Mediated Intimacy

Sex Advice in Media Culture

Meg-John Barker, Rosalind Gill, Laura Harvey

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781509509126, 9781509509119
• eBook ISBN: 9781509509157
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Mediated Intimacy looks at contemporary sex and relationship advice, exploring how our intimate lives are shaped through different media, from manuals and magazines to television and Twitter. By exploring how intimacy is constructed through different media texts, the authors consider which ideas and practices these changing forms of 'sexpertise' open up, and which they close down.

The book reveals the intimate operation of power in mediated advice, how words and images, stories and sound can work to shore up social injustice. It critically engages with the ideas of choice and responsibility in sex self-help, arguing that these can obscure and/or justify oppression, even if they're sometimes experienced as empowering and/or pleasurable.

This bold and incisive book provides a radical challenge to the assumptions underlying the sex advice industry, and presents a critical, collaborative and consensual vision for sex advice of the future.

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Mediated Intimacy: Sex Advice in Media Culture

The bold argument of this book is that media of various kinds play an increasingly important role in shaping people's knowledge, desires, practices and expectations about intimate relationships. While arguments rage about the nature and content of sex and relationship education in schools, it is becoming clear that more and more of us – young and old – look not to formal education, or even to our friends, for information about sex, but to the media (Attwood et al., 2015; Albury, 2016). This is not simply a matter of media ‘advice’ in the form of self-help books, magazine ‘problem pages’, or online ‘agony’ columns – though these are all proliferating and are discussed at length in this book. It is also about the wider cultural habitat of images, ideas and discourses about intimacy that circulate through and across media: the ‘happy endings’ of romantic comedies; the ‘money shots’ of pornography; the celebrity gossip about who is seeing whom, who is ‘cheating’, and who is looking ‘hot’; the lifestyle TV about ‘embarrassing bodies’ or being ‘undateable’; the newspaper features on how to have a ‘good’ divorce or ‘ten things never to say on a first date’; or the new smartphone apps that incite us to quantify and rate our sex lives, etc. These constitute the ‘taken for granted’ of everyday understandings of intimacy, and they are at the heart of this book.

Mediated intimacy builds on Michel Foucault's insight about the entanglement of power and knowledge in relation to sexuality. In The history of sexuality, Foucault (1978) overturned the ‘repressive hypothesis’ that had constituted supposed fact about eighteenth and nineteenth-century culture. Rather than being suppressed, he argued, discourses of sex were subject to a huge proliferation during this period, with especial interest in the sexualities that did not fit within the heterosexual bond that was becoming prescribed as the basic reproductive unit of capitalist society. Rather than silence and repression, he argued, confessional discourses, a fascination with ‘perversions’, and attempts to found the scientific study of sexuality were central to the period. More recently, writing about the late twentieth century, Ken Plummer (1995, pp. 3–4; emphasis in original) has charted the rise of a ‘sexual storytelling culture’ in which the ‘modern Western world has become cluttered with sexual stories’: ‘every modern invention – mass print, the camera, the film, the video, the record, the telephone, the computer, the “virtual reality” machine – has helped, bit by bit, to provide a veritable erotopian landscape to millions of lives’. Plummer was writing at a time before the web, social media, online dating, smartphones or the ‘selfie’, yet his work showed remarkable prescience about the sexual preoccupations of the media of the time: ‘a grand message keeps being shouted’, he argued, ‘tell about your sex’ (1995, p. 4; emphasis in original).

If sex was ‘the Big Story’ (Plummer, 1995, p. 4) more than twenty years ago, it is surely an even bigger story today. Contemporary Western media are suffused by discourses about sex and relationships, both in media products (TV shows, magazines, films) and in the interactive media in which we are all ‘produsers’ (Bruns, 2008) and ‘playbourers’ (Kücklich, 2005). Our aim in this book is to take seriously the key role that media play in our understandings and scripts of intimate life. Considering the volume of media concerned in one way or another with sex and intimate relationships, it is astonishing that there has been a relative absence of discussion about the kinds of ideas promulgated in media – particularly compared to the wealth of research about sex and relationship education in schools. While there is some public concern about the ‘bad influence’ that some media, particularly pornography, may have (Boynton, 2003; Buckingham & Bragg, 2003; Albury, 2014), and a growing body of literature about sex ‘self-help’ (e.g. Potts, 1998; Tyler, 2004; Jackson, 2005; Rogers, 2005; Farvid & Braun, 2006; Ménard & Kleinplatz, 2008; Gill, 2009; Gupta & Cacchioni, 2013), in general we know very little about how sexual relationships are depicted in the media, let alone about the everyday constructions of intimacy that pervade media culture.

In Mediated intimacy we look across a wide variety of different media and genres to ask in detail about the kinds of constructions of sex that are dominant, critically examining what sex is in media culture, who and what is depicted as ‘normal’, how issues of consent, coercion and violence are framed, which bodies matter and are made to count, and exploring media constructions of desire, risk and pleasure. We look both at ‘mainstream’ media and also at ‘alternative’ spaces – queer, feminist, and sex-critical media. As one of the first attempts to examine the mediation of intimate life, our priority is to map broad and emerging patterns, but we also want to note contradictions and ‘lines of flight’ – these are inevitable when looking across a diverse range of sources and might offer resources for hope, and room to move, breathe and resist dominant constructions. The analysis presented is a thoroughly intersectional one that attempts strenuously to take differences seriously. We seek to ‘notice’ and pay attention to exclusions and invisibilities – but also to the kinds of visibility (Gamson, 1998) that are allowed for different groups including those relating to age, health status, disability, sexuality, cis/trans/non-binary genders, class and race.

