Who "Feels Sexy" in the Google Books Corpus? Text-Mining Evidence for Gender Differences in Object of Desire...

Object of desire self-consciousness (ODSC), a perception of one's own romantic and/or sexual desirability, may play a more important role in women's than in men's sociosexuality, including in their language of sexual communication. We examined whether sexual phrases indicative of ODSC themes referred to, and were expressed by, women more than men using a corpus approach to language in a large database of books. Specifically, variations of the phrase "feel sexy" were examined because this language has been argued to capture a perception of one's desirability but also often indicates an arousal component to that sense of desirability, reflective of ODSC. We examined these phrases, alongside male and female nouns and pronouns, using Google's Ngram function. As hypothesized, the majority (89%) of the "hit" phrases (occurring in at least 40 books) were more associated with a female noun/pronoun than a male noun/pronoun. In addition, when "hit" ODSC phrases occurred with both a female and male noun/pronoun, the female-oriented phrases significantly exceeded the frequency of the equivalent male-oriented phrases. An examination of a sample of the books containing the most frequent ODSC phrase (i.e., "her feel sexy") indicated they were predominantly authored by women (89%). Also, an analysis of the genre of the books containing this phrase indicated that a large proportion (64%) were heterosexual romance novels. Finally, the gendered effects for feel sexy language occurred over and above potentially broader language trends in which women were described more than men in a sexualized context. The gendered language effects for feel sexy language support other research suggesting that ODSC can be an important facet of women's sexual scripts.