Tracking 'Feel Sexy' in Books Reveals a Gendered Language of Desire

A study using the Google Books Ngram Viewer across 1800–2022 shows that the phrase 'feel sexy' is overwhelmingly used to describe women in published books, with 89% of qualifying phrases referencing female subjects. Variants like 'her feel sexy' and 'she felt sexy' are most common, and female versions appear about ten times more often than male ones, a trend that began in the late 1970s and accelerated after the 1990s, driven largely by heterosexual romance novels. The researchers link this to gendered sexual scripting and the concept of object of desire self-consciousness, while cautioning that books are just one communication channel and that future work should examine other media and languages and whether such language affects readers' mood or arousal.