Social and Personality Psychology Compass 6/7 (2012): 483–498, 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2012.00433.

The Sexualisation of Culture?

Rosalind Gill*
King’s College London

Abstract
This article examines contemporary debates about the ‘sexualisation of culture’. It sets out the
context for claims that Western societies are becoming more sexualised and it explores a number
of competing perspectives about sexualisation. It then looks in more detail at the nature of claims
about sexualisation as they emerge from the different disciplinary perspectives of Psychology and
Media and Cultural Studies, contrasting the strengths and weaknesses of each, and raising criticisms
of both. In a final discussion section, the article considers the usefulness or otherwise of the notion
of ‘sexualisation’ as analytic category and points to the need to go beyond polarised positions. It
advocates a psychosocial approach that takes seriously differences and power in considering the
contemporary proliferation of ‘sexualised’ images, practices and media.

The last decade has seen a significant development of interest in what has become known
variously as ‘the rise of porno chic’, the ‘pornification’ of society or the ‘sexualisation of
culture’ – namely the perception that Western societies are becoming increasingly satu-
rated by representations of sex. What makes the contemporary moment different from
previous waves of interest in the sex industry and pornography is the concern with prac-
tices and representations that are understood as becoming increasingly normalised, widely
dispersed and mainstreamed.
In this article I offer a review of the burgeoning literature on the ‘sexualisation of cul-
ture’ and I make several interventions to point to future directions for research and
engagement in this field. The article traverses a number of boundaries: it is interested
simultaneously in ‘sexualisation’ as a phenomenon and in responses to it (among activists,
in the policy field, in the media and in academic literature); it examines scholarship
within psychology but also in media and cultural studies; and, above all, it attempts to
negotiate a difficult, contested discursive terrain to articulate a feminist position that is
neither anti-sex or anti-porn, nor sanguine or celebratory about the modes of sexism (and
other axes of oppression) at work in contemporary ‘sexualised’culture. If anything, then,
my position might be characterised as ‘sex positive but sexism negative’ – yet I remain
uncomfortable about the rhetorical ⁄ performative work done with such labels and have
consistently argued for the need to ‘complicate’ polarised understandings in the contem-
porary ‘sexualisation wars’.

Mainstreaming Sex: The ‘Sexualisation of Culture’

The ‘sexualisation of culture’ has become a major focus of interest and concern in recent
years (e.g. Attwood, 2009; Durham, 2009; Gill, 2003; Levin & Kilbourne, 2009; McNair,
2002; McRobbie, 2004). The phrase is used to capture the growing sense of Western
societies as saturated by sexual representations and discourses, and in which pornography
has become increasingly influential and porous, permeating ‘mainstream’ contemporary

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484 Sexualisation of Culture?

culture. Porn stars have emerged as bestselling authors and celebrities; a ‘porno chic’ aes-
thetic can be seen in music videos and advertising; and practices once associated with the
sex industry – for example lapdancing and pole dancing – have become newly ‘respecta-
bilised’, promoted as regular corporate entertainment or recreational activity. This shift
speaks to something more than the idea that ‘sex has become the big story’ (Plummer,
1995: 4) but, as Feona Attwood has noted (Attwood, 2006: 77), denotes a range of dif-
ferent 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, catego-
ries and regulations designed to keep the obscene at bay; [and the] fondness the scandals,
controversies and panics around sex’. Brian McNair (2002) argues Western society has
become a ‘striptease culture’: preoccupied with confession, revelation and exposure. This
is connected to an ongoing breakdown or renegotiation of the boundary between public
and private, which is itself the outcome of multiple, intersecting factors including the
(partial) success of the women’s and sexual liberation movements, shifts in media regula-
tion away from censorship and towards ‘an informed consumer model’ (Bragg & Buck-
ingham, 2009), and the possibilities opened up by rapid technological change. More
broadly, sociologists would situate claims about ‘sexualisation’ within the wider canvas of
developments in advanced capitalism in which relationships are taking on more fluid and
‘liquid’ forms (Bauman, 2003), intimacy is transforming (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 1995),
and sex is playing a more central role in ‘projects of the self’ (Featherstone, 1990, 1999;
Giddens,1993)- though these arguments about transformation are themselves contested
(Jamieson, 1997; Smart, 2007).
Anxieties and concerns about sexualisation have come to the fore in reports from think
tanks (e.g. Rush & La Nauze, 2006; APA’s Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls,
2007; Fawcett Society, 2009), Government reports (e.g. Bailey, 2011; Buckingham, Wil-
lett, Bragg, & Russell, 2010; Byron, 2008; Papadopoulos, 2010) activist campaigns (for
example to change the licensing laws for lapdancing clubs), as well as a variety of well-
publicised popular books (e.g. Durham, 2009; Levy, 2005; Paul, 2005). Media coverage
of these discussions of ‘sexualisation’ has been extensive, with media best thought of in
multiple terms as a key site of sexualisation, a key site of concerns about sexualisation,
and, furthermore, a key site of concerns about concerns about ‘sexualisation’ – the latter
seen in the endless recycling of stories about adults being arrested for taking photographs
of their children in the bath or hugging and kissing them in public – which conjure a
‘Brave New World’ in which ordinary, innocent and everyday activities become crimina-
lised because of a ‘moral panic’ about sexualisation (see also Bray, 2008, 2009). ‘Public
opinion’ is similarly heterogeneous, and invocations of it should be treated cautiously, as
performative speech acts rather than transparent accounts of a unitary ‘people’s view’. All
this indicates something of the complexity of contemporary research and discussion about
‘sexualisation’.

