Changing Semantics of Gendered Insults in Music Lyrics

Popular culture has been heavily criticized for normalizing gendered insults and perpetuating gender stereotypes. Lyrics, powerful platforms for social change and artistic expressions, are particular salient venues to study the changing meanings of gendered insults and the cultural shifts underneath. Using neural network-based word representations, this article dynamically captures different uses of a gender slur in more than 1.6 million lyric sentences over time among different gender groups. First of its kind in both scale and approach, this analysis tracks the evolutions of the referents and connotations of gendered insults to highlight the progress, struggles, and limitations of the feminist movement in the popular culture space.