This concluding chapter of the book summarizes the key themes which have emerged during our explorations of sex advice in media culture, and the ways in which the circulating discourses regarding sex – which are present through this advice – work together to perpetuate and/or resist certain constructions of intimacy. This chapter also takes up a strand of consideration which has been increasingly present through the latter half of the book: that of the potential for more explicitly sex-critical forms of sex advice, education, or information (Downing, 2012).
After exploring the notion of sex critical advice in more detail, we take the key themes from the book one by one. For each we draw together our analyses from across the chapters of the book with two further sources of information (1) an ongoing dialogue – and series of brief online interviews – with current sex advisors who aim for a more sex-critical approach, and (2) an autoethnographic reflection on our own experience of developing more sex critical advice. This illuminates both the potentials for such advice, and the barriers that stand in the way of it. Such barriers include pragmatic realities such as the ways in which publishing industries and mainstream media operate, and more insidious blocks such as the impossibility of ‘stepping outside of culture’ (Barker & Gill, 2012) and the difficulties in challenging one's own assumptions when it comes to thinking and writing about sex in a more sex critical manner.
Throughout the book our analysis has come from a sex-critical position. Here we briefly recap what that involves, and consider how it can also apply to the creation of sex advice itself.
Sex-critical engagement starts from a position of suspicion towards all claims about sexuality, gender, sexual practices, or relationship structures as either oppressive or emancipatory (Downing, 2012). This includes, for example, a critical approach towards both entirely ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ stances on sexual topics such as porn or kink. Given this position, sex critical writing endeavours to avoid either an entirely celebratory, or entirely dismissive, stance towards any subject (Barker & Langdridge, 2010). Rather it approaches it in a non-polarized way, perhaps focusing on what is opened up and closed down by a particular idea, discourse, practice or identity (Barker, 2013b). It identifies areas of both reproduction of – and resistance to – dominant understandings: highlighting points of construction and contestation. Thus sex-critical work explicitly includes an awareness of the ideological contexts in which such claims are produced. Here is a summary of key elements of sex-critical thinking which have particularly informed our work here:
Sex-critical work also takes reflexive account of the researcher's position in relation to the research and, in our case, endeavours to engage in a compassionate critique, which is also aware of the worlds in which producers and creators of sex advice operate, the restrictions they are under, and the impossibility of any of us ever ‘stepping outside of culture’ (Barker & Gill, 2012). Compassionate critique includes the following elements:
For these reasons, in addition to analysing the advice itself, we engaged in two further projects while we were researching and writing this book. The first was a dialogue with sex advisors who were all – to some extent – engaged in the process of endeavouring to produce more sex critical advice. One of us, Meg-John, worked on two collaborative projects with sex advisors and related professionals: Sense about Sex (www.senseaboutsex.com) and Bad Sex Media Bingo (www.badsexmediabingo.com). Both projects developed as a result of dissatisfaction with the kinds of sex information, education and advice that were making their way into mainstream media. The Sense about Sex group created a website of information for the general public, as well as a number of public events. The Bad Sex Media Bingo group created a bingo card that people could use themselves in order to engage in a critique of mainstream media about sex. Indeed, the TV programme Sex Box (analysed in chapter 6), and newspaper agony columns (analysed in chapters 4 and 8) were two of the examples we approached with Bad Sex Media Bingo, encouraging viewers to live-tweet their responses during the pilot episode of Sex Box.
Two social media groups developed out of these projects where members continued to discuss mainstream sex advice, often cohering around a weekly frustration-fest over mainstream newspaper advice columns. Keen that something more productive may come of the groups, Meg-John interviewed six advisors who had been involved in these conversations in more depth, to determine their thoughts on the potentials and pitfalls of attempting to produce more sex-critical advice. These interviewees included sex advisors for major mainstream newspapers and men's and women's magazines, as well as authors of mainstream and alternative sex advice books, and online sex advisors. In their interviews, they were asked about where they located themselves in relation to mainstream and ‘sex-critical’ sex advice, how they saw sex advice having changed over the years and how they would like it to be, how open or constrained they felt around the advice they could give, and how they navigated the tensions in producing more ethical sex advice.
In the second project, Meg-John worked with one of these sex advisors – Justin Hancock – to produce their own sex advice. This formed part of Barker's broader ongoing project creating self-help materials which are informed by critical scholarly work, activism, and psychotherapy, and which locate people's struggles within wider culture rather than within the individual (see Barker, forthcoming 2017). Justin Hancock is a sex educator whose past work primarily involved producing sex critical materials for young people via the BishUK website, and working with young people directly as well as training others who provide sex advice and education to young people. He and Meg-John felt that a joint project would enable them to apply Justin's approach to an adult audience, as well as exploring what sex advice based on the analyses of the Mediated intimacy project might look like in practice.
