Pleasure has a contradictory place in contemporary mediated sex advice. The expanding realm of sexpertise seems to be all about pleasure – beckoning to readers and viewers with tales of better, hotter, wilder sex. There has clearly been a seismic shift since the early marriage manuals discussed in chapter 2. On the surface, it seems that pleasure is no longer something to be feared. Interventions made by feminists and LGBTQ activists claiming pleasure as a right have broken into many mainstream representations of sex and sexuality. Such campaigns are ongoing – including the fight for pleasure to be included in sex education for young people (McGeeney, 2013), and for positive representations and acknowledgement of sexual pleasure for older people (Fileborn et al., 2015) and people with disabilities (Mollow & McRuer, 2012). It has become fairly commonplace to hear sexual pleasure framed in the language of empowerment – as something to strive for and evidence of liberation. But there is a paradox here – in among the focus on sexual pleasure as an imperative, for explicit discussions about what pleasure is (or could be) are largely absent from mediated sex advice.
Representations of sexual pleasure continue to be marked by and articulated through structural inequalities. As we showed in chapter 4, some bodies (white, slim, male, middle-class, young, non-disabled) and some desires (heteronormative, PIV sex) sit at the top of a hierarchy of sexual value, while others are often excluded or pathologized. Pleasure is implied in the listing of different acts and positions in advice books, columns and programmes, but there is less space to explore what pleasure means or feels like, or how to discover different kinds of pleasures. This chapter builds on our argument in chapter 4 – that the majority of sex advice focuses on what (some) people do sexually rather than exploring how people engage in sex and intimacy. We explore how this works in relation to advice about pleasure – focusing on sex advice in reality/makeover television. We follow this with a discussion of sex advice in feminist blogs, arguing that the feminist blogosphere opens up space for a wider diversity of stories and conversations about sexual pleasure.
Sex Box is a reality television hybrid combining the structure of makeover, lifestyle and talk shows. For this chapter we analysed season 2 of the show, hosted by Goedele Liekens and Steve Jones. The programme is filmed in front of a studio audience, with two large ‘sex boxes’ on stage, which contain a double bed. The inside of the sex boxes is visible only if the camera inside is turned on. Each show features couples who are given advice by Goedele, and are then invited to have sex in the ‘sex box’ and report back in a discussion afterwards. Goedele is the show's expert – a clinical psychologist with a specialism in sexology. Liekens was born in Belgium and has also worked in television in the Netherlands. Much is made of Lieken's nationality – she is positioned by the show and its promotion as:
teaching us uptight Brits about the ins and outs of sex. She'll be asking the guest couples questions and giving them practical advice before sending them into the sex boxes to do the dirty on TV. She'll then debrief them, in her unique straight-talking kinda way.
Liekens and Jones, who is a well-known television presenter in both the UK and US, adopt a jokey and playful style on the show – an approach that Liekens has said ‘makes it easier to open up, and … talk about sex’ (Channel4.com, 2016). When promoting the series, she contrasted this style to the more ‘academic’ tone of the pilot series, which featured a panel of ‘sexperts’ including Mariella Frostrup, Tracey Cox and Dan Savage (Channel4.com, 2016). Lieken's profile as a celebrity ‘sexpert’ combines engagement in popular culture with international campaigning around sex education and reproductive health. She is a UN goodwill ambassador, and in 2015 presented a Channel 4 documentary in which she taught secondary school students about sex, including talking about pleasure, communication and consent. During the course of the documentary she called for a compulsory sex education course in Britain for young people aged 14 to 16, and challenged Conservative MP Graham Stuart to push for the inclusion of pleasure in secondary-school sex education.
The guests on series 2 of Sex Box are presented as generally being happy with the sex that they have. Goedele's advice is therefore framed as encouraging participants to try something ‘new’ or have a particular sexual experience ‘for the first time’. The show features twelve couples – two of which are same-gender. The participants are predominantly white, although there are a small number of black and minority ethnic guests. None of the participants were visibly disabled. We were struck by how many similarities there were between the show and the sex advice books we analysed – particularly in terms of the explicit and implicit messages about what counts as sex and sexual pleasure. Here we focus on three ways that pleasure was constructed on the show – through a discourse of the coital imperative, a focus on orgasms as the ‘goal’ of sex and through a discussion about how to communicate about sexual pleasure.
Throughout this book we have argued that mediated sex advice widely reinforces a ‘coital imperative’ in which ‘real sex’ is taken to mean penis-in-vagina (PIV) intercourse. As we argued in chapter 4, while mainstream sex advice often includes information about a range of different sexual activities, these tend to be seen as ‘foreplay’ leading up to penetration (usually PIV intercourse). In this section we will argue that at times Sex Box challenges this narrow version of what counts as sex, but nevertheless ultimately reinforces the idea that ‘penetration’ by the penis is the ‘main event’.
The discussions on Sex Box include talk about different desires, pleasures and activities. Guests on the show are usually asked in quite general terms what kinds of sex they have enjoyed in the past or during their time in the sex box. Participants are given tips and advice to experiment with things like body massage, pain, temperature and restraint, as well as oral sex and different positions for PIV penetration. The tips and advice adopt a similar tone to advice commonly found in mainstream sex manuals – including, for example, a segment in which a couple tries out a range of different sex positions on a ‘kama sutra chair’. There is a tension running throughout the show about what counts as ‘sex’ – with guests and presenters expressing contrasting perspectives about how they define sex.