Competing Positions in the ‘Sexualisation Wars’

Accounts of sexualisation from different perspectives tend – at the very least – to con-
cur over the idea that something has changed, that, as Brian McNair argues, the late
20th century and early 21st century media in the West are characterized by an unprece-
dented degree of ‘sexual revelation and exhibitionism in which public nakedness,
voyeurism and sexualised looking are permitted, indeed encouraged, as never before’
(McNair, 2002, p. ix). Where commentators disagree is about how this should be

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 Sexualisation of Culture? 485

Recent popular books about sexualisation.

understood (including what gave rise to it) and interpreted. It is possible to identify
three broad (and definitely not homogeneous) positions: the ‘public morals’ position,
the ‘democratizing sex’ position, and feminist approaches. The first regards the ‘sexual-
ization of culture’ from a concern with standards, taste and ‘public decency’. It sees
‘sexualization’ as producing a ‘dumbed down’ sexual culture that panders to and cele-
brates the basest instincts of humankind (Hitchens, 2002). Religious views are often
cited (particularly by right wing variants of this position, dubbed by Robbie Duschinsky
(forthcoming) ‘the responsible right wing’), and sexualized culture is regarded as profane
and debased. In the US it is closely associated with the Abstinence movement, and in
the UK is voiced primarily from sections of the right wing press particularly the Daily
Mail. From the left, the commodification of private, intimate experience and the entry
of commerce into profound human relationships is lamented (Freedland, 2000; Postman,
1982). The main criteria by which sexualization is judged by the ‘public morals’ posi-
tion are the volume of representations, their availability (especially to children) and their
explicitness, with few, if any, distinctions made between the kinds of material being
considered.
Diametrically opposed to the public morals position is the ‘democratizing sex’ approach
which regards the same phenomena from an optimistic, sometimes celebratory perspective
(e.g. McKee, 2009). Brian McNair has articulated this argument most fully in his books
Mediated Sex (1996) and Striptease Culture (2002). McNair argues that a ‘communications
revolution’ has inspired a ‘more pluralistic sexual culture’ and thus promoted a ‘democra-
tization of desire’ (2002b, p. 11). For McNair the current everydayness of porn gives
everyone access to the ‘pornosphere’ without the negative social and psychological conse-
quences that used to be associated with it. McNair argues that porn is transgressive and
liberatory – for women as well as men. Indeed, he contends that there is a direct and
causal relationship between sexual openness and women’s rights: the more open and
diverse a country’s sexual culture, the more established and hegemonic its women’s rights
are likely to be. From this perspective, the spread of ‘porno chic’, regarded with alarm by
moral guardians, should in fact be seen as a sign of cultural maturity, openness and sexual
liberation. Kath Albury (2009) has also argued for the need to ‘read porn reparatively’
rather than in a ‘paranoid’ (Sedgewick, 2003) manner (see also McKee, Albury, &
Lumby, 2008).

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486 Sexualisation of Culture?

