! from Making Love to Sexing: Historical Development of Sexual
From Making Love to Sexing: Historical Development of Sexual References in Popular Music 1960-2011 Claire Carden Spring 2012 Advisor: Nancy Bell English Department College of Liberal Arts ! TO THE UNIVERSITY HONORS COLLEGE: As thesis advisor for __________________________, I have read this paper and find it satisfactory. ______________________ Thesis Advisor __________________________ Date Precis This study examines changes in sexual references in lyrics by focusing on the number of references and the language used in the sexual reference. The corpus was made up of 1168 sexual references. Each reference was classified into references to sex acts (e.g., oral, anal or vaginal sex, etc.; N= 610), to body parts (i.e., ass, pussy, etc.; N= 127), to terms of reference or address (i.e., baby momma, lover, etc.; N= 220) or to other sexual behaviors (i.e., rape, prostitution, etc.; N= 211). Only one paper that looks directly at change in lyrics over time is Hall et al (2011). Their approach differs from mine in purpose and thus focus. They did not examine the change in type of sexual references over time. My data sample for this paper is the lyrics from the top-ranked songs on the Billboard weekly listing, selecting the top song for the first week of each month from 1960 through 2011 (610 songs). I found that there have been many changes since 1960, both quantitatively and qualitatively. There has been an increase in the number of sexual references since 1960. The vast majority of the sex act references (441 out of 610) were references to vaginal sex; the first non-vaginal reference was a reference to manual stimulation in 1972.
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