The Sexualization of Culture

Media and sexuality studies scholar Feona Attwood maps out “sexualized culture” as

a rather clumsy phrase used to indicate a number of things; a contemporary preoccupation with sexual values, practices and identities; the public shift to more permissive sexual attitudes; the proliferation of sexual texts; the emergence of new forms of sexual experience; the apparent breakdown of rules, categories and regulations designed to keep the obscene at bay; our fondness for scandals, controversies and panics around sex.

(Attwood, 2006, pp. 78–79)

As Rosalind Gill (2009a, p. 140) points out, both the preoccupations and analyses attached to sexualization are largely ones involving the media:

Media are contradictory locations for exploring “sexualization” since they are sites both where the phenomenon can (arguably) be observed and where it is discussed and dissected, usually as a matter of “concern.” Not infrequently these two can coexist in the same space, as when newspapers and magazines print outraged or “concerned” readers’ opinion pieces about toys featuring the Playboy bunny or the selling to children of T-shirts bearing the legend “Future Porn Star” (to take two recent examples), amidst a range or other content (photographs of topless women, adverts for telephone sex lines and so on) which itself might attract the label “sexualized.” The media, then, are paradoxically perhaps both the biggest source of “sexualized” representations, as well as the primary space where debates about “sexualization” are aired.

In the course of such developments, sexual practices, cultures, and conventions have grown increasingly visible in the public eye (Attwood, 2009, p. xiii). This encompasses trends as different as the seemingly global popularity of E. L. James’ 50 Shades trilogy (and its sequels), the ubiquitous use of hook-up applications designed for pairing up people looking for romantic and sexual encounters, and progress made in advancing the rights of sexual minorities. As Ken Plummer puts it in his discussion on intimate citizenship:

Intimacies circulate around the globe embedded within vast social and cultural “flows.” They flow across the world in technologies (…)—films, television, music, books; through major world markets—including those of pornography and sex work; through people—who migrate, travel as tourists, and have friends of partners in different cities worldwide; and through ideas—religious, political, cultural. We thus have finanscapes, ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, and ideoscapes within which ideas about intimacy circulate around the world.

(Plummer, 2003, pp. 119–120)

Understood in this vein, sexuality is not merely a personal matter of preference and orientation but equally a public issue connected to citizenship. While transformations in antidiscrimination legislation are local, the broader trends that they connect to are much less so, and are supported by the global flows of capitalism, by media and communication networks, and by the imageries of popular culture that affect ways of perceiving sexuality and intimacy alike. The spread and reach of networked communications, and the speed of the circulation of images, texts, arguments, news, and ideas that it affords, feeds such flows connected to sexual identities, practices, tastes, orientations, rights, and regulations. The mainstreaming of sex, as diagnosed by Attwood, is hence markedly “glocal” in its resonances. As such, it fuels frictions, clashes, and incongruities between global flows and local cultures, norms, and conventions embedded in religious, moral, and political principles. Contra advances made in the rights of sexual minorities in many Western countries, Russia has established laws against “gay propaganda,” while the threat of imprisonment and even the death penalty for homosexual acts remains in several Asian and African countries (e.g. Bello, 2012; DeJong & Long, 2013; Rastegar, 2013).

It should be noted that the democratization and publicness of sexuality that both Plummer and McNair address in the context of capitalist consumer culture also involve the regulation of sexual practices and identities, often in predictable ways (Attwood, 2006, p. 82). The imperative of sexiness and hotness equated with desirability (Gill, 2009a, p. 141; Levy, 2005, pp. 30–31), for example, has not so much replaced the imperative of beauty in the lives of young women than contributed an additional normative layer to it. Similar regulatory effects are evident in how the body types and categories of gay pornography continue to feed into dating sites and applications as vectors of recognizability. While many gay men find these categories narrowly confining and difficult to negotiate and relate to, they function as default templates in organizing orientations, desires, and identity positions. (See Cassidy, 2015; Mercer, 2017; Mowlabocus, 2007.)

The fondness for scandals and controversies around sex, interest in the sexual activities of others, and the preoccupation with sexual identities and practices, as described in Attwood’s diagnosis of sexualization, are of course far from novel cultural trends specific to contemporary media as such. The 19th century, which saw the birth of the modern notion of pornography as descriptive of representations previously categorized as obscene or lewd (Kendrick, 1996), also witnessed the rise of what Michel Foucault (1990) identifies as scientia sexualis, namely the rise of sexuality as an object of knowledge. This involved the articulation of identity categories such as the homosexual in drawing boundaries between the normal, the deviant, and the perverted. Sexual acts, preferences, and orientations attached to identity categories became a basis for a truth concerning the individual, one that could be uncovered through the act of confession: “It is in the confession that truth and sex are joined, through the obligatory and exhaustive expression of an individual secret” (Foucault, 1990, p. 61). Following Foucault, sexuality became a secret to be compulsively uncovered, examined, and analyzed.