The tension between these different ideas about what is included in ‘sex’ is apparent in the interactions between the show's hosts (Goedele and Steve) and guests Julian and Courtney in episode 1. These participants came to the show specifically to ask for advice about non-penetrative sex:
| Julian: | We just wanted to try and find a different way how to reach a climax without penetration all the time – so different ways, different foreplays. (Sex Box, 2016) |
While they talk about already enjoying other kinds of sex (for example Julian lists his favourite sexual position as ‘69’), the guests explain that they tend to have sex that involves a lot of penetration, and want to try something different. Goedele gives them a bottle of oil and advises them to give each other a ‘body to body massage’ – gliding each other's bodies against each other and massaging each other with different body parts, without using their hands:
| Goedele: | You use that huge erogenous zone that your skin is to arouse each other – and you might even come to orgasm in a lot of different ways – you can sit on him, you can turn him around – you can reverse roles, you can go in a scissor, you know slip slip slip [uses fingers to demonstrate]. |
The Sex Box advice shares familiar features from other forms of mediated sex advice, which combine textual instruction with diagrams or images. As Goedele gives the guests her ‘tips’, a large video of two models plays on the surface of the sex box behind the guests, giving an intimate demonstration of massage oil being poured, and bodies slipping over each other. While Sex Box does not show images of the couples having sex (in contrast to the night-vision cameras of The Sex Inspectors), this demonstration invites the viewer to imagine the guests (and themselves) carrying out Goedele's instructions.
The advice for Julian and Courtney focuses on non-penetrative sex, but PIV sex nevertheless remains a constant presence in the conversations before and after their time in the sex box. Goedele tells them that ‘the challenge for you will be not to penetrate’, and instructs them to try not to. Once the participants are off-screen, Goedele and Steve have the following exchange:
| Steve: | Don't you think it's a tall order for them not to have actual sex after the buildup they're about to experience? |
| Goedele: | Being in there for 30 minutes and enjoying each other's bodies that's sex, no? |
| Steve: | Yeah but you saw the look in Julian's eye there, he's like ‘yeah sure, there's gonna be no penetration’. |
| Goedele: | You sound like Bill Clinton [laughter] ‘This is not sex’ – I mean, all that is sex. |
| Steve: | Sexual relations he said. [laughter] |
| Goedele: | Yes and she gave him oral sex so that would mean – |
| Steve: | That's sex. |
| Goedele: | That's sex. Why don't – we don't call it oral foreplay, we call it oral sex. Imagine your wife would give oral sex to another man would you – ‘oh it's not sex it's ok’. |
| Steve: | Why would I imagine that?! [laughter] |
| Goedele: | To see whether it's sex or not. |
| Steve: | That would be sex. |
| Goedele: | Exactly. |
| Steve: | And divorce – and divorce – definitely. So what I'm getting is that rubbing your naked body against Julian for instance – that's – that's sex. |
| Goedele: | That's sex and it's the best part of sex often – because if it's all about giving each other pleasure and it's and you can use the whole body – and you know, if you don't go to penetration immediately then they're building the excitement – it's gonna be so hard to avoid his penis – and I think she's not gonna avoid it, but that's ok. |
| Steve: | I'm kinda thinking what's the point of having a massage and not having sex at the end of it – it's kind of like – well it's kind of like reading a book and then putting the book down when there's five pages left to read – we all want a happy ending. |
| Goedele: | [Looks a bit bemused/ amused] [laughter] |
| Steve: | Can I just ask really quickly by a show of hands who believes they are going to have penetration [majority put their hands up, including Goedele] – I think we're all on the same page there [laughter]. |
This extract highlights a powerful tension between the ‘common-sense’ narrative of the coital imperative (McPhillips et al., 2001) and a broader definition of sex as encompassing many different things. The interaction feels rehearsed – to the point where it initially seems to be explicitly included to challenge the assumption that sex needs to include penetration, with Steve set up as the person being ‘educated’ (‘So what I'm getting is that … that's sex’). Throughout the series, Goedele is positioned as the presenter with the ‘expertise’ about sex – introducing the guests, audience and Steve to new information and providing practical ‘tips’. In this context, this interaction between the hosts opens up space to talk about sex as something broader than PIV intercourse – involving ‘enjoying each other's bodies’, with a less fixed definition about what can be included. However, despite being a segment about non-penetrative sex, PIV sex is given centre-stage – something that takes real effort not to do, whose absence leaves sex somehow ‘unfinished’.
When Courtney and Julian emerge from the sex box, Goedele asks them about their experience of the massage.
| Goedele: | Tell us – tell us everything. |
| Courtney: | It was really nice, like it's good to have that connection – you know kissing and touching each other, it was really nice. |
| Goedele: | You – you were on the bed I guess. |
| Julian: | I was the massager. |
| Goedele: | Really? |
| Julian: | Yeah. |
| Courtney: | The masseuse. |
| Julian: | The masseuse yeah. |
| Goedele: | And what body parts did you use on her first? |
| Julian: | The boobs. |
| Goedele: | Your boobs? |
| Julian: | No straight on her boobs. [demonstrating a circular massaging movement with his hands] |
| Goedele: | Like this? [mirrors his movement] |
| Julian: | Yeah like this. [audience laughter] |
| Goedele: | What did I tell you? No hands! [laughter] Where did it go from there? |
| Julian: | I put it all over her. |
| Goedele: | How much oil? |
| Julian: | A lot. |
| Courtney: | Quite a lot. |
| Julian: | A lot, we nearly ran out. [laughter] |
| Goedele: | Ok – how were you, you were still like this, back on the bed, or you turn – |
| Courtney: | I was fa – I was lying down and he was on top of me. |
| Goedele: | Yes. |
| Courtney: | And then I turned round. |
| Julian: | And then she got on the back of me – and she was sliding up and down as well on the back. |
| Courtney: | Rubbing my boobs all against him. |
| Goedele: | How did that feel? |
| Julian: | Really nice. Turned me on a lot. |
| Goedele: | Was it teasing enough to give you an erection? |
| Julian: | Yeah. |
| Courtney: | Oh he did as soon as … |
| Julian: | Really hot head. [laughs] |
| Goedele: | Hot head ok. |
| Julian: | Both heads. [audience laughs] |
| Goedele: | Did you use your feet? |
| Courtney: | No I didn't use my feet. [laughs] |
| Julian: | When we were scissoring I had a little smell of her feet. [Courtney laughs] |
| Goedele: | Did you do scissoring yeah? |
| Julian: | I didn't play with them but I had a little smell. |
| Courtney: | They smelt nice of course. |
| Julian: | Yeah. |
| Goedele: | What happened at the scissor. |
| Julian: | Made us r– well made me horny. [audience laughter] |
| Goedele: | You as well? |
| Courtney: | Really horny yeah. |
| Goedele: | So the crucial question I'm go– [points at Steve] |
| Steve: | Did you penetrate? |
| Julian: | Um … no … |
| Steve: | Liar! [Laughter] |
| Goedele: | Really? No? |
| Steve: | A show of hands amongst the audience was pretty much astronomically in favour of you would have actual sex |
| Julian: | No we didn't to be fair. She had a little play with my bum hole but – [laughter] that was about it – [laughter] |
| Steve: | What happened? |
| Julian: | Ah well when we were scissoring – she just went down with her hands – to start with – well the sides of her hands there – and just slowly worked her way down to the bum hole – had a little play but she was just – what's the word – teasing me. |
| Courtney: | Yeah. |
| Steve: | The scissor thing must be quite difficult because you're very close to your – your end-game your goal, where you wanna be so – you managed to avoid temptation. |
| Julian: | Yeah. |
| Goedele: | I thought you would have had – that you wouldn't listen to me and say oh let's go for it. |
| Courtney: | Well I had to stop him. |
| Julian: | Yeah. |
| Courtney: | Because otherwise he would of, yeah – [laughter]. He's like (whispering) come on, come on – I was like – No … |
| Goedele: | Did you tease him, like no you can't, but then try again go … |
| Courtney: | Yeah. |
| Goedele: | Up and down. |
| Courtney: | That's what I think he found it really hard. |
| Steve: | I suppose there's more to be had later on though. |
| Julian: | Yeah. |
| Courtney: | Yeah. |
| Goedele: | So what was for you the best part of it then? |
| Julian: | It just felt more sexual and more intimate – that was something new – we both enjoyed it – it got us really aroused. |
| Courtney: | Yeah. |
| Julian: | And it's just something to start off and get us on our way really. We learnt a lot. |
| Courtney: | Yeah. |
| Steve: | What's the chances of you doing that again and not penetrating? |
| Julian: | Er – very slim. [laughter] |
We have included the whole of this extract because we found the rhythm and structure of it fascinating as a demonstration of the strength of the coital imperative. We also wanted to shine light on the discursive ‘fissures or cracks’ in which the imperative is challenged – even if only momentarily (McPhillips et al., 2001: 238).
In Goedele's promotion of the show, she has said that asking people to talk about sex immediately afterwards opens something up in terms of connecting to direct experiences. In practice, many of these ‘post-sex’ discussions are quite vague and euphemistic. Courtney and Julian however are strikingly direct and explicit when talking about their experiences and what they found enjoyable. Both describe experiencing pleasure in terms of bodily sensations of being aroused, feeling ‘hot’ and feeling ‘horny’, as well as relational feelings of ‘connection’ and intimacy. It is particularly interesting that in the context of the guests describing their enjoyment of non-penetrative sexual activities that Goedele moves the conversation on to the ‘crucial question’ of penetration. The hosts' incredulity that Julian and Courtney did not have PIV sex acts as a strong reinforcement that it is a fundamental component of normative sex.
The interaction between Julian and Steve in the later part of this conversation is particularly interesting. In response to Steve's comment that the audience thought that they would have ‘actual sex’, Julian replies with a description of Courtney ‘teasing’ his ‘bum hole’ – shifting attention back away from PIV sex towards manual stimulation. It is significant that Steve's response to Julian's account of Courtney's fingers is to return again to the question of PIV sex. While the guests clearly described enjoying scissoring and other kinds of stimulation in themselves, Steve doesn't ask for more information about these, but instead presents scissoring as a challenge in relation to the ‘end-game’ and ‘goal’ of PIV sex. Although the word ‘penetration’ is used often in this segment, it is clear that this is intended to refer to the penis and vagina – there is no discussion, for example, about whether Courtney found it a challenge not to penetrate Julian with her fingers when teasing him.
