Search Results

The College Campus: Sex 101?

Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker

in Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think about Marrying

This chapter considers the sex lives of college students, beginning with an extended discussion of the hookup. In-person interviews describe what hooking up means and what it’s ... More

This chapter considers the sex lives of college students, beginning with an extended discussion of the hookup. In-person interviews describe what hooking up means and what it’s looked like in their own lives. According to recent estimates, hookup sex remains a minority practice because many students never do it, many that have do so irregularly, and plenty of hookups stop well short of intercourse. The chapter also explores the ramifications of gender ratio imbalances for how women perceive men on campus, and how they go about pursuing romantic relationships with them. The chapter also documents the sexualization of campus life, which contrasts with the average sexual lives of many collegians, especially when compared with young Americans who are not enrolled in college at all — these remain the most sexually prolific group in the country. The chapter ends by discussing how social networking and texting have altered the sexual landscape on campus.Less

Titillation: The Evolution of the Newspaper Pin‐up

Adrian Bingham

in Family Newspapers?: Sex, Private Life, and the British Popular Press 1918-1978

This chapter considers the contribution of the press to the sexualization of the female body. As photography was integrated into newspapers in the first third of the century, pictures of attractive ... More

This chapter considers the contribution of the press to the sexualization of the female body. As photography was integrated into newspapers in the first third of the century, pictures of attractive women became common. With the reinvention of the Daily Mirror and the Sunday Pictorial in the mid-1930s, more overtly sexualized pin-up shots became regular features, and during the 1950s the pin-up spread throughout the spectrum of the press. With the relaunch of the Sun in 1969, the pin-up was updated for the permissive age and toplessness became the norm with the invention of the page-three girl. Popular newspapers played a crucial role in circulating and legitimizing sexualized images. Fleet Street tried to defuse criticism by maintaining and rigorously policing a ‘common-sense’ distinction between pin-ups and ‘pornography’. Feminists focused on the way these photographs objectified women for the male gaze, but they were unable to dislodge the pin-up culture from the heart of popular journalism.Less

Encountering public art: monumental breasts and the Skywhale

Alison Bartlett

in Social Experiences of Breastfeeding: Building Bridges between Research, Policy and Practice

This chapter is grounded in the idea that more visual imagery of breastfeeding will contribute to its normalisation, and counter the commercial sexualisation of breasts. It suggests, however, that ... More

This chapter is grounded in the idea that more visual imagery of breastfeeding will contribute to its normalisation, and counter the commercial sexualisation of breasts. It suggests, however, that this strategy is not just about seeing but also about feeling. To demonstrate this the chapter turns to a controversial piece of public art — Patricia Piccinini's Skywhale — which was launched in Australia in 2013 and has been touring internationally. The Skywhale is a hot-air balloon in the shape of a fantastical creature of the imagination, which features five giant breasts on each side. This unexpected flying mammal provokes responses wherever it goes, and arguably provides productive ways of engaging public responses to breastfeeding and maternity. This chapter examines responses to Skywhale through broadsheet and social media, and then analyses its affective domain through psychoanalytic concepts and its materiality through the tradition of public art and monuments. The extremes of intimacy and monumentality configured through Skywhale offer an object par excellence for seeing breastfeeding writ large in the public domain, and for feeling the return of the maternal. The chapter argues that this is fundamental to a shift in perceiving breasts as maternal, and breastfeeding as normative.Less

Feminized Labor and the Classed Body

Susan Dewey

in Neon Wasteland: On Love, Motherhood, and Sex Work in a Rust Belt Town

This chapter addresses the feminization of poverty and concomitant pervasive sexualization of femininity evident in almost all spheres of life in the United States. With the advent of ... More

This chapter addresses the feminization of poverty and concomitant pervasive sexualization of femininity evident in almost all spheres of life in the United States. With the advent of deindustrialization, increased poverty, and lack of formal-sector employment resulted in greater numbers of women in the sex industry. Sex workers came to inhabit a social category that positioned them in awful need of state control and assistance. Following this, it describes the lives of women workers at Vixens who are said to fill culture-specific roles by dancing in front of all-male audiences in exchange for money. It states that American erotic dance practices resulted from cultural contact between diverse communities and elaborate intersections of history, power, and difference in the construction of erotic subjectivity. Finally, it emphasizes that what women experience at Vixens is inextricably linked to the systematic devaluation of women's labor and the pervasive sexualization of femininity.Less

Conclusion Sexual Exhaustion

Dale M. Bauer

in Sex Expression and American Women Writers 1860–1940

This book concludes by explaining that the fictions discussed herein disclose how women writers understood the sexualization of culture, even as they separated it from the increasing commodification ... More