Pornography and the Limits of Decency

Far from being limited to the level of the individual, preoccupation with things sexual has been a key strand of popular media culture throughout its history: in print, cinema, television, and beyond. Sexual identities have been represented and negotiated, the boundaries of obscenity tenuously redrawn, and forms of intimacy established in a range of media, often in contradicting forms. And, as Attwood points out, the very notion of sex has undergone drastic transformations in the process: ones connected to politics, ethics, and the shifting affordances of media technology alike:

Today, “sex” may be an out of body experience, very intimately performed across time and distance; it may be an intense act of communication between strangers; an encounter conjoining flesh and technology; an act of presentation and a representation which is consumed as quickly as it is produced; a way of articulating or disarticulating identity; a type of interaction never before possible in human history. This is very strange given the inherited and still powerful associations of sex with the body, essence and truth, and yet it is already unremarkable and routine to the many people who frequent sex chat rooms or use messenger systems to interact sexually at the beginning of the 21st century.

(Attwood, 2006, p. 79)

The expansion of media culture into one of ubiquitous access, multichannel and multiplatform consumption has further fueled preoccupations with sexuality and diversified the shapes and forms that sexual representations take. Flirtation with the sexually titillating has been, and remains, a central focus of mainstream cinema within the confines set by regulation and classification systems. While it has been possible to depict sexuality and nudity in mainstream cinema in different degrees across decades, pornography, long an illegal genre and hence firmly outside of any pre-examination and public screening practices, has involved no similar limitations in terms of what to show or how. The 1930 Motion Picture Production Code, also known as the Hays Code, regulated the appropriate style of kisses and embraces displayed in American cinema, whereas stag films of the time dwelled on group sex and lustful activities of various kinds. The standards of obscenity, as witnessed in the outputs of Hollywood cinema and the forms of regulation attached to them across decades, are, in sum, contingent indeed (see Lewis, 2000).

The history of pornography can be defined as one of limited access and the barring of certain images and texts from public view. Legislation and regulation have worked to keep pornographic materials away from the reach of minors (as well as the broader population) and to control both the production and circulation of materials deemed obscene ever since the term “pornography” was coined in the 19th century. The modern notion of pornography is derived from the Greek words for prostitute (pornē) and writing (graphein). Such “writing about prostitutes” clearly precedes the 19th century, given the diverse history of literature and visual culture focusing on sexual depiction with the intent of titillation (Hunt, 1996; Laqueur, 2003; Mudge, 2000). After archaeologists discovered the sexually explicit frescoes and objects of Pompeii, they were closed off in a “secret museum” in Naples that was only available to gentlemen. Women, children, and male members of the lower classes were considered much too susceptible to the objects’ ill and arousing effects to be allowed entry. In The Secret Museum, Walter Kendrick (1996) addresses this fencing in and marking off of the obscene as the key event in the modern history of pornography.

According to Kendrick, pornography is defined less through its content than through the practices of classification, censorship, and regulation connected to it. The term pornography has been used to refer to a broad range of images, texts, and practices since the excavations at Pompeii: “In 1857, ‘pornography’ meant something very different from what it now means; in 1755, ‘pornography’ meant nothing at all” (Kendrick, 1996, p. 2). In Kendrick’s view, a regulatory category such as pornography should not be conflated with any kind of textual particularity (also Attwood, 2002, p. 94). Rather, it can be seen as a contingent marker of low cultural status, value, and taste—and, perhaps even more centrally, the miasmic capacity of pornography to arouse and corrupt those encountering it. Such concerns are, for Kendrick (1996, p. 262), encapsulated in the figure of a young person at risk, susceptible to ill effects, and in need of protection that has been used for envisioning the harms of pornography from the 19th century to the current day.

It is noteworthy that debates on pornification often leave the very denominator of pornography, its consumption, aesthetics, ethics, and economies with little attention beyond sweeping generalizations. In such uses, pornography comes across as something that is assumedly always already known and that requires no further definition or study in order to be understood as a point of reference and object of critique. At the same time, the category is nothing if not porous and notoriously difficult to pin down in terms of its contents, forms, intents, or effects (see McNair, 2013, pp. 17–19).

