Read Gormy Cuss's excellent response, to which I'll add that language both reveals how a culture (and the individuals in it) sees, understand and thinks about things and also shapes and molds how a culture sees, understand and thinks about things.
That's why language is so important. In the early days of 2nd Wave Feminism, women were adamant about changing some of the language to be more inclusive so that it would force people to think more inclusively about women and our place in the world.
For example, if the only word used for the head of a committee is chairMAN, people don't EVER think about a woman being the chair. If "man invented this" and "mankind invented that," women's contributions -- which have been enormous -- are never even considered a possibility. If HUMANkind did this or that, it's gender neutral and automatically implies the work done and advancements achieved were at least due to both sexes' involvement.
Now, if you can call any woman a bitch and other dehumanizing words like chick and far worse, if you can disrespect women or a specific woman so much as to denigrate her on the basis of her gender, then she isn't as good as any man, which means she must be slightly less than human -- because men are the default humans, you see -- if you can do that, you can do much worse to her. The LEAST bad language does is promote disrespect for women as a class and individually.
And where does that disrespect lead? Well, you'll probably see me say this again and again: sexism kills; racism kills; homophobia kills. Sexism kills quickly (e.g., violence against women), and it kills slowly (e.g., less access to heatlhcare, medical studies not including women at all, etc.).
So - whether you know it or not, whether you can see or recognize it or not, YOUR life is much less than it could be and should be because of sexism in our society. One of its most visible -- and challengeable -- manifestations is sexist language. As a society we are getting away from using racial slurs and homophobic slurs, it's time to get away from gender slurs as well.
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