This book concludes by explaining that the fictions discussed herein disclose how women writers understood the sexualization of culture, even as they separated it from the increasing commodification of sexuality. The author has also traced three kinds of hope for sexuality, focused on transcendent, transformative, and therapeutic desires. By coining words and developing symbols such as “worse,” “still,” and “freezing,” these writers attempted to master the new code of sex relations, thereby wresting meaning from the new sexual vernacular circulating in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The categories the author has chosen to study—ugliness, middle age, sex power, inarticulate sexuality, and therapeutic intimacy—are the ones considered most crucial in the transformation of women's writing about sexuality from late Victorian to modern times.Less

Introduction

Sara Mills

in Gender and Colonial Space

This introductory chapter discusses the process by which spatial relations are considered classed, raced and gendered within the imperial and colonial contexts. It notes that the focus of the study ... More

This introductory chapter discusses the process by which spatial relations are considered classed, raced and gendered within the imperial and colonial contexts. It notes that the focus of the study is on the period of ‘high’ British colonialism during the last few years of the nineteenth century. It considers the question of spatiality and explains how the book—and the study—developed. It examines post-colonial theory, this book's theoretical position, and the concepts of space and spatial relations. This chapter also identifies the different levels of colonial space and discusses the public and private spheres, the contact zone, the sexualisation of space, and gender and space.Less

Fixing the Tourist Gaze: Essentializing the Primitive and the Creation of Desire in Textual and Visual Media

Michelle MacCarthy

in Making the Modern Primitive: Cultural Tourism in the Trobriand Islands

This chapter looks at the kinds of visual and textual representations that inform and influence ideas about “primitivity”. It provides an overview of the kinds of representations common in television ... More

This chapter looks at the kinds of visual and textual representations that inform and influence ideas about “primitivity”. It provides an overview of the kinds of representations common in television and print for PNG as a whole, and for the Trobriands in particular. Documentary films, reality television programming, and the single feature film made on location are discussed. Also discussed are internet resources and the influence of the Lonely Planet guidebook in prefiguring the expectations of travelers.Less

Female Hereditary Performers in Post-Independence India: Communities, Histories and Livelihoods

Anna Morcom

in Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance: Cultures of Exclusion

This chapter focuses on the communities of female hereditary performers themselves. Drawing on evidence from colonial ethnographies as well as from contemporary fieldwork, it begins by outlining the ... More

This chapter focuses on the communities of female hereditary performers themselves. Drawing on evidence from colonial ethnographies as well as from contemporary fieldwork, it begins by outlining the structure of female hereditary performers as one of interrelated networks of tribes and communities that stretch across North India. The chapter then turns to the post-independence history of selected communities of female public/erotic performers. It shows that it was after independence that some communities of female performers became involved in sex work rather than performing arts and that for those that continued to be performers, it is since the 1990s in particular that life has apparently become most difficult, with a livelihood from performing almost impossible, especially after the closure of the dance bars in Mumbai in 2005. During this time, many vernacular traditions have involved more sexualised performance and/or more harassment for performers, and a more illicit status. Many performers have become more reliant on sexual transaction, with the older systems of long-term concubinage breaking down.Less

Chercher la femme: Traces of an Ever-Present Absence

Jacqueline Couti

in Dangerous Creole Liaisons

This introductory chapter first discusses the 2009 strike in Guadeloupe and Martinique and a 2012 Martinican carnival float re-enacting the argument between the politicians Claude Guéant and Serge ... More

This introductory chapter first discusses the 2009 strike in Guadeloupe and Martinique and a 2012 Martinican carnival float re-enacting the argument between the politicians Claude Guéant and Serge Letchimy. Such an approach stresses the necessity to explore the history of sexualized, gendered, and racialized discourses in the French Caribbean. Indeed a masculine discourse that initiates a gendered and racial rhetoric of victimization particularly needs to be questioned. This chapter also presents Dangerous Creole Liaisons as a literary archaeology. This thus study delves throughout the nineteenth century into representations of sexuality and race to unveil the divisiveness within the French nation and the complicated tensions surrounding republicanism and its ideals. This discriminatory imagery belongs to a strategy for cultural (if not explicitly political) dominance that white Creoles (békés) first deployed. The introduction calls attention to a discursive network that flirts with sexual images, seduction, and libertinage as instruments of political domination and subversion cannot be ignored. Hence examining depictions of licentious behaviors and pernicious interconnections are central to dangerous Creole liaisons. The use of the concept of dangerous liaisons, allows one to untangle the intertwined dynamics of domination, resistance, and negotiation that too often lead to prejudice and stigmatization.Less

