While sex is still often considered private, the passing on of information about sex has always been a social and cultural practice, whether through conversations between family and friends, religious instruction, philosophical tracts, educational and medical institutions, or cultural artefacts. The rise of mass communication has enabled advice-giving to large audiences, opening up the possibility for information about sex to be disseminated and accessed in many different ways (Bashford & Strange, 2004). Such mass-mediated advice giving about sex is part of a wider social shift in which scientific knowledge has combined with self-work in the growing field and industry of self-help. This chapter explores the history of sex advice in the media, looking at its roots in the development of public health, sexology and self-help.
The chapter is divided into two parts – the first part provides the historical context for the emergence of sex advice in the media, and the second explores the histories of the different modes of sex advice, providing a foundation for the analysis of contemporary sex advice in the subsequent chapters of the book. The chapter begins by examining the rise of social medicine and public health, exploring how the development of particular systems of sexual knowledge have fed into the defining of what counts as ‘normal’ sex (discussed in more detail in chapter 4) in public and institutional discourse. The chapter goes on to explore key research and writing in sex therapy, sexology and sex research, examining the journey of ideas such as the ‘sexual response cycle’ and ‘sexual dysfunction’ into more popular forms of sex advice. The chapter discusses the impact of the predominantly heteronormative, non-disabled and cisgender approaches to sex research and sex therapy on mainstream sex advice.
The chapter then charts the development of media sex advice, providing a brief history and discussion of sex advice across different media genres. The sheer volume of instruction, information and advice about sex written over time prevents us from providing a comprehensive review of all sex advice texts. The chapter instead explores key developments, debates and changes in the format, consumption and production of sex advice, charting the rise of sex self-help, the history of magazine advice, shifts in the broadcast of sex advice content on television and the development of sex advice online. Throughout the chapter we discuss the changing nature of mediated sex ‘expertise’, including the rise of the celebrity ‘sexpert’. We show how changes in social organization and technology have transformed the nature of ‘sexpertise’, as increasing numbers of people are able to communicate and answer each other's questions online, opening up new possibilities for the production of sexual knowledge.
In writing this chapter, it was tempting to produce a linear, chronological narrative of the emergence of sex advice through public health and institutional sex education, drawing the threads from government sanitation interventions through to mediated sex advice in the twenty-first century. However, there are multiple stories that can be told to situate the emergence of sex advice, whose threads are tangled and not always easy to separate (Hemmings, 2011). Thus, we have attempted to sketch what we felt was an important context for our analysis of contemporary sex advice in the chapters that follow. The majority of historical, sociological and cultural research on sex advice has focused on mass-produced printed media, in particular marriage manuals and magazines (Bashford & Strange, 2004). There are many areas that still require further examination by scholars, such as the DIY sex advice printed by activist groups, and the wide range of sex advice which now circulates online. We discuss and analyse some of these new forms of sex advice later in the book.
Sex has long occupied a complicated position between the boundaries of the public and private spheres. Contemporary public discussion and reflection about the place of sex in society and in individuals' lives has deep roots in philosophical and religious texts. Even as early as the second century AD, philosophical writing contained discussion of relationships as a site of a ‘deliberative art of self-conduct’ (Foucault, 1990, p. 149). The first Western description of a woman having an orgasm has been credited to the twelfth-century German nun Hildegard of Bingen, whose writings provided advice and reflection on spirituality and medicine (Cadden, 2008; Sauer, 2015; Stearns, 2009).
The communication of sex advice to the population via mass media began in the historical context of public health and social medicine. The emergence of industrial capitalism created a new urban working class, whose health and behaviour became the subject of intense scrutiny from officials in government, medical and religious institutions. Mort (2007) argues that from the hygienists in the eighteenth century through to the campaigns for public health and social medicine in the nineteenth century, the urban poor were identified as in need of health intervention, with sexual behaviour a key site of moral and political concern in ensuring that the working class remained industrious. As such, public health became a site of social regulation, within which the dissemination of expertise and advice played an important role.
Since then, social medicine and public health concerned with sexuality has tended to focus on the management of risk, with a consistent focus on the reduction of unintended pregnancies and preventing the spread of sexually transmitted infections. High profile public sexual health interventions have included the Contagious Diseases Acts from the late nineteenth to mid twentieth century, public campaigns for birth control and abortion in the early twentieth century and condom and safer-sex promotion in response to the AIDS pandemic from the 1980s (Connell & Hunt, 2006; Debenham, 2014). While public health historically has focused on the management of collective risk, the rise of neoliberal ideology from the late 1970s foregrounded individual responsibility for health. Petersen and Lupton (1997) have argued that this ‘new public health’ framed individual responsibility for health management in distinctly moral terms, in which ‘good citizenship’ involves responsibility for looking after one's health and managing potential health risks. As we explore in chapter 5, this injunction now also extends to having the ‘right’ kinds of sex and developing an adventurous (but not too adventurous) sexual subjectivity as part of personal health and wellbeing.
The mass dissemination of advice about sex therefore contains many threads of moral and regulatory discourse. In addition to the management of public health risk, sex advice is also framed in terms of broader narratives about the stability of society, changing gender relations and the shifting place of the family. Parallel bodies of knowledge in medicine, psychology, psychiatry and the emerging field of sexology all contributed to a heightened focus on sexual behaviour and desire as a matter for social concern and intervention. Whereas in the early nineteenth century particular sexual acts (such as sodomy) had been prohibited, the later part of the century saw the emergence of the concept of homosexuality as a disease and the classification of individuals as ‘homosexuals’ – a category that had not previously existed (Weeks, 2000). The Victorian criminalization of homosexuality thus drew on both religious and scientific discourse which constructed non-heterosexual desire as pathological and evidence of ‘degeneration’. As we note in the following chapter, this institutionalization of normative heterosexuality has persisted through much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association (APA, 2013) and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) of the World Health Organization (WHO, 1994).