In the remainder of this introductory chapter we set out some of the key terms and contexts that inform the arguments made in this book. The chapter proceeds in three broad sections. We start with broad discussions of the ‘transformations of intimacy’ said to be marking Western cultures, drawing on social theory and feminist and queer accounts. Continuing our argument we then consider the significance of neoliberalism as a context for thinking about intimate relationships, turning subsequently to neoliberalism's gendered iteration as a postfeminist sensibility. The growing impact of consumer culture and the rise of ‘lifestyle media’ are also both central to understanding how intimate life is mediated and we consider these in the next section. Finally we discuss the expansion and transformation of self-help as a genre and set out our understanding of the notion of mediated intimacy, which informs the analysis presented here. The chapter concludes with a discussion of our key terms and a summary of the argumentative structure of this book.

Intimacy in Neoliberal Capitalism

Intimacy has become a key concept over the last twenty-five years, with a proliferating body of scholarship on ‘intimate citizenship’ (Plummer, 2003), ‘intimate publics’ (Berlant, 2008; 2011) and ‘public intimacies’. The notion of intimacy, with its emphasis upon personal relationships, has displaced older sociological trajectories that were focused on family, kinship and community. For some, the concept is problematic for its privileging of adult sexual relationships and relative inattention to other dimensions – parent–child relations, sibling relationships, and wider bonds of friendship or affiliation. The turn to ‘intimacy’ is sometimes regarded as a symptom of a growing individualism not only in social life itself but also in social theory, with attendant implications that our personal relationships are about individual choice rather than (gendered) roles, responsibilities and obligations (Gillies, 2003; Edwards & Ribbens McCarthy, 2010). For others, however, the notion is appealing precisely for its promise to ‘liberate’ intimate relationships from their ‘domestication’ within the heterosexual nuclear family, and for its openness to broader constituencies, different kinds of affective ties, and more diverse forms of sexual practice.

Transformations of Intimacy

In recent years, feminist research, LGBT and queer activism and scholarship, and sociological writing about late capitalism/late modernity have coalesced around an interest in the ways in which intimate relationships might be said to be changing – with new household forms such as ‘living apart together’, the embrace of civil partnerships and same-sex marriage, and the rise of notions such as ‘friends as the new family’. All these ideas – and many others – are captured by the notion that we are witnessing a ‘transformation of intimacy’. For many of us, just thinking about our grandparents' experiences of intimate life and comparing them with our own offers a compelling sense that the transformation of intimacy theorists are on to something – exactly what that something is, however, is less clear and, as we argue in this book, there are many important issues to consider before we uncritically embrace the idea that everything has changed (for the better) and that we have moved to a bright, new, shiny and democratic form of Intimacy 3.0.

If intimate life is changing, then the causes of this are multiple. Feminist critiques of marriage and the nuclear family were important early contributors to the opening up of intimate life, by highlighting the centrality of power, ideology and even violence to these institutions, challenging the rigid separation between public and private spheres, and interrogating the myth of the family as ‘the site of harmonious, well-adapted social interactions’ (Gillies, 2003, p. 6). The radical psychiatry movement from the 1970s onward also offered a devastating critique of the nuclear family, indicting it for stifling freedom and individuality, and promoting schizophrenia and other mental health problems (Laing, 1971; Cooper, 1971). Women's large-scale entry into the paid labour market, alongside struggles for gender equality and an influential women's health movement concerned to educate and empower women to take control of their sexual and reproductive choices, were together also a significant engine of change. In turn the ‘sexual revolution’, the development of the contraceptive pill, and values of the ‘permissive’ or ‘hedonistic’ 1960s gave rise to new sexual practices and more casual relationships – developments that have arguably been intensified by online dating apps and platforms that facilitate ‘hook ups’ (Farvid, 2010; Moran & Lee, 2014). LGBT activism in the post-Stonewall period has also played a key role in transforming intimacy, through its emphases upon making visible alternative sexual identities and practices, pushing for legal equality, and in modelling new forms of kinship. Lifestyle media, exponential growth of ‘self-help’, and the rise of consumer culture are likewise central to understanding contemporary transformations (as we argue later in the chapter). Moreover, it is important to note the economic/material determinants of new forms of intimate life, and in particular the current prolongation of ‘youth’ as a life-stage in the context of high unemployment and spiralling housing costs which sees increasing numbers of young people remaining in the parental home throughout their twenties and early thirties. At a broader level, many have argued that sexuality and sex have undergone an opening up and postmodernization. Melissa Tyler (2004, p. 96) suggests that postmodern sexualities are characterized by a ‘denaturalizaton of sex, by self-consciousness and reflexivity, by the proliferation of a plurality of meanings, acts and identities, and by pastiche and an indeterminate blurring of boundaries’.

One highly influential perspective on transformations of intimacy comes from theorists of ‘reflexive modernity’, including Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim. Their accounts of the remaking of intimate relationships foreground long-term social processes in the context of postindustrialization, the decline of tradition, and the growing importance of individualization. Giddens suggests that couple relationships have become ‘democratiz...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• 1: Mediated Intimacy: Sex Advice in Media Culture
• 2: History of Mediated Sex Advice
• 3: Gender, Sexuality and the Body in the Media
• 4: Being Normal
• 5: Work and Entrepreneurship
• 6: Pleasure
• 7: Safety and Risk
• 8: Communication and Consent
• 9: Conclusions
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement