"Before this renaissance, “horny” had been gross for quite a long time. For many, the word has been most closely associated with unbridled adolescent male arousal thanks to conventional teen sex comedies like “Porky’s” or “American Pie.
It was mischievous, it was socially acceptable, but above all, it was decidedly masculine. It’s a perception that was hundreds of years in the making.
This will probably come as a shock to absolutely no one, but the word “horny” stems from the description of an animal horn. Twenty-five years ago, William Safire wrote about “horny” for his etymology column in The New York Times Magazine, noting that a “horn is hard; it is shaft-shaped; since the 15th century, it has been used as a symbol for the male’s erect sex organ.”
But here we are, half a millennium later, and women are not just aroused, not just sexual beings, but are, indeed, horny, and reclaiming a word that never really applied to them to begin with.
“Horny” first went mainstream about halfway into 2018
It’s possible that after a solid year of #MeToo, in which women were using social media to publicly share sexual harassment and abuse allegations, asserting what they didn’t want, maybe it felt good to pivot to communicating what they did want.
Expressing one’s horniness, as a woman, represents a significant shift from that of sexual object to sexual subject. . .
Allison P. Davis, a staff writer for New York magazine and The Cut, considers it a form of thwarting the patriarchy...
She would know. Ms. Davis is writing a book called “Horny,” a combination of personal storytelling and cultural reporting on “one of the last great taboos: female horniness.” . . .
Ms. Benoit also thinks that the substantial contextual difference in this modern form of horniness is rooted in women’s liberation
“I think #MeToo came from women already knowing that they can have sex on their own terms, which is what horny is about,” she said.
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Read more >
A People’s History of Horny Culture
The idea that women could at once loathe sexual impropriety and desire dirty sex seems simple and obvious, yet it’s been an agonizingly protracted journey for us to arrive here . . .
The Year Women Got ‘Horny’
Women reclaimed a word once the province of crass boys and men who are boys.