The growing bodies of knowledge about sex and sexuality, and the experts and expertise associated with them, converged at the same time as scientific knowledge and expertise became more readily distributable and accessible to a wider segment of the population via cheaper methods of printing and the distribution of books and magazines (Bashford & Strange, 2004; Peterson, 1964). While much of the advice about sex was disseminated via religious organizations and the medical profession, the introduction of mass media meant that experts were able to speak to much larger audiences via pamphlets, columns in magazines and slots on radio, discussed in more detail below (Bashford & Strange, 2004).
The rise of sex advice also needs to be understood in the context of power and domination in society. The regulation of sex intersects with imperialism, the control of women's bodies and interventions in particular people's lives, such as working-class women and women of colour. For example, the persistent stigmatization of teenage pregnancy can be seen across public discourse about sex education and sexual health – with young motherhood often constructed as evidence of irresponsibility and promiscuity (Ellis-Sloan, 2014). We argue throughout this book that sex has been an important site of the fight for recognition for many social groups and liberation movements, to whom the creation and dissemination of knowledge has been extremely important.
Thus the production, distribution and consumption of sex advice needs to be understood in the context of these intersecting social changes – a space in which sex has been made and remade, and a site of struggle over meaning. Central to the distribution of advice has been the role of the expert, and it is to this we turn next.
It has become commonplace to see celebrity ‘experts’ giving advice in magazines and on television. This history of celebrity expertise can be traced back to the nineteenth century, which saw the emergence of ‘sexology’ as a new field of scientific research. Porter and Hall (1995, p. 155) argue that Darwin's work on the role of sexual reproduction in evolution ‘created the possibility of sex becoming a subject of scientific study distinct from the purely medical – no longer a question of pathology or disease, but a “natural” phenomenon’. This early sexology was controversial and often marginalized (Porter & Hall, 1995). Nonetheless, the amount of research and knowledge produced about sexualities since its emergence as a field of scientific study is vast. There were a number of particularly influential sexologists and sex therapists whose work became widely popularized in mass media, marking the birth of the popular ‘sex expert’. Sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld and Marie Stopes, writing at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, produced books that were read not just by practitioners, but consumed more widely by members of the public, particularly the middle classes (Connell & Hunt, 2006).
Many of the influential ‘sex experts’ since the nineteenth century have been motivated by a desire to change public discourse about sex, and engage in public pedagogy (Crozier, 2008). For some sexologists, this pedagogical approach was connected to ideas about social health and population. Early sexological work and public discourse was rooted in biological explanations for human behaviour and eugenicist ideas of ‘improving the human stock’ (Weeks, 2000, p. 43). Havelock Ellis, for example, argued that public education was necessary to ‘prevent the breeding of the unfit and to limit the less fit members of society’ – including through the withdrawal of welfare support from those who refused to be sterilized (1919, cited in Crozier, 2008, p. 192). Classed and racialized discourses of eugenics were commonplace among social reformers during the Victorian period, as well as being widely used to legitimize discrimination, violence and imperialism. Ellis connected his ideas of selective breeding to arguments about women's control over their reproduction and worked closely with US birth control campaigner Margaret Sanger, discussed below (Weeks, 2000).
The impact of sexology still ripples through the pages and screens of sex advice in the twenty-first century. Scientific research that has measured and categorized sexual desires, feelings and behaviours has been particularly influential in shaping dominant ideas about what sex should look / feel like. The work of US sexologists William Masters and Virginia Johnson is perhaps the most famous of these scientific studies (Frith, 2015a; Morrow 2008). From the mid 1950s, Masters and Johnson conducted a large-scale study of sexuality involving human participants in a laboratory. They are widely known for their arguments that all humans have a four-stage ‘sexual response cycle’, and that deviation from this cycle is evidence of sexual ‘dysfunction’. The model described four stages of physical changes that they argued took place in the body during sex. Although other scholars such as Albert Moll and Havelock Ellis had also pointed to staged models of sexual response, Masters and Johnson popularized the notion through their high-profile research and mass communication, including articles in Playboy Magazine (Morrow 2008). The equating of ‘healthy’ sex with a particular set of physical responses has had an enduring impact on ideas about ‘normal’ sex, as we will show in chapter 4.
Where Masters and Johnson prioritized ideas of sexual patterns and similarity, sexologist Alfred Kinsey's interviews with research participants suggested great variation in sexual desires, activities and identities (Connell & Hunt, 2006). Kinsey began his work in the decade before Masters and Johnson, with his ideas similarly reaching wide audiences through the high level of publicity his research received (Connell and Hunt, 2006). As we show in our discussion of different forms of media sex advice below and in the following chapter, these ideas about sexual response and sexual orientation have had a fundamental impact on discourses of sexual desire and pleasure in the twentieth century.
Feminist and LGBT liberation movements have been (and continue to be) central in campaigning for accessible information and education about sex, as well as creating and disseminating sex advice themselves (Weeks, 2007). Sex education and advice have been central to grassroots liberation movements, including campaigns for sexual and reproductive rights for women, the decriminalization of homosexuality and intersectional liberation movements around identity and oppression (Hossain, 2007). The campaigns and activism of these movements have been central in shifting dominant discourse about sexuality, including the way that sex advice is framed, who counts as an ‘expert’ and at which audiences media sex advice is aimed.
