The ubiquity of sexualized images and narratives across all media forms signals the importance of this topic for research and analysis. In mainstream communications research in the US it has been located in the “media effects” tradition, where the emphasis has been on the moral risks of explicit sexual content to “family values” (Gunter 2002). This research uses content analysis, which relies on attaching predefined codings of meaning to large datasets of, mainly, television content, to measure the number of sexual incidents portrayed, and the kind of values they promote. Often funded by pressure groups such as the Kaiser Family Foundation, the aim of this research is to influence media policy on censorship and controls over children’s access to sexual content. The worry is that young people will be influenced to engage in premature sexual activity outside of marriage without heed to the attendant risks. In feminist scholarship, on the other hand, there has been a different agenda. Here the initial emphasis was on the ideological reproduction of patriarchal power relations through the cultural preoccupation with women’s sexuality. Most feminist research uses qualitative analysis of a few exemplary texts, to reveal the ideological work that they perform, such as the degree to which textual pleasure is predicated on women’s subjection to male control.
The impact of globalization and new technologies of production and distribution such as the Internet, coupled with a decline in the power of regulators to limit what is available, has enabled a greater diversity in the forms of sexual discourse circulated in the media. This has brought questions of taste to the forefront of feminist debate in ways that often challenge the assumptions about sexual representation that defined the “second wave” era. Patriarchy is no longer seen as the only determining force, not least because of the influence of feminist critical discourses. Ethnographic studies have also complicated assumptions about textual meaning by revealing the very different interpretations made by audiences embedded in divergent taste cultures. Foucauldian methods of discourse analysis have been used to map these multiple perspectives alongside theories of hegemony that trace how they compete in a hegemonic struggle to establish or maintain the legitimacy of certain sexual ideologies at the expense of others. For example, feminist scholars have drawn attention to the importance of journalistic reporting that brings sexual issues out of the private and into the public sphere, where they can be subjected to scrutiny and public debate. Infotainment formats circulate these issues more widely, in the responses to celebrity sex scandals, for example, or confessional talk shows where ordinary people expose their sexual problems or transgressive sexual behavior to expert and public commentary (Shattuc 1997).
Critique Of Patriarchal Textual/Sexual Conventions
The critique of mainstream cinema by feminist film theorists, and the call for women to develop new filmmaking practices, has been particularly influential, drawing attention to the sexual politics of recurring narrative structures, visual conventions, and discursive framing, which position the spectator as masculine and foreground male desire. These approaches also cross over into the debates about pornography and to the analysis of the gender politics of television, which came to prominence in the early 1980s. Analytic techniques derived from semiotics and psychoanalysis have been used in feminist film criticism to show how patriarchal ideologies are reproduced through the eroticization of unequal power relations via the sexual objectification of women’s bodies mediated through the male gaze. This also reveals a history of racial subordination and segregation. Marginalized and abjected, in contrast to the idealization of the white female star’s sexual allure, women of color have been commonly cast as sexually promiscuous, and lacking the sexual virtue and restraint expected of “civilized” white women. This binary structure of idealization and sexual denigration has been understood psychoanalytically as a complex mixture of fear and desire in men’s sexual relationship to women arising from Oedipal guilt. Social prohibitions relegate the unacceptable aspects of sexual desire to the unconscious, which then return in obsessional fantasies that can be traced across the mediascape. The relation that exists between the expression of these unconscious desires and everyday conscious behavior, which has emerged in debates about censorship and pornography, is a matter of dispute. Pro-censorship feminists see it as a harmful legitimation of men’s power over women, while others highlight the futility of legislating against the expression of transgressive desires that are themselves the product of societal prohibitions (Krzywinska 2006).
While liberal regimes draw a distinction between mainstream media and a potentially harmful pornography whose circulation must be carefully restricted, feminist analysis points to the continuities across this regulatory boundary in diverse genres, such as advertising or Hollywood films, which share with pornography a perspective where women are the object of men’s sexual desire. The inherent violence in these textual relations is made explicit in the ubiquity of rape imagery and narratives that constitutes “a cumulative set of discourses that saturate the cultural landscape” (Projansky 2001, 17) and which, it is argued, play a role in maintaining women’s subordination through fear. This creates a real difficulty for any program of censorship, however. Regulatory bodies in the UK, for example, have responded to feminist critique by replacing restrictions on sexual explicitness with a more focused concern with the portrayal of sexual violence. Yet this will not have much impact on the sexual power relations that saturate the media environment. For example, feminist scholars have noted the pleasure women gain from fantasy scenarios of unequal power in “romance” genres, which are as ideologically potent as the more obviously sadistic genres addressed to men. Accusing women of complicity in their own oppression highlights the gap that opened up between feminist critics and the tastes of the majority, which led in the 1990s both to a backlash against “political correctness” and the development of postfeminist popular culture.
