Fergie … are we talking about *the * Fergie, as in Lady Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, former wife of Prince Andrew?
I believe we are talking about this Fergie
(slight hijack) There is a documentary called “Slut” that you might want to rent. Very interesting history of the word, it’s implications, how it ruins lives.
Well missy, you can just kiss that radio career goodbye ! 
A slut is a woman who has intellectualized her sexual desires and is comfortable with the number of partners she has.
A skank is a female who has ( sadly, IMHO ) learned that the only coin of the realm that she will ever be able to spend in the world is access to her reproductive organs.
Cartooniverse
Oh, thank God! I thought I was culturally deficient or something!
Having re-read my last post, I must add that the same words and descriptions apply to men.
For the record, I’m a guy.
I have often heard women and men calling each other slut in good-natured humor. The tone for skank turns to disgust, anger, and sometimes a little pity.
Cartooniverse said it better than I could.
Urban Dictionary says:
Yep, she slept with her boyfriend at the time, who turned around and sold the tape. How is that skanky on her part, since from what I hear it wasn’t particularly adventurous?
Google Image gives us this:
I literally only came into this thread to see how long that would take.
As far as I’ve heard the term, it pretty much refers to a woman who sleeps around in a liberal manner with…questionable…partners (looks, reputation, or otherwise), and generally dresses in particularly trashy revealing clothes.
My bad. Does that mean I can’t call you missy ?
Agreed, the way the two are used involves context and tone of voice or written tone.
My ex and my mother call themselves sluts all the time. Not that either one is promiscuous. They mean it in the sense of a lazy or bad housekeeper, which is the original definition of the word. Any way you define it, my mother is most definitely not a slut. She’s a lot like Martha Stewart, except she’s also not a bitch.
There aren’t any male equivalents for ho, (whore,) skank, bitch and slut.
From time to time a male may be called one of those words, but they all originally and generally refer to women and are used to degrade. I assume there is no psychological need to degrade men in English speaking cultures. Judging from the variety of words available for degrading women who are sexually active, there must be a strong psychological drive in our culture to besmirch their characters.
Strange drift, here. I’ve always thought it was obvious:
A whore has sex for money; a slut has sex without restraint or discernment; a skank has sex and doesn’t wash.
Usage of “slut” as either a maidservant or kitchen drudge, a dirty, unkempt woman, or a promiscuous woman all date back to the 15th century. tdn, your ex and your mother may be thinking of “slattern,” as slut has never meant quite the same thing.
I’ve always understood “skank” to derive from “skanky,” describing poor hygiene (and Wikipedia claims it once meant “bad smell” or “filthy surface”) – specifically said of a woman with whom it was unhealthy or unpleasant to have sex, due to her personal habits.
This is more of a tangential comment than an effort to add anything to the definitions and senses already provided. The term “skank” replaced, to some extent, the word we used in high school to refer to a really unattractive girl: scag. After I left the town where that word had that meaning for almost everybody I associated with, I didn’t hear it again. Years later I heard “skank” used in a similar sense of putting down as far as possible the physical attractiveness of a woman at work. That’s when I began to wonder if the two terms were both just regionalisms. Once in a while I will still feel the urge to drag out “scag” when some female is just really hard to look at, but realizing the term doesn’t have much common usage, I’ll fall back to “dog” or “pig” or just use some other phrase to indicate her lack of appeal. I can’t recall ever using “skank” in my speech, but if I did it didn’t have all the connotations of promiscuity other posts have alluded to. Purely a lack of attractiveness, bordering on scary ugly.
It’s not just “sexually active” though from the context of this thread, is it?
You may be right though. My thesis: Sex is how women keep men in line. Consequently they want to keep the availability low. Consequently they are eager to punish any woman who breaks ranks. Name-calling and anathematising are their typical means of doing this. Discuss. 
You leave my mother out of this shes a saint I tell you !