I Spent Hours Analyzing Google Search Trends for ‘Femboy’
I Spent Hours Analyzing Google Search Trends for ‘Femboy’
Feminine Boys in the Male Gaze, part three!
So far in this post series, I’ve argued that we’re witnessing a gradual normalization of feminine masculinity as an object in the male gaze. Girly boys, transfemmes, and feminine androgynes of all kinds have been on the receiving end of US patriarchal violence for as long as the US has existed. The difference is that now, after going way out of fashion over a century of heterosexuality being understood as a rigid and inflexible category, people are once again becoming honest about that little bit of give in their straightness. It’s becoming less and less gay to be attracted to feminine masculinity. This is a question of power and perception, not of identity; when a guy sexualizes somebody, that sexualized person’s self-identified gender is not so important as the guy’s own controlling perception, and the social authority that empowers him to look. Now, it’s time to get specific about what the guys are looking at in the wide world of feminine masculinity, as well as how they’re looking, and to what effect.
To do that, I’ve turned to Google search trends. Looking at the history of web queries in the US, we can get an idea of how interest in certain topics has ebbed and flowed, and the ways language has evolved to describe those topics. Obviously, Google data is not a perfect proxy for real life cultural interest in any given topic. Nothing here is conclusive. Even still, these numbers can be surprisingly useful in what they say about user interests and behaviors. Search trends are even used by social scientists to impute gaps in hate crime statistics. (More on that later.)
I recently spent a day looking at Google trends data for a wide-ranging set of vocabulary terms related to transfeminity and feminine masculinity. (Instead of editing 🙂.) Here’s a few insights I found:
INSIGHT ONE: A whole lot of the vocabulary used for transfeminity or feminine masculinity is related to porn.
Maybe obvious, but important.
Obvious, because as a person living in the English-speaking world, you could probably guess that terms like “shemale,” “femboy,” “tranny,” and “sissy” are all sexually objectifying words. Google search data backs this up with its “Related queries” feature, which shows the top one hundred search queries that users made in conjunction with the base term.
Unsurprisingly, the top related queries for “femboy” in the US include “femboy hooters,” “cute femboy,” “anime femboy,” and “femboy bbc.” With the exception of “femboy hooters,” where the user could conceivably be referring to the meme rather than looking for porn, these queries pretty clearly reflect the information seeking behavior of a dude who is jacking off.
Some more general terms—”trans girl” and “trans woman,” for example—appear to have escaped most of these explicit sexual connotations. The top related queries for the search term “trans girl” include: “trans boy,” “trans guy,” “transgender girl,” and “what is trans.” The associations between these searches reflect a more general curiosity, less focused on the female form and less suggestive of sexual interest. Even if a large (and growing) number of popular words for feminine males and transfeminine people are sexually objectifying, more neutral vocabulary does exist in general use.
INSIGHT TWO: “Femboy” may have emerged recently as a meme, but it fills a linguistic need and is likely to stick around in popular use.
How does the neologism “femboy” stack up against related terms for feminine masculinity or transfemininity? First of all, unlike “shemale,” “twink,” “sissy,” or “tranny”—whose search histories are long and closely correlated—the term “femboy” seems to be a genuinely new term. Google tracks a tiny search footprint for the word starting in 2009, expanding to a consistent yet small footprint starting in 2015 when it was still a niche subcultural term. It jumped into common usage in June 2020 via the popular meme, kicking off the summer of Femboy Hooters.
But “femboy” has not followed a typical meme lifecycle. Now going on five years, “femboy” has continued to grow steadily. Just this past September, “femboy” surpassed “sissy” and “twink” as a search term. Yowza! Step aside, twinks! “Femboy” clocks in at 14.5 million search results for posts on TikTok, due in part to the popularity of the #femboyfridays hashtag. The “femboy” subreddit (which is exclusively porn) has 1.6 million subscribers. Academics have started studying the term, and pop culture news outlet Vice put out an article calling it the “cyber-cousin” of the e-boy.
The other terms mapped on the graph below—twink, sissy, tranny—have been more or less commonplace for decades. Interestingly, their Google searches all peaked between 2014 and 2015, lending a bit more credence to Time’s “Transgender Tipping Point”. Each word has undergone its own evolution, but common between them is a growing consciousness (if not consensus) of their use as a slur. Rep. Nancy Mace just drew notice for openly using the term “tranny” to refer to trans women protesting her anti-trans bathroom crusade in the US Capitol Building. On his SWEAT Tour with Charli XCX, Troye Sivan famously declared that straight people were getting “way too comfortable” with the word “twink” and related its use to the term “faggot,” spurring mainstream news coverage. On the other hand, while discourse absolutely exists as to its usage as a slur, “femboy” does not bear nearly as much cultural recognition as a hateful or pejorative word. “Femboy” is even embraced as an identity label, whereas “twink,” “sissy,” and “tranny” are usually not terms people self-identify with in the same way. Eventually, “femboy” might follow in its sisters’ (brothers’?) footsteps and become slur-ified over time. But my guess is that, in addition to its smash success as a porn category, this positive identification factor will help “femboy” long outlive its status as a meme word.