Thirdly, there are a number of different and diverse feminist positions which engage
with the sexualisation of culture. Some contemporary radical feminist arguments are rem-
iniscent of the second wave anti-pornography perspectives of Andrea Dworkin (1981)
and Catherine MacKinnon (e.g. Dworkin & MacKinnon, 1988). Sheila Jeffreys (2009)
book The Industrial Vagina is an impassioned polemic against the ‘global sex trade’ that
makes connections between the mainstreaming of pornography, military prostitution, sex
tourism, and the trafficking of women and children (see also Dines, 2010; Tankard Reist,
2009). However, other – contrasting – ‘third wave’ positions build from the ‘sex positive’
feminism of the same period (Lorde, 1984; Rubin, 1984) to offer more optimistic views
of ‘sexualisation’ grounded in understandings of women not only as its victims, but as pro-
ducers and consumers of ‘sexual’ material -in ways that break significantly with construc-
tions of women as passive and asexual (Attwood, 2011; Califia, 1994; Church Gibson,
1993; Johnson, 2002; Juffer, 1998; Lumby, 1997; Smith, 2002, 2007). As Attwood has
argued ‘a whole series of signifiers are linked to promote a new, liberated, contemporary
sexuality for women; sex is stylish, a source of physical pleasure, a means of creating iden-
tity, a form of body work, self-expression, a quest for individual fulfilment’(2006: 86).
A further distinctive feminist perspective explores contemporary sexualisation as a post-
feminist and neoliberal phenomenon linked to consumerism and discourses of celebrity,
choice, and empowerment (Coleman, 2008; Gill, 2008; Munford, 2009; Pinto, 2010;
Ringrose & Renold, 2011; Ringrose & Eriksson Barajas, 2011; Whitehead & Kurz,
2009). Some see in contemporary sexualised culture not a more feminist sexual future
but a turning backwards (Whelehan, 2000) a ‘retro sexism’ (Williamson, 2003) in which
objectifying representations of women are wrapped up in a feisty discourse of fake
empowerment (Levy, 2005). In my own work, developing the Foucaultian notion of
‘technologies of selfhood’, I have been interested in the ways in which contemporary
sexualised, consumerist and neoliberal societies call forth a new feminine subject who ‘is
incited to be compulsorily sexy and always ‘‘up for it’’...
Beauty, desirability and sexual performance(s) constitute her ongoing projects and she is
exhorted to lead a ‘‘spiced up’’ sex life, whose limits – not least heterosexuality and monogamy
– are tightly policed, even as they are effaced or disavowed through discourses of playfulness
and experimentation. (Harvey & Gill, 2011a,b)
None of this latter work sits comfortably in the old ‘anti-porn’ versus ‘sex positive’ bin-
ary. Much of it is explicitly pro-sex, but its target of critique is the way in which sexuali-
sation, power and commerce intersect–often at the expense of the possibilities of
exploring, experimenting and celebrating diverse sexualities. As Levy (2005: 29–30) puts
it:
‘If the rise of raunch seems counterintuitive because we hear so much about being in a conser-
vative moment, it actually makes perfect sense when we think about it. Raunch culture is not
essentially progressive, it is essentially commercial. (…) Raunch culture isn’t about opening our
minds to the possibilities and mysteries of sexuality, it’s about endlessly reiterating one particular
– and particularly commercial – shorthand for sexiness’.
As feminist (and other) scholars have widened their conceptual toolkits for thinking about
sexualisation, with a range of questions about power, consumerism, pleasure, and so on,
it would seem that the binary arguments of the so-called ‘porn wars’ or ‘sex wars’ of the
1980s have given way to a situation in which divergent positions should be located across
multiple axes of difference. Alongside the familiar ‘anti-porn’ versus ‘pro-sex’, we might
situate people in relation to libertarianism versus authoritarianism, according to whether

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 Sexualisation of Culture? 487

their scholarship focuses on texts or on audiences, their disciplinary location in psychol-

ogy or media studies, whether they research effects or meanings, their tendency to be
‘media positive’ or hostile to media – and a whole range of other axes, all of which tend,
nevertheless, to be binaries. In the next section I turn to one of these binaries in two tra-
ditions of empirical research from psychology and media and cultural studies –
polarised around disciplinary histories, geographies and affiliations.

Psychology and the ‘Harms’ of Sexualisation

Most psychological and psychologically informed research (in which I would include
some research in marketing and much communications research carried out in the US)
tends to approach sexualisation with one of two broad foci – concerned either with con-
tent analysis of media texts, or with exploring the (harmful) effects of ‘exposure’ to ‘sex-
ualised’ media. Some studies attempt to examine both aspects, and draw connections
between them.
The first type of research – content analysis – involves designing a coding scheme by
which instances of sexualisation can be ‘measured’ for example by operationalizing it in
terms of visually codable units. These will try to assess the extent of ‘sexualisation’ within
a media product, such as a film trailer (Oliver & Kalyanaraman, 2006:18) by distinguish-
ing between (and counting) scenes in which sexually revealing clothing is shown, sexual
poses are adopted, characters are seen as engaging in sexual conduct, etc. Sometimes con-
tent analytic studies include a temporal dimension, with some attempts to make compari-
sons over time. Andsager (2006: 34), for instance, notes a shift in music videos over the
last 20 years from a situation in which ‘sexual content was often implied rather than
blatant’, focusing on flirtation and innuendo, to the much more ‘explicit’ sexual activity
seen today ‘such as pelvic thrusts, long lip licking or stroking’.
Overall, research in this field tends to point to sexualising material increasing in inten-
sity (that is blatantness ⁄ explicitness) and in volume over time. These claims about increas-
ing sexualisation were central to the APA Task Force Report on the Sexualisation of
Girls, which offered a review of psychological research in the field. The report reviewed
evidence about the increasing significance of media use to young people’s lives arguing
‘children and adolescents spend more time with entertainment media than with any other
activity apart from school and sleeping’ (p. 4), as well studies pointing to the develop-
mental harms of viewing such material. These sources were yoked together to depict a
situation of grave concern about young women’s health and wellbeing. Drawing on the
available research that looks at the ‘effects’ of viewing sexualised images, the report con-
cluded that ‘Research links sexualisation with three of the most common mental health
problems for girls and women – eating disorders, low self-esteem and depression. Even in
experimental conditions girls exposed to advertisements featuring idealised women
reported significant increases in depression scores’ (p. 23). As well as highlighting the
negative psychological impact of exposure to sexualised images, the report also noted its
harmful effect on cognitive functioning and educational achievement; its negative impact
on attitudes and beliefs; its detrimental impact on girl’s ability to develop ‘healthy’ sexual-
ity; and the link between exposure to sexualised material and ‘premature’ sexual activity.
(NB Some US studies seem to think that any sexual behaviour before ⁄ outside marriage is
problematic) (see Lerum & Dworkin, 2009 for an important feminist critique of the
report).
Quantitative psychological research has been valuable in drawing critical attention to
sexualisation, highlighting shifts over time in the volume and nature of ‘sexualising’ mate-

