Watching another word "degenerate"

A few years ago, I was reading a lot of feminist writing of the sort that currently gets criticized or simply dismissed by feminist bloggers as being too academic and theoretical. One of the ideas that really stood out for me was the "degeneration" in meaning of feminine words. Basically, degeneration in this sense refers to the fact that it's very common for words which refer to women or girls in a way that was once neutral or positive to become pejorative over time. Some examples in English are "wench," "tart," "dame," and "hussy." Feminine words originating from non-European cultures sometimes get appropriated into English as intersectional racist-misogynist slurs, like "bint," which really just means "daughter" but is used as an insult in Britain, and that s-q-u word that I seriously just discovered I can't bring myself to type because it is so strongly associated with the abuse of Native American women by white men. Then there's the infamous case of the c-word, in which a term for female genitalia somehow became slang for "horrible person," but it is supposedly wrong to point that out as evidence of misogyny because some people use that word to call men horrible people too.

Until today, I'd only ever encountered this phenomenon after the fact, by learning a word as an insult and later finding out that it used to "woman" or "daughter" or "girl" or "wife" or even used to be a term of endearment or a title of respect. I hadn't observed the process in action before. But now I'm watching it happen to "damsel." It used to refer to a young woman while implying nothing about her character. It fell out of popular use for a while except as part of the fiction trope "damsel in distress." Now writing about fiction tropes has become a popular activity in itself, and "damsel in distress" has been shortened to "damsel," which is used both to refer to any character who gets rescued in a story and to a type of character who is always getting into danger and needing rescue, and from there it is moving toward meaning "character who is weak and helpless and without agency." And self-described feminists in fandom are using the old word with this new meaning and sometimes saying, "Oh, I don't use it in a sexist way. I use it for male characters too, which takes away the gendered implications." Except it doesn't because this use of "damsel" is exactly equivalent to using "girl" to mean "weak and ineffectual."