Although the narrative structure of the segment ultimately reinforces the assumption that sex needs to involve penetration (by the penis), there are ‘cracks’ and alternative possibilities throughout the discussion. In fact, despite the repeated positioning of non-penetrative sex as not ‘actual’ sex, Julian describes their experiences in the sex box as ‘more sexual’ – highlighting the contradictions surrounding the discourse of the coital imperative.
Interestingly, Sam and George, a same-gender couple with a similar desire to explore ‘foreplay’, faced no such questioning about having difficulties avoiding penetration during their time in the sex box. Goedele advises them to use ice cubes, warm honey, hot oil and a double penis sleeve sex toy. Despite not being asked directly about penetration, when discussing their experience George explains that ‘We didn't actually have sex if you like, in that we didn't have sort of anal sex, we just had the foreplay …’ with Sam going on to say that he would ‘definitely now say that was still sex’. While there are similar tensions in this narrative about the boundaries of ‘real sex’, what was notably absent was the same level of focus and attention on the centrality of penetration from the show's presenters. In fact, after the statements above, Goedele responds by saying ‘would you recommend other people to try these things?’ This difference perhaps highlights assumptions about which body parts should penetrate and be penetrated. The only discussion of penetration by a body part that wasn't a penis was a conversation about finger penetration during a segment featuring two women in episode 1. Thus while there was some space for broader understandings of sex, the majority of the show focused on penises as penetrators and vaginas as penetratees – reinforcing a gendered norm that this is what ‘real sex’ involves. The spaces around this focus included moments for guests and presenters to question the definition of sex, and talk about a range of different kinds of pleasures. These conversations opened up the possibility of more inclusive conversations about sex, at times encouraging people to think about what they find pleasurable, as we discuss below. Nonetheless, the dominance of PIV penetration as the assumed definition of sex interrupts this potential – relegating other pleasures and bodily configurations to a lower status – not quite ‘enough’.
Our analysis in chapter 4 showed that much like PIV intercourse, orgasms are often centre-stage in current mediated sex advice. This ‘contemporary obligation to orgasm’ is a powerful discourse that positions orgasms as vital for good sex and relationships (Frith, 2015a, p. 24; Potts, 2002). In postfeminist discourses of sexual empowerment, orgasms are often constructed as a right, particularly for women, whose orgasms are presented as mysterious and elusive – needing to be worked on and improved by learning ‘techniques’ (Frith, 2015a). A close look at the representation of orgasms on Sex Box highlights the contradictory discourses that surround sexual pleasure and climax. Our analysis found that orgasms are taken for granted as evidence of sexual pleasure – something that people are expected to want in the future and have experienced during sex in the past. While there are some moments in which the show challenges the idea that sex necessarily involves orgasms – orgasmic sex is positioned as the ‘ideal’. Almost all the discussion in the show reflects this ‘orgasmic imperative’ (Potts, 2002), including in talk about sex without orgasms:
| Steve: | We all love a good orgasm. So what does the Sex Box survey say about the ‘great British climax’? Astonishingly, when it comes to coming, over half of men in our survey say they don't orgasm every time. |
| Talking head: | You know when you just get so drunk, you just can't. |
| Talking head: | I remember one girl who would keep telling me – ordering me as if I could just do it on demand, and I just thought – I'm getting cramp, this is not wor– it's just not going to happen. […] |
| Steve: | For women, an orgasm is harder to get than an answer on university challenge – a whopping 83 per cent say they don't always get their buzzer pressed. |
| Talking head: | I've never had an orgasm, no. No. |
| Steve: | But that doesn't stop 49 per cent dutifully faking it to make their partner feel better. |
(Sex Box, 2016)
The statistics that Sex Box cites from their own survey strongly challenge the assumption that the sex that most people have most of the time involves orgasms – indeed, the majority of their respondents said that they don't orgasm every time they have sex. The implications of the expectation to orgasm can also be seen even in this short extract – whether pressure from a partner or feeling the need to ‘perform’ an orgasm. However, despite opening up the possibility of this challenge to the ‘orgasmic imperative’, the overall discourse of the show nonetheless holds orgasms up as the assumed goal of sex. This imperative is constructed in two main ways – through an ‘orgasmic assumption’ and via a discourse of ‘orgasmic labour’.
The idea that sex involves (or should involve) orgasms is a constant underlying assumption in the series. Couples emerging from the sex box are usually asked at some point in the conversation whether/ how they had orgasmed. In some cases this is posed as a question (‘did you orgasm?’ episode 3) and in others the assumption is written into the question (‘in what position did you orgasm’ – episode 2) – in both cases, the central position of the orgasm is maintained. While the statistics from episode 1 above challenge this assumption, the series ends on the following exchange with the final couple to come out of the sex box:
| Goedele: | Did you orgasm? |
| Beth: | No we were still going – we had no idea the time had passed, honestly. |
| Steve: | Neither of you have orgasmed? |
| Steve: | No. [audience laughs] |
| Beth: | Genuinely. |
| Steve: | Some members of our audience have had an orgasm whilst you were in there … [audience laughs] that's insane. Guys – get back in the box. |
| Goedele: | I think you should. |
| Steve: | Go on – go finish yourselves off. |
(Episode 4)
While we can see the neat pleasure in ending the series on such a note, this interaction, along with others that required guests to report the presence or absence of an orgasm, serves to reinforce its position as the common-sense ‘goal’ of sex, while paradoxically highlighting that this ‘common sense’ is not based on people's experiences of sex.
