Boobs vs. tits: a first look

When you don’t call breasts breasts, are you more likely to call them boobs or tits?

Let’s take it as a given that you are more likely to talk of them at all if you are a male novelist. That’s intuitively obvious (at least to me, and to many others) and has lately been much remarked on. To the annoyance of many women, breasts are sexualized in the male gaze in our society (but by no means in all societies; some find the idea frankly silly). So men, and notably horndog novelists, are apt to talk about them. But…

…here’s the thing. When women talk about how tiresome this is, I have been struck by how often they use the word boobs.

I’m not going to say guys never use the word boobs, because that’s not true, but my experience is that if you see the word boobs, it’s probably written by a woman. Guys talk about tits, hooters, jugs, cleavage, a nice rack, and, of course, breasts, but my impression has long been that boobs is a word that skews strongly to female authors (let’s be scientific and call this hypothesis 1), while tits, on the other hand, is a word male authors are more likely to use (hypothesis 2).

So I decided to check this out with a little corpus research.

I used COCA, the Corpus of Contemporary American English. I searched the general fiction books corpus for the three terms: boobs, tits, and breasts. (Forget about hooters, which gets almost exclusively references to the restaurant chain, and jugs, because come on. Cleavage is also equivocal, and let’s just leave out a nice rack, OK?)

I got 144 hits for boobs, 168 hits for tits, and 1387 for breasts. So you can see that boobs and tits are in the same general frequency range of use, which is an order of magnitude less than breasts.

I checked the sources for the citations for boobs and tits to see whether the author for each was male or female. I didn’t do the same lookup for breasts because I am not made of time – that would have taken most of a day’s work, even with the Excel shortcut tricks I know so well – and because breasts can be used in a wider set of circumstances and so the results would not be comparable without careful evaluation of each instance and I am not made of time.

There were a few I wasn’t able to get the author for. Out of 144 hits for boobs, I got author (and sex) for 134. Out of 168 its for tits, I got author (and sex) for 161. Remember, too, that these are all the instances. They aren’t just in the author’s voice, describing characters. They may be in the voice of a character of the opposite sex from the author. And I’m not going to go through and determine the nature for each one right now because see the end of the previous paragraph. This is an initial survey – a first look.

So. May I have a drumroll?

Of 161 instances of tits with identifiable authors, 85 were by male authors and 76 by female authors. This may look like it leans towards the male, but it’s within the 95% confidence interval given the sample size. My hypothesis 2, that men use tits more, is not supported.

Of 134 instances of boobs with identifiable authors, 37 were by male authors and 97 were by female authors. This is a ratio of 2.6 to 1 and is way outside the 95% confidence interval. My hypothesis 1, that women use boobs more, is supported.

But wait! That’s total instances! Some authors have used the term multiple times in the corpus sample (which is the first chapter of a large number of novels). So let’s look at how many authors used each.

Ratio of male to female authors for tits is 60 to 51, which is right at the edge of the 95% CI but does attain statistical significance, thereby supporting hypothesis 2, but just.

Ratio of male to female authors for boobs is 24 to 69, which is, again, way outside the 95% CI, thereby supporting hypothesis 1 yet again.

It’s tempting to compare the tits-to-boobs ratio for each sex (which might at first glance show women using them equally), but it wouldn’t be a very valuable number without some indication of the total word count in the corpus for authors of each sex. Also, without the context of data on other terms, e.g., breasts, the results would be misleading. All my data right now tell me is that I seem to have some basis for my expectation that if I see boobs it’s probably written by a woman.

But this is not a very large sample size, and it’s limited to a certain field. I’m sure it would be very interesting to compare usage on Twitter, but that would require a large, balanced, gender-coded corpus of Tweets. Let me know if you have one. I don’t.

I would also like to point out that this strictly two-valued approach to gender completely misses anyone who does not fall within that binary. That would also be interesting to see, but I don’t know how I could get enough data for that without a large grant, which is unlikely to be forthcoming.

And why would boobs be used more by women than by men? I don’t have any real idea. Yet.