“What is better, a car or a wife?”: Automobiles and Modern Bodies

in Reproduction by Design: Sex, Robots, Trees, and Test-Tube Babies in Interwar Britain

This chapter describes why probably the most ubiquitous representation of the impact of machine culture was the sexualization of the motorcar on the one hand and the automobilization of humans on the ... More

This chapter describes why probably the most ubiquitous representation of the impact of machine culture was the sexualization of the motorcar on the one hand and the automobilization of humans on the other. The motorcar developed a masculine aphrodisiac in combining speed, risk, and danger. Cars were billed by advertisers as providing men with a reassurance of their virility. Owning and controlling a car should have resulted on to the man's possession and pleasuring of the woman. The car was a key symbol of woman's emancipation. The image of the motorcar could represent male power and female independence, the assurance of upper-class entitlements and the threat of lower-class mobility. It also helped in reconfiguring twentieth-century sexuality. Thus, the motorcar was playing a key a role in reconfiguring sex, gender, and reproduction.Less

‘Sons of Belial’: Contaminated/Contaminating Victorian Male Bodies

Lesley A. Hall

in The Male Body in Medicine and Literature

Lesley A. Hall examines the fear of the sexualised male body as a vector for diseases capable of disrupting both familial and social dynamics. While academic research has tended to focus on the ... More

Lesley A. Hall examines the fear of the sexualised male body as a vector for diseases capable of disrupting both familial and social dynamics. While academic research has tended to focus on the potential for damage caused by the sexually diseased female body, Hall redresses the balance by considering the pariah status attributed to those, such as soldiers and sailors, considered to be over-sexed or lacking in self-control. But the prejudice was extended to those men in general society either afflicted by syphilis or gonorrhoea or regarded as threatening through their moral laxity the reproductive healthiness of family life. Hall shows how this threat became increasingly public in wider culture during the last decades of the nineteenth century, bringing about both general condemnation and legislative amendment. Reinforcing such anxieties about wayward male concupiscence was an equally virulent condemnation of masturbation as consciously self-harming. Hall asserts that masturbation was considered more than a personal vice, being viewed as potentially contaminative – seminal loss producing not just a range of frightful pathologies for the individual but a transmission of harmful agents to others.Less

Sexualization and participation

Amy Adele Hasinoff

in Sexting Panic: Rethinking Criminalization, Privacy, and Consent

This chapter examines the tension between the idea that participatory new media practices typically produce positive, democratic effects and the assumption that sexualization creates a problematic ... More

This chapter examines the tension between the idea that participatory new media practices typically produce positive, democratic effects and the assumption that sexualization creates a problematic type of new media practice—sexting. Drawing on postcolonial feminist scholars who question the normative definitions of agency, the chapter argues why the complexities of sexting suggest that resistance and participation might be overvalued ways of interacting with mass culture. It explores the stakes of pathologizing conformity to mass culture and contends that the supposedly deficient agency of adolescent girls who create sexual photographs of themselves should not be a primary site for intervention. It also maintains that it could be useful to think about sexting as media production but at the same time challenges the notion that media participation is inherently good. Thinking about sexting as a form of media production, which has a basically positive connotation for youth, suggests the need to consider the potential benefits of sexting, such as intimacy and interpersonal communication, alongside the well-known risks.Less

Conclusion

Amy Adele Hasinoff

in Sexting Panic: Rethinking Criminalization, Privacy, and Consent

This book has explored three dominant problems in how people tend to think about sexting: that sexting is a crime, that adolescents sext because they are biologically irrational and irresponsible, ... More

This book has explored three dominant problems in how people tend to think about sexting: that sexting is a crime, that adolescents sext because they are biologically irrational and irresponsible, and that sexting is a psychological problem of girls' low self-esteem. It has made a case for the decriminalization of consensual sexting and advocated viewing sexting as a form of media production. It has also interrogated both the theory that sexualization causes sexting and the idea that new media participation is inherently good. Finally, it has criticized the assumptions that “information wants to be free” and “privacy is dead” and instead suggested a model of explicit consent for all private media circulation. The chapter concludes by offering three key recommendations: first, we must recognize that granting youth the right to sext will offer them a significant defense against possible harms that the state and peers can commit; second, we need to incorporate consent into how we think about private media circulation; third, we need to accept adolescent girls' sexual agency.Less

U.S. Colonialism, Migration, and Sexualities: The Filipino American Case

Yen Le Espiritu

in Sex for Life: From Virginity to Viagra, How Sexuality Changes Throughout Our Lives

This chapter studies how immigration between the Philippines and the United States has altered men's and women's sexual lives. Focusing on Filipino immigrants, the chapter argues that, owing to the ... More

