women are sluts, just the way men are tough and women are bitchy,” the column continues.

“But as women express themselves more, sexually and professionally, and no longer need to ‘use their virginity as a meal ticket,’ as the anthropologist Helen Fisher puts it, the slur may have lost some sting,” Dowd writes.

“Slut” is a faddish appellation for everything from lip balm to cocktails, and applies to voracious behavior of all kinds; Cosmopolitan recently ran a quiz on how to tell if you’re an “attention slut.”

“It’s just a really fun word to say,” explains my classy 26-year-old girlfriend. “Usually women only call someone a slut if she’s not slutty, but if you do call a slutty friend a slut, you can get away with it because, oh, it was just a joke, even when it’s not. So, yet another way for mean girls to flourish.”

It was probably inevitable, once women began discovering their inner slut with microminis and other provocative outfits and with high school and college girls reporting a much more blase attitude about performing oral sex, that they’d turn the word itself inside-out. But, semantics aside, have attitudes really changed much?

Studies show that superiors, men and women, may penalize female executives who dress in too sexy a manner — proving that it’s not always safe to strut as a slut. And Don Reisinger, a student in Albany, told Rosenbloom: “When I think of the word slut, I think of a woman who has been around the block more times than my dad’s Chevy. I might date a slut, but I certainly wouldn’t marry one.”

It should go without saying that the New York Times’s Opinion Page is rarefied real estate. Only a select few get to publish their ideas there. NYT’s op-eds have the power to change the political debate, even the world. As the country grapples with a new law on the handling of detainees, a new law on domestic surveillance, with a hopeless war in Iraq, and a blowup in Israel, all Dowd can come up with to discuss is whether the word ‘slut’ still carries the same sting it used to.

If her 26 year-old friend says it is just a fabulously fun word to say, then maybe Dowd is right. Who knows? But, really, who cares? I look forward to hearing Krugman tell me whether the word ‘nerd’ still bites to the bone, of Frank Rich tell me whether ‘spoiled dry-drunk duty-dodging frat-boy ex-cheerleading punk’ makes the President uncomfortable.

Someone please take Dowd’s job away from her. She long ago demonstrated that she doesn’t deserve the space.