Diversification And Distinctions In Taste
Other post-war social movements in western democratic societies have also had a substantial impact on the debates about sexual content in the media. A more diverse culture of sexual expression was advocated by the bohemian challenge to bourgeois sexual propriety in the “permissive era” of the sixties. This was followed by a challenge to heteronormative media cultures, which, linked to extensive campaigning for political and cultural rights for gays and lesbians, has produced a growing acceptance of “queer” sexual portrayals in the western media. These developments have been further enabled by the niche markets opened up by new digital technologies of production and distribution, and the challenge to top-down regulation of “taste and decency” in a consumer-led market. In television, for example, the development of multiple channel televisions has enabled explicitly sexual programs addressed to a gay and lesbian audience to be developed and sold worldwide. Drama serials such as Queer as folk, about a group of gay friends, or the L word, about a community of lesbians, have been welcomed for moving away from the “homosexuality as a social problem” approach that previously characterized their treatment in the media.
The positive role of fantasy in sexual portrayals is emphasized by libertarian theorists, who welcome the expression of repressed and transgressive erotic desires that limit women’s sexual expression as much as men’s. In this view, “unruly” impulses which are denied expression in everyday life are enjoyed in the “safe” space provided by the popular media, acting as an outlet for sexual drives that exceed the moral and political disciplinary boundaries of the patriarchal order or, indeed, the “politically correct” discourses of feminist critique. Cultural theories emphasize the political ambivalence of these temporary transgressions and their openness to hegemonic appropriations that diminish their political power. For example, there are doubts about the radical value of the “raunch culture” that has developed out of the utopian visions of sexual emancipation originally linked to the “second wave” women’s movement, given that it has led to a more intensive commercial exploitation of women’s sexuality alongside a decline in women’s allegiance to feminist politics (Levy 2005). More positively, it has encouraged the address to women as an audience for sexual content in the mainstream media, enabling guilt-free access to sexually explicit media that, it has been argued, is a more significant development for women’s “right to sexual pleasure” than the transgressive pornography valorized by libertarian feminists in that it can be more easily integrated with women’s everyday lives (Juffer 1998).
The globally successful TV series Sex and the city on the US pay channel HBO offers a dramatization of this new sensibility in contemporary western cultures, in which women’s desire to achieve sexual satisfaction is a central motif alongside an ironic recognition of the contradictory expectations of contemporary femininity (Arthurs 2004). This ironic response to the continuing power of traditional gender power relations in a postfeminist society is also exemplified by the rise in the 1990s of the knowingly sexist “lads mags” such as FHM, which carry sexually explicit pictures of women alongside humorous features and commentary.
Global Issues
Sexual freedom may be seen as “empowering” in a context where women have won widespread economic and political citizenship in their own right, but is easily appropriated to more exploitative purposes where economically vulnerable women have little choice to refuse the terms on which their “liberated” performances are bought. Marxist feminists point to how capitalist cultures exploit women’s sexuality for profit and women are rarely the ones who control the process. Glamorous images of sexual freedom in the western media have been identified as one of the lures to migration for impoverished and disempowered women in the poorer regions of the world, who, in the worst cases, find themselves trapped into sexual servitude of various kinds. Charitable agencies seek to counteract the dangers via media campaigns about sexual exploitation. MTV Europe Foundation, for example, targeted male customers in a multimedia global campaign in 2005 alerting men to their complicity in trafficking.
The global flows of sexualized imagery via the Internet and satellite television also generate controversy and censorship where they encounter divergent cultural contexts and regulatory regimes, as has been seen in China’s response to their entry into the international market. The public display of sexualized women’s bodies has also been central to the perceived corruption of values in western consumer cultures that traditional Islamic societies are seeking to resist. Another concern has been the proliferation of pedophile sites on the Internet, which has brought calls for international cooperation to prosecute the producers and consumers.
Cross-cultural exchanges also produce processes of hybridization and syncretization. For example, the impact of the South Asian diaspora on changing sexual cultures and marriage rituals is evident in mainstream Bollywood films and the cosmopolitan bricolage that characterizes the wedding magazines consumed by the new transnational urban middle class in India. Indeed, in this new taste culture “sexuality is most often the site marking and negotiating these class interests” (Desai 2003), while the power relationships involved are explored more critically in low-budget independent films such as Monsoon wedding and Bombay boys.
References:
- Arthurs, J. (2004). Television and sexuality: Regulation and the politics of taste. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
- Buckingham, D., & Bragg, S. (2003). Young people, media and personal relationships: The facts of life. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Desai, J. (2003). Bombay boys and girls: The gender and sexual politics of transnationality in the new Indian cinema in English. South Asian Popular Culture, 1(1), 45–61.
- Gunter, B. (2002). Media sex: What are the issues? Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
- Juffer, J. (1998). At home with pornography: Women, sex and everyday life. New York: New York University Press.
- Krzywinska, T. (2006). Sex and the cinema. London: Wallflower Press.
- Levy, A. (2005). Female chauvinist pigs: Women and the rise of raunch culture. New York: Free Press.
- Projansky, S. (2001). Watching rape: Film and television in postfeminist culture. New York: New York University Press.
- Shattuc, J. (1997). The talking cure: TV talk shows and women. London: Routledge.
- Williams, L. (1990). Hard core: Power, pleasure and the “frenzy of the visible.” London: Pandora.