The production of alternative knowledge and representation of sexualities has been central to much feminist activism. Consciousness-raising by feminist groups from the 1960s connected the experiences of people's personal, intimate lives to the analysis of and resistance to domination and oppression. Such groups often challenged medical discourses of sexuality, encouraging people to find out more about their bodies, their sexuality and their desire and create alternative representations. The histories of feminist activism are filled with challenges to the dominant language of sex and sexualities and collective interventions providing vital spaces of resistance and care. Two examples of such are the National Black Women's Health Project in the US, which included sexual health in its consciousness-raising and collective support from the early 1980s, and the Boston Women's Health Collective, which published the manual Our bodies ourselves in 1973 (Reviere & Byerly, 2013; Goldner, 2017). Many feminists were also involved in grassroots community AIDS organizing, alongside LGBT activists, discussed below.
Feminist activism around reproductive and sexual health has sometimes been fought on deeply racist, classist and ableist terms. Early contraceptive advocates such as Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger argued for population control as a form of eugenics – ‘a means of eliminating the “unfit” sectors of the population’ (Davis, 1982, p. 361; Melody & Peterson, 1999). Similarly, as Angela Davis (1982) has argued, the predominantly white, middle-class birth-control movement in the US generally fails to take into account the structural causes of poverty and exploitation faced by working-class women and women of colour, and ignores the colonial history of sterilization abuse and population control. Thus campaigns against forced sterilization and for reproductive justice were often principally fought by women of colour.
Feminist activists, scholars and researchers challenged dominant messages about women's sexuality, calling for alternative stories about sexual pleasure and bodies (Reviere & Byerly, 2013). As we discuss below, feminists produced erotica, pornography and alternative guides to sex and desire – although this has also been a site of conflict between feminists. Feminist activism around sexuality challenged the centrality of penis-in-vagina intercourse as the ‘common-sense’ view of sex – perhaps most famously in Anne Koedt's The myth of the vaginal orgasm (1968) and Shere Hite's report on female sexuality (1976).
Similarly, the activism and creativity of the LGBT movement has played a vital role in contesting discrimination and injustice, as well as producing community-led advice and interventions around sex and sexuality. In the US the Stonewall riots in 1969 were crucial in making visible a wave of protest against police raids on gay bars – in this case the Stonewall Inn – inaugurating a social movement that became a major campaign for gay rights, as well as a site for LGBT-produced media including zines, newspapers, and magazines. Activism had a variety of different foci – from decriminalizing homosexuality, to challenging medical practices like aversion therapy, campaigning around sex education, equalizing the age of consent, and contesting the US military's ‘don't ask don't tell’ policy. As captured in the film Pride (2014), LGBT activism was not exclusively focused upon securing rights for sexual minorities, but also worked in solidarity with other movements such as striking workers. In the UK the fight over Section 28 – which banned the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in schools – was a significant focus of protest – but so too was the stationing of US nuclear weapons in the UK – and the famous Greenham Common women's protest camp had a large and vocal lesbian contingent. Many people involved in these struggles did not regard LGBT rights in isolation as a ‘single issue’ campaign, but as part of a major social and political transformation.
The HIV/AIDS crisis from the early 1980s onwards can also be identified as a significant moment in the struggle for greater visibility – particularly of gay men. AIDS galvanized extraordinary support movements in LGBT and black communities, with the establishment of charities, community organizations and church-led interventions that cooked or shopped for people affected by HIV, and the establishment of dedicated hospices and other facilities to care for the large numbers of people with the infection. Some of this AIDS activism and organizing brought together LGBT, black and working-class communities (Royles, 2016). However, inequalities of race and class had an impact on which organizations and campaigns had the greatest visibility and access to resources. For example, in an analysis of early AIDS activism in Washington DC, Chi Hughes argues:
Organizations [that were] primarily white male dominated, they got the bulk of the funding that came from the federal government or the city and they didn't know how to use those resources necessarily to address HIV in the black and Latino communities.
The underfunding of medical research and treatments, combined with ugly homophobic reporting of the disease (e.g. ‘the gay plague’) instigated a new wave of activism that is often understood as more ‘defiant’ than earlier waves – something cemented by early ‘queer’ slogans such as ‘We're here, we're queer. Get used to it’ – with organizations such as ACT UP and GLAAD being formed to demand change. The crisis was also significant in catalysing a wealth of cultural production, with powerful film and stage productions – such as Longtime Companion, The Normal Heart and Angels in America exploring the impact of AIDS on gay men, paving the way for what would later be dubbed the ‘New Queer Cinema’ (Rich, 1992), as well as for a mainstreaming of representations of ‘queer’ representations. As well as producing magazines, pamphlets and art, AIDS activists have also used video – producing AIDS education films, including for broadcast on television (Crimp, 1987; Cvetkovich, 2013).
Developing from multiple sources and influences, public sex advice has never been confined to a single medium. Indeed, long before the notion of multimedia content, ‘sexperts’ have spanned different platforms. In the following sections we will start by examining the history of sex advice across different media – beginning with the longest standing genre – printed books.
The first mass-produced sex advice came in the form of books. Printed advice has existed in England since the fifteenth century but proliferated in mass produced form from the nineteenth century onwards (Melody & Peterson, 1999). The advice offered in books has shifted considerably over the years, particularly in terms of how the books define ‘sex’ and their assumed audiences. These books reflected the historical and social context of their time, as well as contributing to the social construction of gender, sexuality and desire.
Porter and Hall (1995) place the emergence of popular sex advice literature in the seventeenth century, as literacy rates were rising. These books built on advice from earlier texts, which ‘were for the first time being condensed into handy, entertaining advice books targeted at the public at large’ (1995, p. 35). Advice in the seventeenth century tended to present procreation as central to the continuation of the human species, seeing marriage as a healthy and fertile institution. The focus on the benefits of good marital sex for society continued in eighteenth century marriage manuals (Connell & Hunt, 2006). The advice given in such manuals was aimed specifically at married couples, with sex outside marriage, or even masturbation, considered damaging for individuals and society. Such fears were particularly apparent in eighteenth century writing that warned about the dangers of masturbation, with the anonymously authored Onania (published in 1710) sparking widespread fears about unmarried men and women engaging in ‘self-abuse’ (Porter & Hall, 1995).