According to most thesaurus definitions of the term, pornography aims to sexually arouse its viewers and readers by depicting bodies, genitalia, sexual acts, and bodily fluids in attentive detail. The generic specificity of porn has been located in the images and texts themselves (what they depict), in authorial intentions (what they are intended to do and to be used for), in their effects (what they do), in audience interests (what is experienced as pornographic), and in combinations thereof. Notions of obscenity frame pornography in moral terms, casting it as immoral, damaging, and involving “prurient” (impure, lascivious, vulgar, bawdy) interests.

(Paasonen, 2011, p. 50)

Attempts to define pornography are rendered even more laborious by the value judgments and political investments that come with them. The marking apart of porn from erotica, for example, involves questions of, and norms of, good taste and artfulness, whereas antipornography activist interpretations position pornography as both symbol and engine of male violence against women. In a media studies perspective, again, pornography is a marker of genre, the identifying characteristics of which are under constant redefinition in the interactions that occur between the producers, distributors, consumers, and regulators of media. The increased public visibility of materials previously deemed obscene involves both conflict and renegotiation between disparate definitions and the interpretative positions attached to them.

This short conceptual and historical detour helps to point out at least three issues central in terms of contemporary debates on pornification: First, the cultural role—and, at least to a degree, the attraction—of pornography has been based on the constant drawing of boundaries between the unacceptable and the acceptable, the obscene and that which is deemed appropriate for public view and consumption. Second, this drawing of boundaries has been, from the beginning, strongly motivated by the figure of childhood at risk and the imperative of protecting it. This figure remains an affective epicenter in contemporary concerns over the pornification and sexualization of culture. Third, the fencing off of pornography as an ill yet titillating force has involved marking it apart from not only from culture proper but even from the category of culture itself. This has made it possible to position pornography as an external threat that must be regulated, combatted, and controlled in order to minimize its harmful effects on culture and society.

Mapping Pornification

Messy Conceptual Terrain

The three lines of development connected to the notion of pornification, outlined above as ones concerning technological, regulatory, and cultural transformations, are easy enough to identify and illustrate with an ample array of examples. At the same time, the question remains as to how suitable a term “pornification” may in fact be for identifying and analyzing them. There is a risk that the term does not allow for sufficient distinctions to be drawn between different kinds of materials, “soft-core and hardcore pornographies, the public circulation of sexually suggestive imageries and the explicitness of action shots” (Paasonen, 2015, p. 6). Images flirting with levels of undress and sexually suggestive poses and references may be ubiquitous in print media, television, and social media platforms, yet the same does not apply to the more explicit, straightforward, and even grotesque imageries of hardcore pornography that are, in fact, algorithmically filtered out from platforms like Facebook, forbidden in the user agreements of YouTube, and excluded from the flows of public broadcasting and network television.

Online pornography is easily, freely, and abundantly available. However, contrary to what the term “exposure,” which is widely used in describing encounters with pornography, implies, porn is also something that needs to be knowingly searched for and actively sought out. Addressing recent British reports on children and sexualization, Martin Barker comments on the frequent uses of “exposure” in describing young people’s encounters with adult content online. According to him, these speak of a

dismissive attitude towards research which showed that, where young people do look at pornography, the motives for doing so range from “masturbation,” to “wanting to know more about sex,” to “curiosity,” and to “boredom.” Such motives for looking do not fit well with the working model of cumulative effect, corrupting influence, and slippery slope to doom, all of which is set in motion by that word “exposed.”

(Barker, 2014, p. 143)

The terminology of exposure, supported by the framing of pornography as a force somehow external to culture that threatens to “pornify” it, ignores the user motivations of people of different ages. Counter to the abstract figure of a young person at risk who is passively exposed to pornography, empirical research points to adolescents’ foregrounding of their own media literacy, showing notable resilience in terms of content they find disturbing, and having a range of reasons to consume pornography and a variety of interests attached to it (e.g., Albury, 2014; Barker, 2014; Bragg & Buckingham, 2009; Buckingham & Chronaki, 2014; Mulholland, 2013; Spisak, 2016). As Barker notes, such perspectives, along with a range of questions concerning adolescent sexual agency, are nevertheless routinely rendered invisible by the hegemonic discourse of concern.

