Fk yea I swear : Cursing and gender in a corpus of MySpace pages

Youth-orientated social network sites like MySpace are important venues for socialising and identity expression. Analysing such sites can therefore give a timely window into otherwise hidden aspects of contemporary culture. In this article a corpus of MySpace member home pages is used to analyse swearing in the U.S. and U.K. The results indicate that most MySpaces of 16 year olds and about 15% of middle-aged MySpaces contain strong swearing, for both males and females. There was no significant gender difference in the U.K. for strong swearing, especially for younger users (16-19). This is perhaps the first large-scale evidence of gender equality in strong swearing frequency in any informal English language use context. In contrast, U.S. male MySpaces contain significantly more strong swearing than those of females. The U.K. female assimilation of traditionally male swearing in the informal context of MySpace is suggestive of deeper changes in gender roles in society, possibly related to the recent rise in ‘ladette culture’.