The Victorian period was marked by both the emergence of sex research and moral discourses about the dangers of sex and desire. Historians exploring nineteenth century marriage manuals have found that sex tended to be presented as risky – something which was necessary, but which should not be engaged in too often:
Victorian advisors had counselled only occasional indulgence … No guide recommended intercourse more than once weekly; most suggested relations far less frequently.
The manuals addressed an assumed heterosexual, cisgender and middle or upper-class audience, whose marital relationships were increasingly privatized and domesticated in the context of rising employment outside of the home, urbanization and industrialization (Connell & Hunt, 2006; Fellman & Fellman, 1981; Gupta & Cacchioni, 2013; Melody & Peterson, 1999). Sex in moderation was encouraged as part of marital responsibility, a gendered discourse in which women were seen as performing sex as part of their duties as wives, with less room for an understanding of autonomous female sexual desire (Connell & Hunt, 2006). The wider context of Victorian discourses of self-control and morality fed into advice in which restraint in the private sphere was valuable for a stable and democratic society (Fellman & Fellman, 1981). At the same time, public health discourse about venereal disease positioned sex as potentially dangerous for the individual and wider society (Melody & Peterson, 1999).
The new field of sexology was part of a broader shift in Enlightenment scientific research, in which the classification and categorization of bodies and behaviours became central. The links between sexology and eugenics discussed above was particularly apparent in the context of the racialized discourses of British imperialism. Hossain (2007) argues that in the context of colonialism in Australia, while Aboriginal communities were not explicitly mentioned in nineteenth century colonial sex advice, the texts were characterized by racialized anxiety about the protection of white women's femininity.
Nineteenth-century sex advice was not uniform in its representation of sexuality and sexual morality (Gordon, 1969; Hossain, 2007). Sexual desire and pleasure appeared in some cases as something to be controlled or prevented – women were warned by Australian Physician Alexander Paterson in Physical Health of Woman: ‘what does the harm, is the orgasm which accompanies the act, and if this is not indulged no baneful effects will follow the act’ (1890, cited in Hossain, 2007, p. 91). Conversely, in other cases sexual pleasure was held up as necessary for reproduction and stable marital relationships, in which complete repression of sexual desire could lead to illness (Fellman & Fellman, 1981; Porter & Hall, 1995).
Connell and Hunt (2006) have argued that the position of sexual pleasure in sex advice changed at the turn of the twentieth century, as part of social shifts towards the notion of ‘companionate marriage’ and the role of sexual satisfaction in maintaining marital relationships. Their analysis shows how early twentieth-century sexual knowledge turned its attention to sexual physiology as a site of female sexual desire. They argue that in contrast to nineteenth-century representations of female sexuality as duty, early twentieth century sex advice presented female desire as possible through the skilled attention of a male partner. Marriage manuals were often characterized by a gendered discourse in which men were positioned as responsible for women's sexual pleasure, with a duty to acquire sexual knowledge and act as ‘tutor’ to their wives (see also Laipson, 1996). This focus was highlighted by the dividing of sex into ‘stages’, and attention on sexual activities other than penis-in-vagina intercourse (PIV). For example, the 1928 manual Ideal Marriage focused most advice on ‘love-play’, positioning this as after ‘prelude’ and before ‘sexual union or coitus’ and ‘after-play’ (Van de Velde, 1928, cited in Connell & Hunt 2006, p. 30). While this advice suggested a more ‘playful’ approach to sex, Laipson (1996) contends that the ‘orgasmic teleology’ of sex ending at climax continued to dominate books into the twentieth century.
As Connell and Hunt's (2006) comprehensive exploration of sex advice literature shows, the marriage manuals of the first decades of the twentieth century continued to assume a middle or upper-class, heterosexual and cisgender audience. They argue that the limitation of female sexual desire and pleasure to heterosexual marriage in advice manuals drew boundaries around ‘respectable’ sexuality, placing it in contrast with discourses of danger, risk and disgust levelled at working-class women and sex workers, whose desires were presented as ‘unrestrained’ and at risk of venereal disease. The books' heteronormativity and focus on procreation also stigmatized masturbation and homosexuality.
The focus on sexual pleasure brought with it a shifting attention towards more specific instructions and information about ‘techniques’ for husbands to learn, with ‘mastery’ of such techniques associated with masculine virility (Connell & Hunt, 2006, p. 31; Laipson, 1996). In the early twentieth century, this detailed instruction did not focus on PIV sex, but on other activities, with ‘the tone struck in most manuals … that the reader either knew about coitus or that the activity was natural and thus self-evident’ (Connell & Hunt, 2006, p. 33).
The sex research conducted in the second half of the twentieth century, discussed above, fed into sex-advice books. The high-profile publication of Masters and Johnson's work on sexual response, for example, reframed women's sexual pleasure as a ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ experience during sex. While in some senses this enabled recognition for women's desires and bodily pleasure, this produced a new site of social regulation and responsibility around sexual pleasure in marital sex (Connell & Hunt, 2006). Women failing to experience pleasure from PIV sex became categorized as having a ‘faulty’ sexuality (Neuhaus, 2000). At the same time, Neuhaus argues that cultural anxieties about ‘American manhood’ were reflected in a greater focus in sex advice manuals on the fragility and potential sexual vulnerability of men. Sex advice from the 1950s also began to bear the mark of changing post Second World War practices of leisure and consumption, particularly among the middle and upper classes. Lewis and Brissett's (1967) analysis of marriage manuals in the US points to the growth of guidance and instruction for leisure activities, including sex. They argue that such guidance presented sex as labour, something to be worked on, in which orgasm was seen as ‘the product of marital sexual relations’ (Lewis & Brissett, 1967, p. 11). The labour involved in this production included the requirement to master particular techniques and sexual knowledge, including an increasing focus on different ‘positions’ for PIV sex from the 1960s onwards (Lewis & Brissett, 1967). From the 1970s, this sexual labour also began to become conceptualized not just as a form of skills acquisition, but as a site of self-fulfilment (Ward, 2015b). We explore this issue in more detail in chapter 5.