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488 Sexualisation of Culture?

rial, and opening up important questions about the potentially harmful effects of exposure
to sexualised images (particularly on young women who have been the pre-eminent focus
of research). Such studies are relatively cheap to conduct, easily garner scientific credibil-
ity, and are readily translated into attention-grabbing headlines or campaigning materials.
However this type of research also has significant weaknesses. Content analytic studies
rely upon a conception of meaning that is problematic, seeing ‘sexualisation’ as residing
in single, readily identifiable images treated separately from wider features of the texts in
which they are embedded (e.g. storyline, genre, characterisation). They ignore the differ-
ence between levels of meaning (e.g. manifest versus latent meanings) and tell us little
about the images they examine, except how frequently they occur. Even this can be
extremely problematic since coding is an inevitably subjective process and, despite
attempts to ameliorate this (e.g. training different coders to enhance inter-coder reliabil-
ity), there remain very real difficulties in coding many variables (e.g. what counts as ‘pro-
vocative’ clothing differs markedly across time, place and even subculture; similarly it is
far from straightforward to decide whether a female pop singer, such as Katy Perry or
Lady Gaga, is the subject or object of the gaze in her pop video). Rather than opening
up these dilemmas and ambivalences in research reports, positivist science requires that
they are downplayed and treated as value free, ‘technical’ decisions. Frequently this pro-
duces a tendency to ‘code inclusively’ so that anything which depicts or refers to a per-
son’s (particularly a woman’s) physical attractiveness can be read as sexualising or
‘objectifying’, and, moreover, the distinction between ‘sexual’ and ‘sexualised’ is elided.
Research on media ‘effects’ is subject to similar problems which have been well docu-
mented over many decades in the media studies literature (see e.g. Barker & Petley,
1997; Bragg & Buckingham, 2002 for reviews). At the heart is the notion of media audi-
ences as passive dupes who unquestioningly and uncritically absorb media messages
‘hypodermically’ injected into them. Often there seems to be the assumption that conclu-
sions about the nature of media content (e.g. its sexualised quality) can be taken as evi-
dence of the effects of that content upon audiences – i.e. that a direct link can be
assumed. When this link is tested there can be further problems: in laboratory experi-
ments there is the issue of ecological validity – that is the relevance of the experiment to
real life – as well as their ‘snapshot’ nature and preoccupation with what may turn out to
be very short-term effects – for example studies frequently measure depression or cogni-
tive abilities immediately after exposing subjects to ‘sexualising’ material.
There are also a whole series of problems based on the confusion of associations or
correlations with causes, and a tendency to see harm flowing in one direction from the
media to the individual – rather than exploring the complexity of mediating or interven-
ing variables, or even the possibility – say – that individuals who are predisposed to have
sex at an earlier age might more actively seek out more ‘sexualised’ material than people
of a similar age with less interest in sex. Moreover, such research does not give us any
understanding of the mechanisms or processes of influence – that is, how it is that expo-
sure to ‘sexualised’ images may impact on self-esteem or educational attainment (Gill,
forthcoming). This remains the ‘black box’ of such research – a curious absence for psy-
chology. Finally, it is worth highlighting the somewhat asocial, acultural and even asexual
notion of the subject of media influence seen in this research – he or she is understood
to be a tabula rasa (who presumably, without the media, would freely go on to develop a
‘healthy’ sexuality). This issue has been critically discussed in relation to children by a
number of scholars who point to the ways in which a particular problematic idea of
‘childhood innocence’ is mobilised (e.g. Buckingham, 2000; Egan & Hawkes, 2008).

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 Sexualisation of Culture? 489