The status of orgasms as a necessary goal of sex therefore presents them as something that should be ‘achieved’ through skill and hard work:
| Goedele: | If you feel the tension coming, you know building up, don't stop, keep on going because that's the moment when it might happen – ok – because for oral sex – we want to have an orgasm, ok? |
(Episode 1)
The idea that orgasms are elusive and require skill opens up some discursive space in the show to challenge the pressure surrounding them. For example, in the following extract, Adam and Marzena talk about their experiences of using the ‘coital alignment technique’. In chapter 4 we argued that this position has been presented as the orgasmic ‘holy grail’ during PIV sex. Indeed, the couple is advised to try this as a way to enable Marzena to have an orgasm through PIV penetration:
| Goedele: | Were you hoping then that she would get to an orgasm … ? |
| Adam: | Yeah yeah. I felt like I put a lot of work in and stuff like that. [audience laughs] |
| Marzena: | I think I felt like Adam's putting too much pressure on himself. It's like – this is it. I'm here to achieve something very unusual and everyone is watching and everyone is waiting for me to obviously please you and ah – I'm pretty confident that it's gonna happen but it's not gonna happen probably first time, you need to practise. |
| Goedele: | The female orgasm is not some kind of medal for a man – it's ‘woah you're a good lover you gave her an orgasm’ – you know what, a female orgasm is something you take, much more than a man gives you. So this exercise takes practice – you're thinking – how did I move, what did I feel – so you're thinking too much –. |
| Adam: | I guess that's the thing – eventually it becomes sort of like more natural and stuff like that. |
(Episode 3)
Marzena's comment challenges the pressure around the ‘goal’ of the orgasm. While the ‘common-sense’ equating of orgasms with sexual pleasure was generally left intact throughout the series, there were cracks like those seen above, offering different ways of seeing things. Similarly, Chris in episode 3 challenges the notion that orgasm is an ‘end point’, reflecting with his partner that she had ‘had two identifiable orgasms’. Such a comment troubles the notion of orgasms as necessarily distinct, classifiable experiences. However, both Chris and Marzena's comments maintain the orgasm's position as the ultimate measure of pleasure – something that can be achieved through work and attention. Goedele's advice in the extract above reflects a shift that Frith (2015a) has argued has occurred in the representation of orgasms – in which women are called upon to take control of ‘orgasmic excellence’ as part of their own empowerment and liberation. Such tasks form part of the sexual labour we explored in chapter 5. This extract also powerfully shows how these everyday discourses about what sex should be like feed into our everyday sense of ourselves and our sexual experiences. For both Adam and Marzena, the ‘achievement’ of orgasm through PIV is centre-stage in their experience and reflection on it.
It may seem strange to challenge the imperative around orgasms as a site of sexual pleasure, particularly given the ongoing struggles of those excluded from mainstream representations of sex to create positive, non-pathologizing accounts and information about sexual pleasure. The status of orgasms as desirable is almost unquestioned – their absence regrettable and remarkable. Sarah Ahmed (2010) has analysed the framing of happiness as always in the future, attached to the pursuit of pleasure via particular objects that are always slightly out of reach. The dominant framing of the relationship between sex and orgasms is similarly future-oriented (Frith, 2015a) – with sex a process of striving towards the ‘right’ kind of pleasure. Sex is also therefore constructed in terms of failure – whether that is failure to be orgasmic, or failure to have the ‘right’ kinds of orgasms.
In questioning the emphasis on orgasm we are not arguing that orgasms aren't pleasurable, or do not matter, but want to call attention to their position as the only (or most important) kind of sexual pleasure. For example, a number of participants on Sex Box talk about bursting out laughing during their time together in the box. However sex advice does not often discuss climaxes of this kind – with orgasms often prioritized as symbols of pleasure over other peaks like tears, moments of connection, love and intensity. Similarly, contemporary sex advice does not generally discuss other forms of pleasure that don't involve climaxes of any kind. As we showed in chapter 4, this focus on orgasm is part of a broader tendency within sex advice to break sex down into a linear collection of skills and techniques which can be mastered – a point we also explored in our discussion of sexual entrepreneurship in chapter 5. In this formulation, orgasm appears as the ultimate evidence of pleasure – with far less space for conversations about the different things that people find pleasurable. We explore the representation (and absence) of communication and consent in sex advice more broadly in chapter 8. In the next section, we take a look at this specifically in relation to the representation of pleasure in Sex Box.
‘I didn't have to say anything … she's a natural talent.’
(Kayleigh, episode 1)
‘We literally did not have a single conversation.’
(Anna, episode 2)
One of the central premises of Sex Box is that sex is more pleasurable if it is talked about openly – and that English people in particular find this difficult. There was much talk in the show about sexual experimentation and discovery. However, across the series there is relatively little direct discussion about ways of finding out what you or other people find pleasurable, and how to communicate about this. Of the twelve couples featured, only one involves a direct discussion about a way of communicating with their partner about what they find pleasurable, with the majority of Goedele's advice focusing on particular sexual activities or techniques. This approach to communication was also reflected in much of our data from sex advice books and website advice, explored in chapter 8.