These later sex advice books also began to broaden their intended readership. While most books still assumed a heterosexual and cisgender audience, there was a declining focus on marriage and sex as procreation (Connell & Hunt, 2006). Sex advice manuals in the 1950s and 60s predominantly maintained a gender binary, in which women and men were presented as having very different desires and experiences of sex: ‘Men can enjoy sex, in an animal sort of way, without love. Women can't’ (Hall, 1965, cited in Weinberg et al., 1983, p. 315). However, the research conducted by Masters and Johnson discussed above, in particular their analysis of women's sexual arousal, challenged these assumptions. Their contention that sex is a matter of physiological stages of arousal meant that orgasms became framed as possible (and desirable) for women.
As we showed above, the period from the 1960s to the 1980s saw a huge amount of feminist and LGBT activism. The women's liberation, gay liberation and growing LGBT and queer movements all drew attention to the politics of intimacy, looking at the power relations in sex and sexualities. These political movements also provided alternative spaces in which sexual knowledge and information was disseminated, for example through feminist consciousness-raising groups and small-scale publications. In addition to DIY media, sex advice for lesbian and gay readers began to be addressed in higher circulation and more widely publicized books. Sisley and Harris' (1977) The joy of lesbian sex and Silverstein and White's (1977) The joy of gay sex presented alphabetized guides to topics ranging from bathhouses to orgasms and role-playing, as well as discussions about homophobia and consciousness-raising (Melody & Peterson, 1999).
The emergence of HIV in the 1980s led to a shift in relation to advice about sexual health, particularly in terms of the focus on risk and safety. Safer sex, including the use of condoms and discussion of sexual history, developed as a collective practice in the gay community, with community and activist organizations central in providing support at a time when mainstream public health and medical discourse were often homophobic and stigmatizing (Robertson, 2002). Safer sex, and particular the use of condoms, became common features in sex advice literature, characterized by an individualized, moral discourse of personal responsibility for sexual health. We explore this in more detail in chapter 7.
The late twentieth century and early twenty-first century saw a return to medicalized discourses of sex, in which sexual pleasure was framed in relation to sexual ‘function’ (Gupta & Cacchioni, 2013, pp. 445). The emergence of pharmaceutical responses to sexual ‘dysfunction’, such as Viagra, became entwined with a representation of sex as central to psychological health, feeding to advice that urged readers to work on their sexual selves and gain sexual knowledge and skills (Mamo & Fishman, 2001; Marshall, 2002). This advice for self-work is part of a much broader expansion in the self-help industry, which we discuss in more detail in chapter 5.
Magazines and newspapers have long been a relatively cheap and accessible way for people to read about sex and relationships. Mass circulation was made possible by advances in printing technology at the end of the nineteenth century, at the same time as literacy was rising further in the general population (Bashford & Strange, 2004; Peterson, 1964). Personal advice in newspapers and magazines can be traced back to late seventeenth century journals, however it was the low-price, advertising-funded explosion in publishing in the twentieth century that opened up such content to a much wider audience (Peterson, 1964). The advice column began life in early journalism, in which readers wrote to periodicals to ask for guidance on questions of morality in their everyday lives (Hendley, 1977). This mode of advice giving, in which experts and ‘agony aunts’ respond to personal letters from readers, remains a popular source of information about sex across many media.
Elizabeth Meriweather Gilmer, writing in the 1920s, wrote under the pen-name of ‘Dorothy Dix’, which became syndicated in many newspapers, including the Sunday Express in the UK (Bingham, 2012). Bingham (2012, p. 52) marks the mid 1930s to 1970s as a ‘golden age’ for this form of mediated advice in Britain:
Agony aunts such as [Dorothy] Dix, [Ann] Temple, Marje Proops and Claire Rayner were among the most highly paid and widely recognized journalists in Fleet Street, and significant amounts of money were invested by newspapers in responding to the hundreds of letters that poured in week by week.
Bingham (2012) argues that the advice printed at that time was invaluable to many readers, who found it difficult to find out information, particularly in relation to sex, sexuality and sexual health. His analysis shows that in addition to providing information about sex, many of the advice-givers writing in these publications were doing so to explicitly open up conversations about social attitudes and norms about sex and sexuality, in addition to disseminating ideas from the sexology of the post Second World War period. Bingham's work highlights a proliferation of popular and accessible writing about sex in the mid twentieth century – particularly that which saw heterosexual, coupled and monogamous sex as a positive thing. Some experts, such as Marjorie Proops, went as far as to say sex was key to self-fulfilment. In the 1960s, advice columns more explicitly became spaces of debate and campaigning about issues such as contraception and abortion, reflecting and contributing to the wider context of activism and political reform at the time (Bingham, 2012).
The status and form of advice columns and ‘problem pages’ has shifted in relation to changes in magazine and newspaper production. Bingham (2012) points to the arrival of Rupert Murdoch at The Sun and News of the World in 1969 as a turning point in tabloid newspaper advice columns in the UK. The funding and staff for advice pages were cut, and their contents swung more towards entertainment and titillation:
Kelvin MacKenzie, editor of The Sun between 1981 and 1994, reportedly used to become frustrated when the paper's ‘Dear Deirdre’ column tried to be serious, instructing staff to ‘Tell her to put a dirty letter in here.’