Critical Media Consumers: Literacy, Choice and Pleasure in Cultural Studies

A contrasting tradition of research is found in a body of audience scholarship from media
and cultural studies (e.g. Hermes, 1995; Radway, 1984; Ang, 1985; Gauntlett & Hill,
1999) This research starts from a position that is often agnostic about the putative intensi-
fication of sexualisation, and, moreover, sees the media more positively as offering ‘tools
to think with’ (Bragg & Buckingham, 2009) rather than as agents of harm. Like the psy-
chological tradition, it sees value in empirical research, but this is largely qualitative, based
on interviews, participant observation and the use of a variety of visual methods (e.g.
scrapbooks or video diaries) and other ethnographic practices. Framed partly as a response
to the psychological tradition, this work offers a critique of media effects and presents
audiences as active, knowledgeable, sophisticated and critical users or consumers of media
(Buckingham & Bragg, 2004; Jackson & Vares, 2011; Smith, 2007).
In a series of research projects on young people, sex, media and the ‘commercial
world’, David Buckingham and Sara Bragg champion the view that children are not the
‘naive or incompetent consumers’ but ‘use a range of critical skills and perspectives when
interpreting sexual content’. Moreover, children’s responses to sexual imagery display ‘a
well-developed understanding of how such images are constructed and manipulated’ and
children and young people are ‘literate’ and ‘highly critical’ consumers (Buckingham &
Bragg, 2004:238). Children and young people are seen as making active choices about
how far to engage with sexualised culture – for example, Buckingham and Bragg cite
one girl who argues that she understood what she would expect to see if she was illicitly
watching (UK’s Channel 4) programmes late at night, and so would not be upset by
them. Another child – a 10-year-old boy – reflects upon a Helena Christensen advert for
beer headlined ‘probably the sexiest advert in the world’. He writes in his scrapbook: ‘I
think I should know about it, but not right now because I think I’m too young to
understand’ (quoted in Bragg & Buckingham, 2009:135). For the researchers, this was an
indication that people – including children – are successfully ‘managing their practices of
freedom’ (Buckingham & Bragg, 2004: 234).
Alongside notions of literacy, competence, critical sophistication, and choice, pleasure
also emerges as central to the lexicon of the media and cultural studies research tradition
(Ballaster, Beetham, Frazer, & Hebron, 1991; Ang, 1985; Radway, 1984; Brown, 1990)
as part of the shift from textual analyses to understanding audiences’ engagements with
various forms of media (from romantic fiction to women’s magazines). In relation to sex-
ualisation, Clarissa Smith’s work on the ‘pleasures and practices of reading women’s porn’
is important for refuting the idea of pornography as a ‘mono-logic tool of ideological dis-
course’ (2007: 224), and taking as its starting point women’s experiences, pleasures and
disappointments in reading For Women magazine. She argues ‘Readers used the magazine
to assert their rights to pleasure, not only as a political statement but as a very personal
reiteration of being deserving of pleasure. Of being entitled to think of themselves as
beautiful, sexy, assertive, romantic, loving, worthy of loving, of the possibility of being
politically motivated one minute and a sex kitten the next’ (Smith, 2007: 226).
Holland and Attwood (2009) also approach the potential pleasures of ‘sexualised’ cul-
ture in their (auto) ethnographic study of attending pole dancing classes. They discuss the
pleasures offered by the attire (particularly fetish [sic] shoes), the physical athleticism,
grace and skill involved, and female camaraderie. They argue that women at the pole
dancing classes resisted the idea of objectification, ‘even while they pursued their desire
to identify with and become a ‘‘thing of beauty’’’and suggest that traditional indicators of
femininity are ‘reworked into experiences of sexual agency and power’ (2009: 177).

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490 Sexualisation of Culture?

Qualitative research in the media and cultural studies tradition is important in explor-
ing the diverse meanings people give to engagements with media and in according proper
respect to audiences – even, or perhaps particularly, to children and young people who
are too often patronised and treated as incompetent ‘dupes’ of the media. In demonstrat-
ing children’s and young people’s sophistication and reflexiveness this research offers an
important corrective to the psychological tradition and, moreover, a valuable push to pol-
icymakers to take young people’s voices seriously as participants in (sexualised or other-
wise) media culture. In this sense it resonates with wider trends such as the call from the
disability movement: ‘nothing about us without us’. However, the research also deserves
interrogation for its method and analytic framework. At times this can seem like a naive
empiricism, in which audience responses to interview questions are cited uncritically as
articulating truths about the way things are.
Some research in this field is more sophisticated. Buckingham and Bragg’s work is
informed by social constructionism and regards answers to questions given in research set-
tings as socially produced, context-dependent and in some cases ‘performative’– that is
involved not simply in ‘telling it as it is’ but also involved in ‘doing’ various kinds of
things – performing gender, displaying bravado, etc. Yet here there are also problems as
the researchers offer no principled means of distinguishing between those responses
deemed straightforwardly authentic, and those read with the greater ‘epistemological
scepticism’ (Grint & Woolgar, 1995) of the social constructionist. Often, it seems that
those responses which resonate with the researchers’ own ideas of young people as
sophisticated and reflexive media consumers tend to be taken at face value as authentic
accounts of their real feelings, whilst those which express ‘concerns’ or which ‘moralise’
about sexualisation are treated as somehow ideologically contaminated by circulating
parental and media discourses about sexualisation – ‘echoes’ is a word used a lot. In other
words, certain kinds of talk are epistemologically privileged to count as authentic evi-
dence, while other kinds of responses are implicitly downgraded to the status of mere
epiphenomenon or mimesis – yet, as with the psychologist and their supposedly ‘techni-
cal’ decisions about coding, there is little transparency about the interpretative work that
is effectively ‘smuggled in’ here.
With important exceptions (e.g. Ang, 1990; Walkerdine, 1997a,b) much of the audi-
ence research in media and cultural studies also draws upon a very rational and unitary
view of the subject as autonomous and freely choosing, and as able to excavate and
(apparently straightforwardly) ‘lay bare’ all the influences upon him or her. I do not
believe such a perspective is equal to the task of understanding the complicated terrain of
desire, intimacy and sexuality. Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere, such a view is often
complicit with rather than critical of neoliberalism, highlighting few of its erasures,
ambivalences and costs (Gill, 2007a). Buckingham and Bragg present young people as
‘autonomous, calculating and self-regulating entities in control of their own quest for
knowledge in relation to sex and sexual material’ and able to make their own decisions
and judgements and choices. These apparently extend even to the ‘choice’ of whether to
be a child: ‘the media are creating new ways of being a child – not corrupting but con-
fronting young people with choices about whether to remain a child or whether and
when to enter the ‘‘adult’’ world of sexual media’ (2009: 136). Here, then, ‘child’
becomes simply another discursive identity category, which subjects can choose or choose
not to inhabit – as if that choice were fully within their control.
The focus on pleasure, too, while important in attending to the affective dimensions of
sexualisation, risks falling into what some have called ‘pointless populism’ (Seaman, 1992)
or the ‘banality’ of cultural studies (Morris, 1991). The finding that aspects of sexualised

