21st
Century = equality, right? Cathrine Norberg decided to investigate, using the New Model Corpus, a 100 million word corpus of current
English drawn from the web, to see if there were any differences in the usage
of the words GIRL and BOY.
Norberg
started by examining verbs and found that boys are frequently associated with
physical activities. Jump, run and kick for example, were mainly found with BOY. GIRL was principally used with ‘non-movement’ verbs, like sit and wait. Play was strongly
linked to BOY, although the thinking verbs, discover
and understand were also
exclusive to BOY, suggesting they are more curious and mentally active.
Girls were the objects of verbs far more
often than boys. The violent verbs rape,
traffick, abduct, assault, attack and steal
were all exclusively found with GIRL, whereas the only similar verbs with
BOY as the object were beat and drown, suggesting that girls are more
frequently represented as victims. GIRL
was much more frequently the object of marry,
indicating that the idea of girls being ‘given’ in marriage still persists.
GIRL was often used as the object of date,
love, and fuck, showing that females are seen as passive objects of male
sexuality.
Norberg
also analysed adjectives, dividing them into three groups:
● In physical
appearance, female identity was closely connected to appearance, often with
sexual undertones. Attractive and sexy are
more frequent with GIRL and the use of naked
suggests that there is a stronger connection between nakedness and sexuality
when it is a girl who is without clothes (‘I
spot a naked young boy chasing a
cow’ vs. ‘...viewing naked girls was a matter of sexual
delight’). Boys were discussed in
terms of their physical size, with big
also used in the sense of importance.
Girls were more often described as little
but in the sense of sweetness and innocence (‘...that little girl is so cute’). Young was also used more with GIRL, although freshness, in terms of
girls’ sexuality, was a more common meaning than age (‘I could...enjoy this young
girl’s body for pleasure…’). Old was used more with BOY, although
rarely with reference to age; more commonly it had the sense of belonging to a
‘club’. Similar to big, old indicates male
importance (‘Study finds corporate old boys have positive impact on
governance reform.’)
● In
personal characteristics, naughty was
used for both BOY and GIRL but with a difference, often including sexual
aspects for girls (‘Can you make your
skirt slit any higher, you naughty
girl?’) and only conduct for boys (‘We’ve
got a naughty boy in school.’) Norberg found a set of adjectives used more
with GIRL that diverged from the traditional image of girls as agreeable and
passive: words like tough, crazy and popular.
However, once again, many of them alluded to sexuality (‘Edith, a very pretty blonde, was the popular girl, who received lots of valentines.’)
● In roles
and social identity, Norberg found that boys were associated with activity
(delivery boy) whereas girls were
associated with sexuality (call girl). Only GIRL occurred with single and unmarried,
indicating that females are more likely to be referred to in terms of their
marital status. This also happened with nationality words like Swiss and religious terms like Christian, suggesting that females are
seen as ‘others’, becoming Muslim girls,
whereas males were just Muslims.
So, our
language reveals that we still think in gender specific terms, sometimes to an
alarming extent. Definitely not 21st century equality….
Norberg,
Cathrine (2016). Naughty boys and sexy girls: The representation of young
individuals in a web-based corpus of English. Journal of English Linguistics 44: 291-317.