(Chippindale and Horrie 109, p. 59)
Nonetheless, agony aunts and advice columns have continued to be spaces for the discussion and circulation of information and ideas about sex and sexuality, with journalists, therapists and other ‘experts’ answering questions on radio, television and online (Boynton, 2007). There are many different kinds of ‘sexperts’ offering such advice, with varying levels of knowledge and experience, and currently no regulation in terms of the quality of their responses to reader / viewer queries (Boynton, 2007). We discuss the changing nature of ‘sexpertise’ in more detail at the end of this chapter.
Advice pages could appear at first glance as a relatively passive form of media. Yet the direct line between reader and ‘expert’ is arguably an intimate form of communication, as well as being part of a wider, collective conversation about sexuality among writers and audiences (Bashford & Strange, 2004; Currie, 2001). Ethnographic research over the last few decades highlight that mediated advice is not generally passively consumed, but often read and discussed with friends, forming part of friendship cultures (McRobbie, 1991; Durham, 2004). This sharing has partly been made possible by the relatively inexpensive and accessible nature of magazines, in comparison with books about sex.
The rise in lifestyle magazines from the 1960s also saw sex advice step out of advice columns to feature as editorial content. Most mainstream magazines have tended to be aimed at young, heterosexual women, with the majority of magazine covers featuring white and not visibly disabled people. In the last twenty years or so there have been more mass-produced magazines specifically aimed at heterosexual men and LGBT people, but normative representations of bodies and desires continue to be reproduced in mainstream publications (Farvid & Braun, 2014).
There is a rich tradition of feminist research that has analysed both the content and audiences of girls' and women's magazines (García-Favaro, 2016; Gill, 2009; Vares and Jackson, 2015; McRobbie, 1978; Ticknell et al., 2003; Walkerdine, 1984), while less attention has been paid to magazines aimed at men (Ménard & Kleinplatz, 2008; Nixon, 1996; Ticknell et al., 2003) and LGBT people (Sender, 2003). This work over the last few decades has shown a shift in gendered representations of sexuality in mainstream culture. Scholars point in particular to a change in popular discourse about women's sexuality – away from expectations of virginity, innocence and passivity towards representations of women as desiring, active and autonomous sexual subjects (Gill, 2009; Radner, 1999). Magazine sex advice has arguably been at the forefront of the dissemination of neoliberal ideas about self-improvement and personal labour into the intimate sphere, in which the ideal subject of postfeminism is a ‘sexual entrepreneur’ who learns the skills and techniques required to be the ‘up for it’ Cosmopolitan girl (Harvey & Gill, 2011a). We explore this shift in more detail in chapter 5.
Mainstream lifestyle magazines have not been the only source of printed sex advice circulating over the last century – advice columns have also been regularly featured in erotica and pornographic magazines, as well as smaller-scale, DIY publications created by activists and communities. However, the idea that people learn about sex via pornography has been a site of tension and debate. There is a wide spectrum of perspectives on the relationship between audiences and pornography, from those who criticize the genre (or certain kinds of representations within it) for perpetuating gender inequality and harm through its production and consumption (Dworkin, 1981; Tyler, 2015), to those who have explored pornography as entertainment or education (Albury, 2009; McCormack and Wignall, 2016; McKee, 2012). While in the rest of the book we attend to the role of representations of sex more broadly in the mediation of intimacy, here we want to focus briefly on the specific provision of sex advice in pornographic magazines historically.
We show throughout this book that mainstream sex advice has tended to focus predominantly on heteronormative representations of sex and sexuality. In contrast, sex advice outside of this script has been more commonplace in gay and lesbian pornographic magazines. Sender (2003) points to the role that advertising funding played in changing the content of gay and lesbian publications from the 1980s, with the more explicitly sexual content shifting into more pornographic publications. Pat Califia's sex advice column in US gay magazine the Advocate was moved into Advocate Classified, a more obviously pornographic publication. He has criticized the magazine for focusing narrowly on advice about disease and risk:
I was told that my column couldn't remain in the main book because letters about foreskins did not belong in a serious newsmagazine … The Advocate proper still runs advice columns – about AIDS. It seems that the only way we can legitimately talk about our sexuality is under the rubric of death and disease. We can't celebrate, defend, or describe queer pleasure even though it was the quest for pleasure that made so many of us HIV-positive. This hypocrisy and prissiness robs the gay press of much of its old feistiness, earthiness, and power to rock the world.
(Califa, cited in Sender, 2003, p. 357)
Califa's criticism points to a tension that has run through LGBT activism and community organizing around sex and sexuality, in which liberal rights campaigns have sometimes sought to ‘assimilate’ to mainstream culture rather than posing more direct challenges to institutional structures within heteropatriarchal capitalism, something we discuss more fully in chapter 3.
Lesbian erotica magazine On Our Backs, published in the US from the 1980s until about ten years ago, featured a sex advice column run by Susie Bright. Henderson (1991) has argued that the magazine ‘demystified’ lesbian sex, with Bright's answers to readers' questions providing a space in which to talk about desires outside of the heteronormative mainstream. The magazine also proved controversial, with some feminists arguing that the pornography in the magazine was degrading and problematic for women (Wood, 2017b).
Activists and community groups have a long history of producing their own media. From the 1970s in particular, LGBT people, women and people of colour collectively organized to produce magazines and pamphlets, alongside other community resources like telephone switchboards, support groups and groups within Trade Unions (Patton, 1990; Watney, 2000). The LGBT community and communities of colour were particularly active in circulating community-produced advice about safer sex in the context of HIV from the 1980s, as well as in setting up community-run HIV/AIDS support centres and organizations (Crimp, 1987; Patton, 1990; Weeks, 2000). Patton (1990) notes that
By the advent of the first identified case of AIDS in 1981, there were several nationally distributed newspapers and magazines from the gay community, dozens of stable local or regional newspapers and magazines, dozens more ‘bar rags’ which came and went with the economic interests of their owners, and probably a hundred or more newsletters of specific gay organizations, including several national gay organizations.