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 Sexualisation of Culture? 491

culture may be experienced as pleasurable becomes the endpoint rather than the starting
point for analysis, leading to a kind of suspension of criticality in which all academics
seem to be able to say about a cultural phenomenon is that ‘people like it’ or ‘I enjoy it’.
Moreover, when those pleasures are experienced by women there is often a problematic
elision of pleasure, agency and empowerment such that merely getting enjoyment from
something is held up as intrinsically transgressive and empowering for women and there-
fore to be championed. Yet as Judith Williamson (1986) argued more than two decades
ago, there is no necessary connection between pleasure and transgression, and many cul-
tural activities ‘while certainly enjoyable, are not radical’. In relation to sexualisation, it is
notable how some academics seem to echo marketers who use a postfeminist language of
‘liberation’ and ‘empowerment’ to promote everything from vibrators to burlesque shows
– yet, interestingly, similar products or experiences are never sold to men in such terms.
Active participation in ‘sexualised’ culture is, it seems, read as an expression of agency
and power for women, while it may conversely still be associated with ‘dirty raincoats’
for heterosexual men. It is also worth pointing out how such moves frequently indict
‘censorious feminists’ (Brunsdon, 2005) for ‘spoiling other women’s fun’ (see also Bray,
2008, 2009; Tyler, 2007).

Discussion
In this short paper I have sought to give a brief review of some of the literature and
debates around contemporary ‘sexualisation’. I have presented views that both celebrate
and critique sexualisation, and contrasted research traditions in psychology and in media
and cultural studies, highlighting what I see as issues and dilemmas in both bodies of
work, as well as in the polarised thinking that dominates this field. In concluding, I seek
to further complicate things by raising some critical points pertaining to the nature of
sexualisation, the need to take differences seriously, and the necessity of going beyond
both the ‘effects’ and ‘critical consumers’ paradigms to a more psychosocial approach.

What is sexualisation? Does the term have any analytic value?

As I noted from the outset, sexualisation as a phenomenon is – fairly obviously – con-
tested. However, the very notion of ‘sexualisation’ is also controversial and there is little
agreement about what it is, or even about the lines of contestation. While writers in soci-
ology and cultural studies may locate sexualisation in broader social shifts such as the
transformation of the public sphere or the shift towards personalisation, revelation or the
intimatization of public life, the psychological literature seemingly attempts a tighter defi-
nition, with specific indices. The American Psychological Association’s Task Force (2007)
argues that sexualisation should be thought of on a continuum with sexualised evaluation
at one end and sexual exploitation, such as trafficking or abuse, at the other. It occurs
when: a person’s value comes only from his or her sexual behaviour or appeal, to the
exclusion of other characteristics; a person is held to a standard that equates physical
attractiveness (narrowly defined) with being sexy; a person is sexually objectified – that is,
made into a thing for others’ sexual use, rather than seen as a person with a capacity for
independent action and decision making; and sexuality is inappropriately imposed upon a
person. However the report also asserts that only one of these factors needs to be present
for sexualisation to occur – leading to a situation in which an extraordinarily wide range
of material could be understood as ‘sexualised’ (for example, it would seemingly include
all depictions or descriptions of people as physically attractive). Add to this the tendency

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492 Sexualisation of Culture?

for specific research studies to elide ‘sexual’ and ‘sexualised’ meanings, and it is clear that
definitional problems abound (Lerum & Dworkin, 2009). Much of the time different par-
ties are not even talking about the same thing.
A further specific problem relates to the ongoing confusion between what we might
understand as beauty or appearance related pressures, and those that relate directly to sex-
ualisation. Too often, these appear to be collapsed. Indeed, if the 1990s was the decade
of body image concerns (with public and policy anxieties about ‘anorexic’ models and
their impact on girls’ self-esteem, culminating in the UK in the Body Image Summit held
in Downing Street in 1998), then in the noughties these worries would seem to have
been displaced onto ‘sexualisation’. Yet frequently it is not clear what distinction is being
made between the two and what it is – if anything – that makes ‘sexualisation’ distinct
from the ‘beauty myth’ (Wolf, 1991).
How useful, then, is the notion? It has clearly become ‘overloaded’ with competing
meanings as well as with intense affect – particularly (but not exclusively) anxiety. This
suggests, as Hebdige (1988) puts it in another context, that ‘there is something worth
struggling over’, but perhaps as with postmodernism (which Hebdige was writing about)
it is time to move away from the generality of ‘sexualisation’ towards a greater level of
specificity; more modest, local, contextually-rooted studies that may not be able to come
down on one side or other in the polemical ‘sexualisation wars’ but which can inform
debate about the meanings, practices and experiences of phenomena understood as sexua-
lised in particular settings, among particular groups, at particular moments, and with par-
ticular consequences.