This chapter studies how immigration between the Philippines and the United States has altered men's and women's sexual lives. Focusing on Filipino immigrants, the chapter argues that, owing to the Philippines' neocolonial relationship with the United States, Filipinos “[have] been prepared by the thoroughly Americanized culture of the homeland” because they have encountered U.S. customs while still in the Philippines. However, Filipino immigrant parents have both constructed idealized notions of female chastity and relaxed rigid expectations for their children's behaviors. Furthermore, the perceived inflexible expectation of Filipina chastity is not only about reinforcing masculinist and patriarchal power but also about strengthening national and ethnic self-respect in light of the pervasive sexualization of Filipinas and other Asian women in the United States.Less

Doubled Stagnations: Mapping Debates

Adrienne Evans and Sarah Riley

in Technologies of Sexiness: Sex, Identity, and Consumer Culture

Sexiness has become a topic of significant public interest, debate, and concern. This has meant that an emotive noise concerning sexualization has drowned out more complex ways of understanding the ... More

Sexiness has become a topic of significant public interest, debate, and concern. This has meant that an emotive noise concerning sexualization has drowned out more complex ways of understanding the intersections of neoliberalism, consumerism, and postfeminism, so that sexualization discourses call on us to emote, but without any sense of forward momentum. In this chapter, the authors conceive of this noise as a “doubled stagnation” that contains elements of past noise: concerns about the bodies of young women, celebratory and critical accounts that mirror the feminist sex wars of the 1980s, and academic accounts that place women as either freely choosing or suffering from their own false consciousness. In mapping these debates, the authors argue for finding a more productive space from within doubled stagnations from which to account for pleasure, agency, and “empowerment.”Less

Putin the Sex Back in Politics: Gender Norms, Sexualization,and Political Legitimation in Russia

Valerie Sperling

in Sex, Politics, and Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia

This chapter spotlights the Russian case, addressing the question: Why have we seen the use of gender norms and sexualization in Russian politics in the Putin era? The chapter reviews the Kremlin’s ... More

This chapter spotlights the Russian case, addressing the question: Why have we seen the use of gender norms and sexualization in Russian politics in the Putin era? The chapter reviews the Kremlin’s apparent strategy of accentuating Putin’s machismo and considers multiple intersecting factors (political, cultural, economic, historical, and international), rooted in the 1990s, that contributed to the emphasis on gender norms and homophobia in twenty-first century Russian politics. The chapter looks specifically at the masculinity on the campaign trail, the development of the image, especially in relation to Putin, of the “real man” (muzhik) and the sexy man, and the effectiveness of the machismo legitimation strategy. The chapter also uses a multiple opportunity structure model to explain the rise of gender norms and sexualization as tools of political legitimation in Putin’s Russia.Less

Bikinis and Other S/pacific N/oceans

Teresia K. Teaiwa

in Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific

This chapter suggests that the bikini bathing suit manifests both a celebration and a forgetting of the nuclear power that strategically and materially marginalizes and erases the living history of ... More

This chapter suggests that the bikini bathing suit manifests both a celebration and a forgetting of the nuclear power that strategically and materially marginalizes and erases the living history of Pacific Islanders. By analyzing militarist, nuclear, and touristic discourses on Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands, it demonstrates the feminization and sexualization of nuclear colonialism while elaborating how empires have been engendered through the deformation and violation of Pacific Islander bodies. It describes the bikini bathing suit as a testament to the recurring tourist trivialization of Pacific Islanders’ experience and existence. By drawing attention to a sexualized and supposedly depoliticized female body, the bikini distracts from the colonial and highly political origins of its name. The sexist dynamic the bikini performs—objectification through excessive visibility—inverts the colonial dynamics that have occurred during nuclear testing in the Pacific, that is, objectification by rendering invisible.Less

Integrating Evolutionary Affective Neuroscience and Feminism in Gender Research

Leslie L. Heywood and Justin R. Garcia

in Gender, Sex, and Sexualities: Psychological Perspectives

Tensions between feminist and biological theories applied to human behavior have generated extended debate. The debate has been multifaceted, with threads focusing on, for instance, particular forms ... More

Tensions between feminist and biological theories applied to human behavior have generated extended debate. The debate has been multifaceted, with threads focusing on, for instance, particular forms of evolutionary theorizing, the relationship between scholarly and popular discourses, and the relative appropriateness of scientific and humanistic methods of inquiry into human experience. Although many issues remain contentious, in recent years feminist researchers have been making a strong case for the integration of scientific insights into feminist paradigms. Theoretical innovations in evolution, development, and neuroscience point to ways of addressing long-standing tensions between scientific and feminist theory in a manner that honors and requires contributions from both. This chapter focuses on the relevance and complementarity of affective neuroscience to feminist theory.Less