Watney (2007) has argued that the gay press had an important role to play in producing an alternative to the ‘peak and trough’ effect of mainstream media cycling between mass hysteria and silence on the epidemic.
‘Consciousness-raising’ about sex and sexuality has long been a part of feminist activism (Wood, 2008). Such collective production of knowledge, critique of mainstream culture and creation of alternative representations has often taken place in small-scale print media like pamphlets and zines. These DIY publications, which explore subjects like consent, gender, sexuality, desire and sexual assault as well as explicitly erotic material, have been commonplace within feminist activist groups, LGBT and punk and riot grrrl zine subcultures (Ruscin, nd). DIY media often poses an overt challenge to mainstream representations. The self-produced approach of the medium encourages ‘active participation in the production of critical beliefs and practices in place of passive acceptance or consumption of established political norms or representational media.’ (Collins, 1999, p. 68). This mode of advice has continued both in print and in DIY sex advice online, discussed in more detail below and in chapter 6.
The advent of broadcast media opened up a new space in which people could seek and provide advice – one which was both intimate (directly into people's homes) and public (Bashford & Strange, 2004). Radio advice columns, which emerged in the early twentieth century, enabled experts to reach wider audiences, with those publishing popular written advice often also doing so on air. Bashford and Strange (2004) give the example of Norman Haire – a sexologist who provided sex advice in Australian magazine Woman as well as providing advice on a number of Australian radio programmes in the mid twentieth century. Broadcast media has tended to be subject to tighter regulation than print, and sexual content in particular can be controversial. Haire's open discussion and support for birth control on Australian public radio broadcaster ABC in 1944 provoked a parliamentary investigation, in which concerns were raised about the appropriateness of broadcasting information about sex, which could be heard by anyone (Bashford & Strange, 2004).
Early broadcast sex advice tended to be provided by sexologists or sex therapists. For example, therapist Dr Ruth Westheimer responded to callers' sexual problems on a televised talk show in the US in the 1980s. Her expertise was constructed specifically through her medical qualifications – which were referenced throughout the show (Banks & Zimmermann, 1993). The sex advice given by ‘Dr Ruth’ was not accompanied by images of sex or bodies – although she was visible on screen talking to the caller and audience directly (Banks & Zimmermann, 1993).
As discussed in chapter 1, this emergence of sex advice in lifestyle television has shaped the genre. Contemporary sex advice on television generally sits at the intersection of lifestyle, talk show, self-help and makeover programming – following conventions of both informational and entertainment formats (Attwood et al., 2015; Harvey & Gill, 2011a). Both the information and entertainment of televised sex advice is highly visual – often including intimate, sometimes explicit representations of sex and sexuality – whether in the close-ups of medical reality show Embarassing Bodies or the nightvision cameras in people's bedrooms in The Sex Inspectors (Harvey & Gill, 2011a). Even shows that focus on verbal discussions about sex, such as Sex Box, include moving and still images to illustrate their advice, as we discuss in chapter 6.
The potential for explicit content means that televised sex advice can attract public criticism. In the UK, the producers of shows like The Sex Education Show (2008–11), The Joy of Teen Sex (2011) and Embarrassing Bodies (2008–present) and Sex Box (2013–present) tend to present their content as informative and respectable, as an ‘antidote’ to the consumption of pornography (Attwood et al., 2015). Contemporary ‘sexperts’ on television are comprised of a mixture of sexologists or psychologists with formal training in human sexuality or therapy, and journalists, celebrities and presenters (Boynton & Callaghan, 2006). This widening out of ‘sexpertise’ has been facilitated by multimodal and participatory forms of sex advice – most notably online.
The arrival of the Internet and its increasing (although by no means universal) accessibility has had a huge impact on the availability of mediated sex advice. Advice online has moved with technological change – from relatively static sites providing information, much like books or magazines, to the multimedia and interactive content associated with the technology of ‘Web 2.0’. There are a wide range of different sources of information about sex, provided by health, educational, governmental and religious organizations, charities, community and activist groups, and individuals sharing their experiences with each other. As such, sex advice online varies massively in content and quality.
Such variety opens up the possibility for many different perspectives about sex and sexuality to be represented and sought out. Some have argued that this has been particularly useful for enabling people to access information beyond the heteronormative, couple-focused sex advice of mainstream media, and beyond the STI and risk-prevention focus of much current sex and relationships education in schools (Attwood et al., 2015; Masanet & Buckingham, 2015; McKee et al., 2015). Youth sex educators have been particularly interested in exploring how to support young people via advice online (Levine, 2011), with grassroots sites such as Scarleteen.com and Bishuk.com popular with young people and widely respected by sex educators and health professionals (Attwood et al., 2015). Throughout this book we will discuss some of the different ways that sex advice is framed in these online spaces. In our final chapter we talk with those working in these areas about some of the challenges of providing sex advice online.
One of the central differences between most of the forms of sex advice discussed above, and that provided online, is the changing status and relationship between advice-givers and audiences. Over the last decade it has become relatively straightforward to self-produce content online. Online diaries emerged in the 1990s, later becoming known as weblogs (blogs) (Attwood, 2009b). Blogs about sex have tended to focus on the narration of personal experience – a form of online ‘memoir’ and erotica, often written by women (Attwood, 2009b). Blogging presents the possibility of writing anonymously, which can open up space to write about desires and discuss issues that are taboo in mainstream writing about sex (Wood, 2008). Popular sex blogs such as Belle de jour and Girl with a one track mind foreground accounts of sexual pleasure, and also grapple with the complexities of desire and power in the context of changing gendered norms (Attwood, 2009b).