Taking differences seriously

One feature of this will involve taking seriously differences in relation to sexualisation –
the different practices, representational styles and products understood as ‘sexualised’, but
also the uneven way in which these play out across differently located bodies. Too often
‘sexualisation’ is discussed through a generalising logic that conceals uneven power rela-
tions. Notions such as the ‘pornification of everyday life’ or ‘corporate paedophilia’
occlude the gender, race, class and age relations at work in ‘sexualised’ culture (see Gill,
2009 for detailed discussion). Sexualisation is far from being a singular or homogeneous
process; different people are sexualised in different ways and with different meanings and,
moreover, many remain outside or excluded from what McNair has called the ‘democrat-
isation of desire’ operating in visual culture.
Ariel Levy (2005: 33) makes an important point about the gender asymmetry of ‘sexu-
alisation’: ‘proving that you are hot, worthy of lust, and – necessarily – that you seek to
provoke lust is still exclusively women’s work’, she argues. Attwood (2009), too, has
argued for the need for an understanding of ‘gendered sexualisation’. My own interest is
in shifting the debates away from moral frameworks to relocate them in discussions about
ethics and politics that are able to address questions about power relations in sexualised
culture. There is an urgent need for research that explores the gender politics of sexuali-
sation, especially in the wider context of the resurgence of sexism in recent years (see
Gill, 2007b; McRobbie, 2009), alongside the emphasis upon women’s active participation
in- indeed empowerment through – sexualised culture. Sexualisation is no longer pre-
sented as something ‘done to’ women but is something in which active, playful sexual
subject sapparently freely choose to take part in. As I have argued elsewhere (Gill, 2008)
this marks a significant disruption to older more established patterns of visual culture in
which active sexuality was not permitted to women without grave consequences, and in

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 Sexualisation of Culture? 493

this sense it highlights the profound impact of feminist struggles to facilitate the expres-
sion of women’s desire(s) and achieve positive sexual identities. However, contemporary
‘sexualised’ culture risks becoming a new mode of governmentality in which a confident
sexual agency is not outside power but is central to a disciplinary ‘technology of sexiness’
(Radner, 1993, 1999; Evans, Riley, & Shankar, 2010; Harvey & Gill, 2011a b).
The class dimensions are also crucial in a context in which socio-economic inequality
profoundly shapes our very understanding of what counts as ‘sexualised’ (Arthurs, 2004;
Attwood, 2006; Egan & Hawkes, 2011; Jancovich, 2001; Skeggs, 1997,2004; Tyler,
2008), with implicit distinctions drawn everywhere between ‘trashy’ sexualisation and
‘respectable’ (subtle, discreet, tasteful, etc. – read: middle-class) ‘sexiness’. Similarly,
research on this topic has barely begun to explore the way in which the very field is
structured by racialised, neocolonial dynamics, in which – for example – the assumed
‘superior’, ‘liberated’ sexual agency of Western female sexual entrepreneurs is counter-
posed to many silenced Others for example the figure of the ‘oppressed Muslim woman’
(Scharff, 2011) or the Thai ‘mail order bride’ (Haritaworn, 2011), which I see as contem-
porary versions of what Chandra Mohanty (1988) called the figure of ‘Third World
Woman’. Gargi Bhattacharyya (2008: 49) argues these dynamics have been central to
securing consent for the contemporary militarization and securitization of the War on
Terror: ‘whereas previous fantasies of Imperial femininity relegated Western women to a
passive role as the feminine ideal safely ensconced in the home’, now ‘there is a more
active engagement imagined for Western women as envoys of a Western feminism that
characterises freedom in market-friendly terms, including a buy-in to commodified ver-
sions of sexual emancipation’. As I have argued elsewhere (Gill, 2011) there is a rich vein
of postcolonial, queer scholarship about sexuality but this is often kept discursively sepa-
rate from the debates about ‘sexualisation’. Indeed, these very debates have been marked
by intensely problematic racial and colonial dynamics in which the middle class White
North American girl child has become the privileged object of anxiety and concern (Gill,
forthcoming). There is an urgent need for accounts of these processes which can do
justice to contemporary transnational politics, capitalism and the market.

