The Sex Lexicon

In the early 1990's Laurel A Sutton undertook an experiment at the Linguistics Department at UC Berkeley, where she asked 365 undergraduate students to write her 10 slang words minimum that they used frequently. What she collected finally was a list of almost 4000 words out of which 200 turned out to be related to or pertaining to women, describing them in a rather negative manner. After coding the data she came upon the theory that these terms could be categorized into one of three types; sexual promiscuity, level of hotness or a kind of food.

Inspired by her project I created a list of my own by collecting a list of most commonly used sexualized terms; words that have become almost synonymous with the expression sexuality.

The aim of this project was to expose the different contexts in which these words can be used and applied, and how they can almost always be applied to the female gender. Some though now, are being reclaimed and the word image image associations in this project help me illustrate this. The images and videos shown in this lexicon have been sourced by searching the 'word' (cunt/whore/bitch/slut) +'gif' on google images. I invite you to do the same, for this curated image list is probably not what you'll find. 70% of the gif searches had a majority of results containing mostly porn imagery. The sounds are exclusively collected from oxford online dictionary and the descriptions have been collected from oxford, urban dictionary and wiktionary.

to go to the actual website and explore, click ——> https://mysite.pratt.edu/~nsinghal/TheSexLexicon/