As digital technology and online spaces have become increasingly participatory, and social media has become embedded in many people's everyday lives, the form and content of mediated sex advice have done so too. This is particularly evident in the popularity of self-made experts providing advice via different social media platforms such as YouTube. Johnston (2016) argues that, like broadcast advice on television, YouTube presents a ‘face-to-face’ interaction between experts and audience. Johnston argues that this interaction goes a step further than television, via comments made directly underneath the video. Those who follow the sex advice of YouTube advice-givers like Laci Green (who has over 1.5 million subscribers) and Lindsey Doe (who has over 200,000) can also interact with them via other social media on Twitter and Facebook. In some senses, this is not far from the intimate relationship between letter-writer and expert / advice columnist. However, there is something about the everyday and intimate flow of information, often via mobile technology and across multiple sites, that perhaps creates a new kind of intimate mediation of this sexual information – one that is intensely visual, constantly in reach in a way that is quite different to books or magazines (Elias & Gill, 2016; Johnston, 2016).
Participatory digital media also creates spaces in which the relationship between audiences and experts is further flattened. Audiences online are becoming producers of content (García-Favaro, 2016). This is particularly apparent in discussions about sex in online communities and forums. In contrast to advice in magazines, which is often aimed at young heterosexual people, online discussions can provide space in which people give advice to each other, and enable readers to weigh up different ‘crowdsourced’ responses (Attwood et al. 2015). Pedersen's (2014) analysis of discussions about sex on online parenting community Mumsnet found that, unlike mainstream lifestyle and parenting magazines, which often do not explore sexuality and parenting in much detail, the discussions online opened up space for parents (predominantly women) to talk about their worries, seek emotional support and advice from peers and discuss advice given to them by health professionals. While there are many forums and threads focused specifically on sex, peer advice-giving and information sharing also takes place in other online discussion spaces, such as discussion forums attached to teen television programmes that feature storylines about sex and sexuality (Masanet & Buckingham, 2015).
The accessibility of information about sex online has fed into existing fears about how young people in particular learn about sex, with more popular forms of media subject to panic about the risks sexual content poses to young people (McKee et al., 2015). Conversely, it can be tempting to see the Internet as opening up a space for a utopian landscape in which all information, bodies and desires are made equal. However, as with other media, online spaces reflect and produce relations of power, as well as resistance, as people engage with them in multiple ways in their everyday lives. Albury (2013) has argued that it can be difficult to disentangle the way that power works in people's use of media, particularly when users might circulate existing content, rework it, write their own content, discuss or criticize it across different platforms.
The convergence of media through digital technology means that different forms of mediated sex advice can be entangled with one another. Magazine and newspaper advice can now be accessed, shared and interacted with online, people can leave reviews of advice books on online stores and advice can be integrated into everyday life through live interactions via social media. Advances in mobile digital technology have also brought into being a new genre of sex advice and self-management via the use of mobile applications (apps). Apps that focus on sex are part of a broader development in ‘digital health technologies’ (Lupton, 2015) which offer users the ability to record information about their lives, as well as access information. Sex-related apps include information about sexual techniques and health advice, but also include new technologies for self-monitoring and tracking. Lupton (2015) contends that these apps tend to construct sex as something which can be quantified – with apps measuring the number of thrusts during intercourse, volume during sex and frequency of sexual activity. In some senses, these apps are not unlike written sexual diary keeping. However, what is perhaps different about this technology, is that it reinforces a model of sex that is about performance (which is measured in numbers) and comparison (as users are able to compare their ‘results’ with others). We discuss this more fully in chapter 5.
This chapter has highlighted the significant changes that have occurred in mediated sex expertise since the first advice columns began. The huge social and technological changes of the last two centuries are marked in the shifting practices of mediated intimacy – an entanglement of advice and audience through discourse, sound and images that weave into people's everyday lives, whether in the dog-eared pages of a marriage manual or in the measurement and rating tools of a sex app.
We have shown that as sex advice has changed, so too has the position of those who dispense it. Whether clinicians and sexologists or celebrities and bloggers, the affordances of media such as the printing press and participatory online platforms have enabled different categories of expertise to emerge and circulate in society. The rise of mass communication has meant that sex advisors can become famous for their books, columns, shows or YouTube channels. In recent years celebrities from other spheres such as reality television have increasingly become positioned as sex advisors on the basis of their fame (Attwood et al., 2015). ‘Sexpertise’ is multimodal – with those appearing on reality television shows also usually authors of sex advice manuals, columns and sometimes attached to branded sex-related merchandise (Boynton, 2007; Harvey & Gill, 2011a). Within journalism, sex is often treated as a ‘lite’ topic that requires little depth or expertise, leading to poorly researched stories and the dominance of recognized celebrity names for comment (Boynton & Callaghan, 2006). Sex is thus seen as a topic on which anyone can offer advice, based on their own experience (Boynton & Callaghan, 2006).
At the same time as there is a concentration of celebrity expertise, online participatory media has opened up space for a proliferation of advice giving from many different sources – a point we explore in more detail in chapters 6 and 8. This multiplicity of expertise challenges the notion that there is one ‘right’ expert view. Peer to peer content is crucially still mediated – written and circulated for public consumption, often to a mass audience. This breadth of media also requires audiences to sift through and assess the information they read, as well as navigate the sometimes sensationalist and shaming discourse that can circulate online – whether in the judgemental comments of a columnist or the collective aggression of ‘trolling’ (Attwood et al., 2015).
However (and by whoever) expertise about sex is created, mediated sex advice creates powerful stories about desires, deviance, pleasures, risk and identities. The mediation of intimacy is not a singular process, but a set of practices that connect language, images, technological affordances and people together as we experience and make sense of our intimate lives. These connections are infused with power, inequality and resistance – making them important sites for the understanding of contemporary social life. Starting in the next chapter we develop this by exploring mediated constructions of bodies, gender and sexuality.