Beyond ‘effects’ and ‘critical audiences’: towards a psychosocial approach

Psychological effects studies have largely proved a dead-end for research on sexualisation,
and have been extensively critiqued elsewhere. The qualitative, ethnographic research
associated with sociological, media and cultural studies approaches has, in my view, been
more fruitful in providing an engagement with how children and young people
live ⁄ negotiate mediated lives. However, in eschewing the ‘psychological’ dimensions of
engagements with media, this research risks becoming stuck telling a familiar, well worn,
(albeit policy-friendly) story of consumer sophistication and knowingness – and missing
the opportunity to explore some of the complexities and ambivalences of people’s experi-
ences of ‘sexualised’ media culture. We need to ask what it means to be critical – particu-
larly in cultures where we are all now expected to be media savvy critical decoders, and
in which there is no reason to suppose that an ability to critique an image for its con-
structed (e.g. airbrushed, photoshopped) nature lessens its impact upon us (Vares, Jackson
& Gill, 2011; Gill, forthcoming). ‘Critical’ stances on sexualisation may themselves
depend upon long-standing, troublesome, binaristic language is problematic (see Jackson
& Vares, 2011). Furthermore the ‘uptake’ of critical discourses by media (e.g. adverts
which critique the sexual objectification of women in their verbal text, while deploying
it in the photographic one) renders it difficult to feel sanguine about what a truly critical

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494 Sexualisation of Culture?

position might mean. To engage with these complexities, we need psychosocial

approaches that are capable of thinking about the complicated, entangled relationships
between visual culture, desire and subjectivity, and rethinking media ‘effects’ not as dis-
crete, measurable events, but as part of ongoing processes of the disciplining and recon-
structing of selfhood – in which we are all implicated.

Feminism beyond the sex wars

The ‘porn wars’ or ‘sex wars’ of second wave feminism – in which, as Drucilla Cornell
(2000) has argued, every feminist was made to take a position, or was forcibly allocated
one – have cast a long shadow over debates about sexualisation. Memories (or accounts)
of painful and difficult exchanges have made many feminists slow, and perhaps under-
standably reluctant, to engage with the contemporary ‘sexualisation’ of culture. This
silencing dynamic has been underscored by the current postfeminist climate within acade-
mia which makes it difficult for scholars to engage critically with the sexualisation of
culture for fear of being accused of prudishness or censoriousness (Ringrose, 2011). But,
as Coy and Garner (2011) have argued, debates about sexualisation are too important to
be left to the moralistic concerns of the right-wing press or the protectionist agendas of
policymakers, who have no critique of sexualisation except when it is targeted at chil-
dren. ‘Premature’ sexualisation is their target, and this is not based on an analysis of the
way in which ‘sexualisation’ is connected to wider patterns of injustice and inequality,
but rather is too often framed in terms of the ‘corruption’ of ‘innocents’ (Duschinsky,
forthcoming). Instead we need the creativity and power of feminist analyses – that are sex
positive but attentive to the power relations at work in ‘sexualised’ culture. Building on a
wealth of vibrant and important current work that explores everything from the com-
plexities of the ‘slut walk’ Ringrose & Renold, forthcoming) to the new forms of alt
porn (Attwood, 2011), and from the sexualisation of the fitness industry (Donaghue,
Kurz, & Whitehead, 2012) to the way young people use social media for ‘heterosexy’
self-presentation (Dobson, 2011) we will need a range of theoretical and methodological
resources – including discursive approaches, psychoanalysis, Foucaultian work, critical race
theory, postcolonial engagements and queer theory. Together these will contribute to the
continuing exploration of the nature, experiences and consequences of what is loosely
but not unproblematically termed the ‘sexualisation of culture’.

Acknowledgement
I am grateful to Sue Jackson and Jessica Ringrose for commenting on a draft of this
paper, as well as to two anonymous referees for their helpful engagement. I would like to
express my gratitude to all the participants in the ESRC seminar series on ‘Complicating
the debates about the sexualisation of culture’ (2010–2012) for the stimulating collective
debate about the issues raised here.

Short Biography
Rosalind Gill completed her PhD in Social Psychology at the Discourse and Rhetoric
Group (DARG), Loughborough University in 1991, and has since worked across a num-
ber of disciplines including Psychology, Sociology, Gender Studies and Media and Com-
munications. She has been based at Goldsmiths College, the Open University, and spent
10 years at the LSE before moving to King’s College, London, in 2010, to take up a

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 Sexualisation of Culture? 495

position as Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis in the Centre for Culture, Media
and Creative Industries. Professor Gill is known for her research interests in gender and
media, the body, sexuality, cultural work, new technologies and mediated intimacy. Ros-
alind currently leads the ESRC’s research seminar series ‘‘Pornified: Complicating the
debates about the sexualizaton of culture’’ and is also working with Dr Sue Jackson and
Dr Tiina Vares on a 4 year project exploring how ‘‘tween’’ (9–12 year old) girls negoti-
ate living in an increasingly sexualized culture. Professor Gill is author of five books and
more than 70 scholarly publications, and has also made two BBC documentaries. She sits
on numerous editorial boards and advisory boards, including Feminism and Psychology,
Subjectivity, and Feminist Media Studies.

Endnote
* Correspondence address: Centre for Culture, Media and Creative Industries, Chesham Building, King’s College
London, Strand Campus, London WC2R 2LS. Email: rosalind.gill@kcl.ac.uk

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