In this section we want to focus on the exception to this dominant narrative of communication and consent – focusing on communication about pleasure in the final episode of Sex Box. Unlike most of the other segments, Goedele gives the final couple of the series explicit instructions about communication during sex, stressing the importance of talking with each other about their likes and dislikes:
| Goedele: | We have in Belgium a very popular saying and it says ‘first blah blah, then boom boom’. (Episode 4) |
In this segment, Goedele asks Beth and Oscar questions separately – with the responses cut against each other. The guests are asked about their favourite sexual position, what their partner is ‘good at’ and their partner's favourite part of their body. The segment follows a similar structure to other reality television programmes like Don't Tell the Bride in which the humour of the segment is created in the differences between the guests' responses. Pleasure and desire are presented as varying from person to person – advice that Goedele gives to a number of the couples over the course of the series. At the same time the activities that Goedele discusses present quite a static version of pleasure, with less space for the idea that people's likes, dislikes and desires might vary over time, with different people or in different moments. Before she enters the sex box, Goedele advises Beth to use a tube of chocolate body paint to point to the areas on her body that she would like to be stimulated:
| Goedele: | I have chocolate paint – a lot a lot a lot, because you never know how many erogenous zones people have. What you do is – you join Oscar, you point at your body, you put the chocolate paint at the places where you really like to be stimulated – and not always straight to the triangle there you know – so he's gonna eat you, bite you lick you, scratch you – do whatever you want – to tell him exactly this is what I like. |
While communication is assumed through much of the series, the discussion surrounding this couple's experiences opens up a more direct conversation about communication, including talking about the difficulties that people can face in talking about their desires:
| Beth: | It was quite fun starting with the whole chocolate and everything, it sort of gave quite a nice sort of introduction into everything, and it sort of like – it opened up a lot of communication from the beginning, which was quite good because usually you sort of – you get a bit more talkative as you get through – get a bit more ok about talking about everything – but I quite liked that it went straight into that. […] |
| Oscar: | It was really cool cause like – sometimes you feel like you're communicating and you know you're actually being quite closed in, but it like forces you to like – so I need to put this chocolate on my body somewhere. |
| Beth: | Makes you really think about where you want it as well which was quite good. |
(Episode 4)
This example highlights the multiple, often contradictory meanings about sexual pleasure that circulate in media texts. Our analysis shows that even within a single television series (or segment of a show) there are competing kinds of ‘common-sense’ stories about sexuality and intimacy – about what counts as ‘real’ sex and what pleasure is or should look like. These discourses are animated not just through the voice of the expert, but through the participants' reflections about their experiences. The intimacy of the reality television format of Sex Box brings the viewer into the private worlds of the guests as they follow (or fail to follow) the expertise on offer. The narrative structure of the show presents the sex happening on the box, and the reflections afterwards, as happening in ‘real time’ while the audience (both studio and television) wait to hear about it afterwards. Kavka (2008, p. 22) argues that the intimacy of reality television draws ‘on the sense that viewers and participants have of “being there”, in a shared if mediated space’. This feeling of both spatial and temporal immediacy positions reality programming as a deeply intimate form of everyday pedagogy (Kavka, 2008; Skeggs & Wood, 2012). Sex Box invites the audience not only to listen to the guests, but to enter into the experience of following sex advice with them. We are asked to hear about their intimate lives, but also to identify with them, to think about how we would try the suggested techniques, and how our own experiences would compare.
The conversational style and live audience of Sex Box open up space for disagreement and contradiction, as we have shown above. While Sex Box shares much in common with the dominant narratives about sex discussed in chapter 4, these are perhaps less stable – more cracked around the edges as different participants tell their own intimate stories. However, the collective, intimate space of Sex Box appears as a shared story. Affective moments like audience laughter, jokes with the guests and moments of embarrassment combine with the content of the advice to shape what ‘counts’ as sex and sexuality. This reinforces the ‘common-sense’ appearance of such stories beyond the advice of a single ‘expert’. Consequently, while there are multiple meanings and possible readings of televised sex advice, there are nonetheless particular assumptions written into their fabric. In particular, it is striking that in Sex Box there is not much discussion about how particular kinds of things might work / not work for people with different desires or bodies – the ‘menu’ of sexual activities are presented with an unspoken assumption that all people would want / be able to do / enjoy them. In the final section of the chapter we will explore online mediated sex advice that has explicitly challenged some of the assumptions built into these sexual scripts.
Many feminist activists, educators and writers have critiqued normative assumptions about pleasure, as well as producing alternative representations and knowledge. Our bodies ourselves, which we discussed in the introductory chapter, was created with the principle that it was important for women to learn about their bodies and desires – challenging ideas about female sexual pleasure and the phallocentric dominant ideas about sex. Lesbian erotica magazine On Our Backs, discussed in chapter 2, was formed in response to a feeling that there was a lack of lesbian-produced pleasure-focused publications. Across the vast history of political pamphlets, small-scale self-produced zines, blogs or YouTube videos, feminists have created alternative spaces for conversations about sexual pleasure. Over the last fifteen years there has been an explosion in feminist blogging, bringing together politics and aesthetics from feminist, riot grrrl, punk and hip-hop cultures to critique, subvert and intervene in popular culture (Durham et al., 2013; Harris, 2008; Hester & Walters, 2015). Feminist blogs mix original content with academic texts, video, images and sound – creating, among other things, erotica, political discussion and public pedagogy. In this section we will briefly explore how feminist blogs have created space for wider understandings about pleasure.