INSIGHT THREE: Interest in transfeminity and feminine masculinity is greater in places where transness is more politically targeted.
The top five “femboy” searchers are:
1. West Virginia
2. Oklahoma
3. Arkansas
4. Mississippi
5. Alabama
All of these states are a fucking mess for anti-trans legislation. Refer to this map by journalist Erin Reed—who, by the way, is my go-to for journalism on US anti-trans legislation, and should probably be yours too. It’s a little dated (December 2023) but its predictions have held up pretty well. I use this map because it would take literally all day for me to aggregate and explain the extent of anti-trans political attacks in each of the states listed above.
Compare those high-searching states with the lowest “femboy” searchers:
50. Hawai’i
49. New York (shoutout lol)
48. Minnesota
47. Vermont
46. Massachusetts
Note that literally all of these states have passed legislative protections for trans people.
“Femboy” is, of course, just one example, but the principle applies to all related sexually objectifying terms I studied. There are regional variations in the kinds of words people like to use when cruising the web for feminine boy content. My home state of New Hampshire, for example, is number one in the nation for “sissy” as a search term, and has been seeing huge recent attacks on trans rights in its state legislature.
Cultural taboo makes a thing interesting and alluring. Prohibition makes for more private indulgence.
INSIGHT FOUR: The fetishization of feminine masculinity is deeply racialized.
Top related queries for sexually objectifying feminine boy/transfeminine vocabulary almost always include racial specifications, most often for Black people. This means that while using Google to search for content related to “sissies,” “femboys,” “twinks,” and “trannies,” US users very often add racial modifiers like “ebony,” “black,” “bbc,” “asian,” and “white.”
Nationwide, top related search terms for “femboy” include “black femboy” (number seven) and “femboy bbc” (number nine), both positioned above “femboy twink” and only a few points shy of “femboy hooters,” the meme phrase that rocketed “femboy” into general usage in the first place. For “tranny” related searches, “ebony tranny” clocks in at number three, and “asian tranny” at number six. “Black sissy” is the number five search related for “sissy.”
Racialized interest in feminine masculinity is not equal throughout the country. Generally, the frequency of racialized searches corresponds to areas where more racialized people—i.e. BIPOC—live. In Mississippi, the state with the highest population percentage of Black people, “black sissy” is the third top related query for “sissy,” and “white sissy” the seventh; for “femboy,” “black femboy” is number two, “femboy bbc” number five, and “ebony femboy” number ten. In Hawai’i, the state with the highest percentage of Asian people, “asian femboy” is the second highest related query for “femboy.”
ONE LAST INSIGHT: More like a question, actually?
While researching for this installment, I happened upon and read a 2019 academic paper by Dhammika Dharmapala and Aziz Huq called “Imputing Unreported Hate Crimes Using Google Search Data.” The authors observe a pretty huge gap between hate crimes reported by law enforcement and hate crimes self-reported through victimization surveys. They suggest that self-reported hate crimes might be fully twice as many as cop-reported ones. Their research focuses on the US south, where anti-Black hate crimes are commonly experienced and chronically underreported. The authors use Google search data for anti-Black hate speech as a proxy metric for general racial animus, which they then use to estimate unreported hate crimes. They conclude that “Google search rates add substantial predictive power” to the kind of statistics they’re attempting to estimate.
Reading this article, I thought (as I often do) about the 2022 US Trans Survey results. With a staggering 92,329 respondents, the USTS made disturbing observations about violence against trans and gender-nonconforming people. Nearly one third of respondents reported being verbally harassed because of their gender, and three percent reported being physically assaulted in the last twelve months alone. Considering that approximately three quarters of trans people reported being “very uncomfortable” or “somewhat uncomfortable” asking law enforcement for help, and that around half reported their government ID features an incorrect name, underreporting of hate crimes is all but guaranteed.
In terms of hate speech and hate crimes, gender and sexuality are different than race. Google searches for racial slurs are very different than ones used for women and queer people, mainly because the latter will show you porn and the former will probably just show you hate content. However, looking at the abysmal state of trans hatred in the US today, and then comparing that to the truly astonishing number of people Googling shit like “teen shemale” in the state of Louisiana, one has to wonder:
What kind of invisible damage are these numbers indicating that can't be estimated with existing means?
thanks for your patience on this installment, femboy fans. please get in touch! share your thoughts! tell me if i’m doing social sciences wrong! my email is eviewrites@duck.com. you can also share and subscribe to this newsletter, follow it on IG @everzines, and on bluesky @everzines.bsky.social. until next time, with love
your ******,
evergreen<3