Linda Papadoupoulos’ 2010 report for the British Home Office, Sexualisation and Young People: A Review, reiterates many of these concerns, also arguing that “prolonged exposure increases the likelihood of consuming material that depicts either potentially ‘harmful’ or, what the UK government labels, ‘extreme’ sexual behaviours such as violent sex, sadomasochism and bestiality” (Papadoupoulos, 2010, p. 12). Here, as elsewhere, the term “exposure” does all kind of work. It helps to frame pornography as a force that enters the lives of children without any volition or activity on their side—and, in fact, frames pornography as a force that enters culture as if from the outside. In this framing, the discourse of exposure is both facilitated and motivated through the marking apart of pornography from culture proper.

Another set of problems lies in how discussions on pornification may ignore elementary distinctions and developments within the category of hardcore pornography itself, fixing it instead into a knowable, singular entity. Differences between different sub-genres, aesthetics, and practices of circulation may be rendered invisible even as they remain both highly pronounced and crucial in and for understanding the phenomena under discussion. Generalized debates on the “pornification of culture” may, in short, engender a simplifying master narrative out of diverse and conflicting cultural tendencies in ways that pave the way for analytical obscurity (Nikunen & Paasonen, 2007). Following such a line of thought, Clarissa Smith argues that the terms “pornification” and “pornographication” have, in the course of their abundant reiteration,

been so widely taken up as descriptions and explanations of cultural shifts and worrying experiences, that they obscure the specific histories and politics of both the cultural artefacts under examination and those who are doing the examination. The claims of “pornographication” and “pornification” are already so saturated in the languages and references of concern and regulation that they restrict the range of possible explanations that can be admitted.

(Smith, 2010, p. 104)

It may in fact well be that the connotation of concern, combined with the imprecision inherent in the term “pornification” itself, work against its productive uses as a descriptive or analytical term when exploring the public role and position of pornography: “Rather than explaining or describing cultural tendencies in their complexity, pornification may create a fallacious impression of order and unity and effaces ruptures and mutually conflicting developments from view” (Paasonen, 2015, p. 5). These problems are amplified by the highest visibility of those diagnoses of pornification that feed media panics connected to the normalization of sexual representation and anxieties concerning online pornography (Hunter & Attwood, 2009, p. 547, 551).

These responses re-articulate quite familiar concerns around the loss of childhood, commodification, technology, representation, and desire, though they are entirely contemporary in focusing on addictive behaviours, women’s collusion with their own objectification, adults preying on children, and the blurring of boundaries between genres such as porn and horror that depict the body in extremis.

(Hunter & Attwood, 2009, p. 552)

There is a clear seduction to concepts such as pornification in describing sociocultural trends and tendencies that may not be organically interconnected. Such concepts may provide a semblance of unity and coherence where there may in fact be little, and where different processes and interests overlap and possibly contradict one another. Given how the terms pornification and pornication more or less rhyme with “fornication,” they may also easily connote moral judgments over the phenomena addressed. At the same time:

Pornographication/pornification has no very precise meaning; they are a matter of social and cultural perception. The same questions asked of obscenity, pornography, erotica—what are the boundaries of the term, what is included and excluded and why, how are its boundaries maintained—need to be asked of “pornographication.” How is this term deployed and to what ends?

(Smith, 2010, p. 105)

Similar problems are unavoidable with the concept of sexualization. For, as Rosalind Gill (2009a) argues, the developments that the term aims to cover are much too broad to be reduced to a singular narrative or any single homogenized notion. Like sexualization, the term pornification may, then, be put in much better use in formulating questions concerning media culture than in explaining or describing them. Questions can be asked, for example, of how fitness pole-dancing classes connect or fail to connect to the iconographies of pornography, how sexually suggestive selfies distributed on Instagram cite or do not cite these visual conventions, or how sexually explicit scenes in films like Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac (Denmark, 2013) interface with hardcore materials. Rather than assuming a connection—let alone any causality—between such examples and the genre of pornography by default, it is more productive to frame the matter as one of potential continuities and disconnections, flows and reverberations. In such a framing, the notion of pornification obviously cannot promise or provide any ready answers. Furthermore, in order to have analytical leverage, such investigations need to remain sensitive to cultural contexts and specificities.

Discussions on the public visibility of porn and sex are carried out on different continents, in different political regimes, and with notably different tones and political investments (Jacobs, 2014). Several analyses of pornification focusing on American culture have addressed the interconnections of Puritanism, sexual repression, and popularity and mainstreaming of pornography (Hall & Bishop, 2007; Levy, 2005; Sarracino & Scott, 2008). Levy, for example, argues that “Our national love of porn and pole dancing is not the byproduct of a free and easy society with an earthy acceptance of sex. It is a desperate stab at free-wheeling eroticism in a time and place characterized by intense anxiety” (Levy, 2005, p. 199). In something of glaring contradiction, the United States is a key global hub of porn production and its citizens avid consumers of pornography while public resistance to, and moral panics concerning, pornography have high visibility. At the same time, the aftermath of the so-called sex wars continues to divide American debates on pornography into two opposing camps.