Black feminist scholars have argued that exploring pleasure is crucial for Black feminist theorizing and activism (Durham et al., 2013; Morgan, 2015). Calling for a Black feminist politics of pleasure, Joan Morgan (2015, p. 36) argues:
Holding the United States accountable for a sordid history of legally and culturally sanctioned rape and gender violence against black women has long been a priority in [Black Feminist Thought]'s agenda … From academia to the blogosphere, we've become feminist fluent in theorizing the many ways in which our sexuality has been compromised. We've been considerably less successful, however, moving past that damage to claim pleasure and a healthy erotic as fundamental rights.
Hip-hop feminist blog The Crunk Feminist Collective takes up this challenge – creating space for dialogue and Black feminist public pedagogy, including on pleasure and desire (Durham et al., 2013). Drawing on Black feminist and hip-hop histories and politics, the bloggers in the collective grapple with power and pleasures in everyday experiences and popular culture through political commentary, poetry and theoretical discussions:
One of the biggest conundrums faced by this generation of Black feminists is the challenge of articulating a pro-sex, pro-pleasure politic in the face of recalcitrant and demeaning stereotypes that objectify, dehumanize, and devalue Black women's bodies and lives. To be “good” feminists, we always feel that we have to make sure and say it, so folks know that we get it, that we understand the magnitude of these histories of negative representation. To be fair, I understand that part of the reason for insisting on naming the rampant misogynoir (h/t to Moya Bailey) in our culture is that keeping it front and center reminds us that we need to tear this shit down, and create anew.
But can I be real with y'all? Sometimes being the one to wave the red flag is tiring as hell. I'm down for the struggle. I got serious Black Girl Freedom Dreams, like most of the sisters I know.
But sometimes you just need to twerk!
So now that I've done the requisite acknowledgements, I'm ready to get a little ratchet and hip you to three new songs that have me feeling optimistic about what Black girl pleasure can look like.
[…]
[T]here's post Destiny's child Kelly Rowland. She's found her niche, making sexy, grown Black girl music like ‘Motivation’, ‘Ice’, and this newest joint ‘Kisses Down Low.’
Some of my homegirls are mad that she has limited herself to putting out sexy songs. And that's a legitimate critique. But I'm more interested in the unapologetic nature of the music she's putting out, and her willingness to ask for what she needs.
Check this lyric: ‘I like my kisses down low/makes me arch back/when you give it to me slow/baby, just like that.’
Then an autotuned masculine voice (maybe Bey from I Been On – J/K!) repeats the lyrics as if to make sure he has the instructions just right. All Black feminists need to know how to give instructions! And you need a partner who can follow directions!
As someone who definitely likes her kisses down low, I ain't #hatin.
Brittney Cooper (2015), one of the founders of the Crunk Feminist Collective has explored the rejection of a ‘politics of respectability’ (Higginbotham, 1993) in black working-class cultural expressions that are unapologetic, disruptive and defiant. Higginbotham (1993) argued that strategies of respectability, including sexual purity, politeness and temperance were promoted by progressive black women in the US at the turn of the twentieth century (Durham et al., 2013; Harris, 2003). Black feminist scholars have interrogated how such strategies have reinforced white, heteronormative and capitalist systems of power, while pathologizing black women's sexual desire and pleasure (Chepp, 2015; Durham et al., 2013). Black feminist analysis of popular culture and music has pointed to the importance of exploring actively desiring representations of black women's sexuality, challenging the absence of such accounts in feminist theory (Chepp, 2015). Along with Cooper, Aisha Durham and Susana Morris (2013) have examined the radical potential of black women's unapologetic expressions of sexuality, arguing for a feminist theory that acknowledges both the history of violence and trauma against black women's bodies but also enables an understanding of black women's experiences of pleasure and desire. The extract above from the Crunk Feminist Collective grapples with this in relation to Kelly Rowland's song ‘Kisses Down Low’ – positioning Rowland's lyrics as a feminist instruction for sexual pleasure and communication. Crunktastic's ‘requisite acknowledgements’ at the start of the blog post ground the pleasurable reading of Rowland's lyrics to a political analysis – both about the persistence of racism and sexism in cultural representations of black women's pleasure, and about resistance through alternative stories and representations.
Such intimate connections between theory, popular culture and activism are a common feature of feminist blogging about sex and pleasure. Feminist sex advice blogging is part of a wider culture of feminist community building and consciousness raising (Hester & Walters, 2015). The feminist blogosphere opens up space for discussion and representation of multiple kinds of pleasures, experienced by different bodies and body parts and in different configurations beyond the boundary walls of the normative sexual scripts outlined in chapter 4.
Disability activists and scholars have been at the front line challenging narrow assumptions about sexuality, tackling in particular the exclusion of disabled people from mainstream representations of sexual pleasure:
Rarely are disabled people regarded as either desiring subjects or objects of desire. And when sex and disability are linked in contemporary American cultures, the conjunction is most often the occasion for marginalization or marvelling: the sexuality of disabled people is typically depicted in terms of either tragic deficiency or freakish excess. Pity or fear, in other words, are the sensations most often associated with disabilities; more pleasurable sexual sensations are generally dissociated from disabled bodies and lives.
