{"id":1366,"date":"2025-02-12T19:07:51","date_gmt":"2025-02-12T19:07:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/?p=1366"},"modified":"2025-02-18T21:22:09","modified_gmt":"2025-02-18T21:22:09","slug":"the-attractive-the-unattractive-and-the-ugly-appearance-adjectives-and-gender","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/17\/the-attractive-the-unattractive-and-the-ugly-appearance-adjectives-and-gender\/","title":{"rendered":"The Attractive, the Unattractive, and the Ugly: Appearance Adjectives and Gender"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By Abby Morris<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>From the author:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u200b\u200b<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This paper was originally written for WRT 285: Analyzing Linguistic Data. I developed my thesis and conducted further research throughout the course as I learned how to use various analysis tools. My essay serves as the compilation of this research, analyzing the gendered use of the adjectives \u201cattractive,\u201d \u201cunattractive,\u201d and \u201cugly\u201d through both qualitative and quantitative lenses. I utilized multiple corpora and examined data from 1990-2019, examining several hundred examples of gendered usages of these words with the goal of comparing how often and in what ways adjectives relating to appearance are used when discussing women and men. In a world where the lived experiences of women are often dismissed as hyperbole and gender studies are labeled as being purely theory, I believe that my work can be useful in providing evidence to illuminate an extremely gendered disparity in how appearances are talked about to those who demand strictly data-driven evidence. At the very least, I hope it can be useful in furthering readers\u2019 understandings of gendered linguistics and the ways in which language constructs our world.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Read: <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/files\/2025\/02\/LX001_2024_FINAL.pdf\">The Attractive, the Unattractive, and the Ugly: Appearance Adjectives and Gender<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Copyrights of all Verge articles and editorial material belong to the authors.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cEven the terms we see as \u201cungendered\u201d can still be applied inequitably. Seemingly positive terms can, in this way, come to represent wider differences in societal ideals applied to different social groups. This data asks the question: if women are talked about as \u201cattractive\u201d so much more often than men, what does this mean for \u201cunattractive\u201d women? If it is so important for women to be \u201cattractive,\u201d what does that mean when someone is unable to or simply does not want to follow that social norm?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":345,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[54551],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-54551"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/345"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1366"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1457,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1366\/revisions\/1457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/verge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}