In Nordic countries like Finland, concerns are routinely voiced about adolescents’ access to online porn (Spisak, 2016), while public memoranda frame pornography as a problem in terms of sexual health, relationships, and gender equality. At the same time, antipornography activism remains minor and the topic of pornography, in general, fails to evoke major public passions (see Paasonen, 2009). In India, Western influences seen as threatening traditional Hindu values remain the focus of concern. In this context, “The word ‘pornography’ has rarely been used to denote the genre of pornography, that is, sexually explicit material produced specifically for sexual arousal. It has been used to describe material that connotes sex, like film songs, advertisements, cover girls, rape sequences, consensual sex and even beauty pageants” (Ghosh, 2006, p. 273). Even such a brief contextual scan helps to show that although key themes connected to debates on pornification certainly circulate internationally, no cross-continental diagnoses are viable, given the drastic differences in the respective interpretative frameworks. Even if Anglo-American perspectives and concerns remain dominant in both academic and journalistic debates on pornography and its mainstreaming, their context specificity needs to be acknowledged and their claims for generality perpetually questioned.

Review of the Literature

The most widely read journalistic analyses of the pornification of culture include Pamela Paul’s Pornified and Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs, both published in 2005. Both of these books address the sexualization of culture from a markedly North American perspective and with an emphasis on its harmful implications for gender equality and personal sexual lives. Similar emphasis on sexualization and pornification as social problems and concerns is pervasive in public debates, in general interest titles like Pop-Porn (Hall & Bishop, 2007) and the The Porning of America (Sarracino & Scott, 2008), as well as in research reports on the sexualization of adolescence (Papadoupoulos, 2010). The discourse of concern, as exemplified by these bodies of work, functions as the dominant framing for discussions on the increased visibility of sexually explicit media content and its role in the lives of both adults and adolescents. This discourse of concern is supported and amplified by the equally ubiquitous association of pornography with both individual and social harm, as voiced in newly re-activated antipornography activism in particular.

In his 2002 Striptease Culture and 2013 Porno? Chic! Brian McNair offers an explicit counterargument to the discourse of concern. For McNair, the sexualization of culture is connected to increased gender equality and freedom of sexual minorities: rather than being a tool of control or oppression, pornography then becomes framed as an element of liberation. This focus on the democratization of desire is partly echoed in Ken Plummer’s (2003) analysis on sexual citizenship as connected to both global and local flows of media images and public debates.

Pornification and sexualization of culture have been addressed in the research anthologies Pornification (Paasonen, Nikunen, & Saarenmaa, 2007) and Mainstreaming Sex (Attwood, 2009). Both of these volumes contextualize transformations in media culture and analyze their implications in Western societies beyond North America without subscribing either to the discourse of concern or to that of liberation. Pamela Church Gibson (2014) and Rosalind Gill (2009a) similarly focus on the complexities that the flirtation with pornographic conventions in fashion and advertising involves in and for feminist cultural analysis. Robbie Duschinsky (2013) has tracked the popularization of the discourse of sexualization in United States and Britain and argues that, by focusing on young female minors as the ones being negatively affected, it has worked to downplay their sexual agency in problematic ways. In Young People and Pornography, Monique Mulholland (2013) examines girls’ strategies for negotiating pornification while also analyzing the affective dynamics connected to adolescent sexuality and explicit media content.

Diagnoses of sexualization and pornification have also been criticized for doing away with crucial contextual nuances and historical perspectives, perhaps most forcibly by Clarissa Smith (2010), who associates the discourse of pornographication with unsustainable conceptions of authentic sexuality as somehow separable from media and consumer culture. At the same time, the terminology of sexualization and pornification has become mainstreamed and established as shorthand for complex and often contradictory developments and practices. Launched in 2015, the journal Sexualization, Media, & Society explores the shapes and forms of hypersexualized media, more often siding with antipornography perspectives than not (see Bridges et al., 2015). For its part, the launch of the journal Porn Studies in 2014 demonstrates the increased scholarly interest in pornography, as supported by porn’s high visibility as both an object of consumption and a topic of public debate (see Attwood & Smith, 2014).