(Mollow & McRuer, 2012, p. 1)
Disabled feminists have been critical of representations and exclusions of disability in both mainstream media and within the feminist movement on and offline (Shaw, 2013). The disabled feminist blogosphere is wide-ranging, often combining discussions of personal experiences with critical theories, cultural analysis and collective calls to action, including for the importance of more inclusive definitions of sex and pleasure (Ellis, 2015):
Talking about sex and disability, explicitly and shamelessly, just makes the most sense to me. In talking about it and in writing about it, I am striving to create conversations about these things, conversations that let us examine our own beliefs and values, and let us examine the radical possibilities of pleasure, for all people (babe).
Disabled feminist blogging about sex often explicitly challenges assumptions about what people want/ desire/ are able to do. For example, in a review of a sex toy, Bethany Stevens at Crip Confessions explicitly explores its usefulness in relation to different bodily possibilities:
This toy is ideal for those with difficulty with dexterity, wrist pain, those who don't have a lot of muscle control in the arms, etc. This could easily be placed on a person, after being positioned comfortably without any aid needed during the process.
Much of this feminist writing about disability and sex draws on social, rather than medical approaches to disability which shift attention away from the individual to consider the disabling effects of social structures and barriers (Barker & Iantaffi, 2015). This approach poses a challenge to the dominant scripts of sexual pleasure – pointing out how these scripts create the pathologizing stories about ‘normal’ and ‘dysfunctional’ sex that we discussed in chapter 4. This social model is useful for thinking about sexual pleasure more widely – acknowledging diversity in bodies and pleasures and challenging the assumption that all people's bodies and desires are the same (Barker & Iantaffi, 2015).
A social approach to disability and sexual pleasure also opens up space to examine how disablism intersects with other forms of oppression, excluding and stigmatizing those who fall outside the white, non-disabled, heteronormative, young, slim and middle-class minority who are disproportionately represented in mainstream sexual media. The explosion of feminist blogs has meant that there are multiple voices from different standpoints and communities, often positioning themselves directly in opposition to mainstream representations of sexuality. Following on from punk and riot grrrl zines, fat feminist bloggers have also posed a vocal challenge to dominant representations of sex and pleasure:
It's really sad when you look up ‘fat sex how to’ or ‘bbw sex guide’ and it only takes about 5 entries before you get to either degrading porn or weight loss tips. Ugh. And then, of course, there's all the body-negative bullshit to wade through. Way to remove sexual agency from fat people!
Well, fat people have sex too, I'm here to tell you, and it can be as varied and exciting as it is for everyone else.
The often irreverent, punk and DIY aesthetic of much of the feminist blogosphere can interrupt and subvert dominant representations of sexual pleasure. The form of blogging itself encourages new and reworked articulations of pleasure – original content is pasted together, linked or recirculated with other feminist texts – videos and theoretical writings and talks by feminist scholars and activists nudge up against poetry and lyrics and reworked images. Online spaces are constantly in process – thus feminist blogs can be sites to ‘work through’ tricky questions (Crunktastic, 2017). At the same time, feminist blogs can be sites in which inequalities are reproduced. As well as enabling alternative stories about sex, bodies and pleasures, feminist blogs also create space for conversations between different feminists and feminist communities. Such discussions can be productive sites of collective exploration, and can also enable feminists to publicly challenge and reflect on inequality and oppression within feminist online and offline communities. This public and participatory nature of feminist blogs mean that while they are open to a growing number of people, they can feel like risky places to work through complex questions of power and intimacy. Feminist bloggers receive high levels of online, often violent and sexualized, racist and LGBTQ-phobic abuse (Jane, 2014). While many feminist have spoken out and developed strategies for dealing with such abuse, its prevalence potentially limits the possibilities for the feminist blogosphere as a participatory space.
We began this chapter with an observation that pleasure is paradoxically everywhere and nowhere in contemporary sex advice. Building on our analysis in chapter 4, we have explored discourses of pleasure in two genres of sex advice media – makeover reality television and feminist blogging. These genres are characterized by an intimate relationship to the audience. Whether in homes or in reading / viewing on mobile devices, they circulate in the intimate spaces of everyday media consumption. Reality television and blogging also both centre on intimate life, with an emphasis on the personal experience and authenticity of participants, contributors and creators of content (Skeggs & Wood, 2012; Lange, 2007). The discourses of pleasure that circulate in these media are not fixed, but are part of the threads that form and tangle and unravel what pleasure means. The contradictions in mediated discourses of pleasure that we have analysed above highlight their instability and challenge the ‘common-sense’ story of sexual pleasure. Increasingly participatory media has opened up space for multiple alternatives to a singular story about what pleasure is or should be. However, we think it important to note that coital, phallocentric, orgasmic and technique-mastery notions of pleasure overwhelmingly dominate the landscape of mediated sex advice. As we discussed in chapter 5, pleasure has increasingly become a site of self-management and audit – a marker of ‘success’ with lack of pleasure not only evidence of dysfunction but of personal failure. The imperative to particular kinds of sexual pleasure is therefore part of a much bigger imperative to sexual pleasure itself. We have grappled with these ideas in thinking about what a sex critical approach to pleasure might look like – one that both recognizes the importance of sharing information and stories but that avoids excluding, stigmatizing and reinforcing structural oppressions. These are questions we turn to in our concluding chapter. The entrepreneurial sex that we have analysed in this chapter demands striving for pleasure – but it also demands that individuals manage the risks associated with sex. We explore this tension in the following chapter.