During the final two years of the mediated intimacy project, Justin and Meg-John met weekly to co-create a number of sex advice outputs. These included:
Throughout this ongoing project both Meg-John and Justin reflected on the process of producing sex-critical advice. Specifically, they took time before and after each session together to discuss their experience of the project in relation to challenges and potentials, and relating it to their own sex and relationship lives. Meg-John kept a reflexive journal throughout this time informed by a combination of Adams and Jones's (2011) queer autoethnographic approach and Blinne's (2012) auto(erotic)ethnographic approach. Their reflections will be woven into the rest of the chapter, along with the dialogues with other sex advisors. The sections reflecting on Meg-John and Justin's project will be written in the first person (we) and in italics, for ease of reading. To clarify, the ‘we’ of the non-italicized text refers to your current authors (Meg-John, Ros and Laura) while the ‘we’ of the italicized text refers to Meg-John and Justin.
Now we will go through the different core themes of this book, summarizing our analysis, and drawing on the sex advisor interviews, and Meg-John and Justin's project, to reflect on the potentials and constraints around developing more sex-critical advice. We will consider: normativity and inclusivity, bodies, the self, safety and risk, pleasure, and communication and consent, before concluding with reflections on modes of sex advice – and their place within wider media – and an invitation to you, the reader, to develop more sex-critical media, with guidance about how you might do this.
As described in chapters 3 and 4, sex advice – and media more widely – is largely heteronormative: presenting ‘normal’ sex and relationships as primarily happening between one cisgender man and one cisgender woman. This is embedded within the representation of men and women as ‘opposite’ and ‘complementary’ exemplified in the bestselling Mars and Venus self-help books (Potts, 2002), men's and women's magazines, romantic comedies, and chick lit (Gill, 2007a). Chapter 3 touched on the ways in which sex remains centred around men's pleasure with the omnipresent male sexual drive discourse (Hollway, 1984) and assumption that men are focused on sex and women on love. Recent shifts from objectification to subjectification mean there is now an onus on women to be ‘up for’ sex, to demonstrate enjoyment, and to find it empowering, while still navigating the sexual double standard to be sexual enough, but not too sexual. In chapters 4 and 8 we saw how this plays out in many sex advice advice materials which – implicitly or explicitly – emphasize the vital importance of women providing regular sex to male partners so as not to lose the relationship. However, TV shows like Girls and Fleabag begin to open up the possibility of a more messy, complex female sexuality as their characters navigate this territory.
There is increased representation of LGBT people and relationships in mainstream media, including some coverage of LG sexuality in sex advice books, and even high-profile LG sex advisors speaking to a broad audience like Dan Savage on Sex Box (see chapter 6) or the authors of Sex tips for straight women from a gay man (Anderson & Berman, 2008, see chapter 4). However, as we saw in chapter 3, representations focus largely on the LG, rather than BT, parts of the acronym, and those aimed at a wide audience still commonly represent lesbian and gay people in homonormative ways, focused around marriage and family, for example, and often de-sexualized. Most sex advice assumes a heterosexual audience, and a clear division between the kind of advice that would be required by people of different sexual ‘orientations’: hence specific books and magazines aimed at LG people, and separate pages of mainstream sex advice books on this topic. This is despite the popularity of romantic themes in media and popular culture, with increasingly fuzzy distinctions between homosociality and homosexuality (Ward, 2015a), and the fact that questions of ‘same-sex’ attraction are the most common in newspaper agony columns: suggesting a far less clear-cut separation between hetero- and homo-attraction and experience. This is reflected in recent statistics that over 40 per cent of young people regard themselves as somewhere between ‘exclusively heterosexual’ and ‘exclusively homosexual’ (YouGov, 2015).
In chapter 4 we saw how heteronormativity operated in conjunction with mononormativity (the assumed normality and naturalness of monogamy), the sexual imperative (that humans must experience sexual attraction) and the coital imperative (that sex = penis-in-vagina intercourse) to create the ‘problem’ addressed by much mainstream sex advice: that of continued sex in long-term relationships. These interconnected assumptions also constrain the possible ‘solutions’ that can be provided to a series of positions and techniques which can be applied to the sexual script (foreplay, intercourse, orgasm) without posing any serious threat to it, or to the normativities that underlie it.
When we asked our sex advisor interviewees about their experience of the sex advice industry, their responses concurred with our analysis. For example one long-term magazine and broadcast sex advisor said that sex advice ‘presupposes that all sex is heterosexual and penetrative. This is so subtle that often it slips by unnoticed; for example: ‘When you have sex do you use this, this or this position?’ This leads onto a tendency – even now – to assume that most women climax through penetration alone. Argh.’ They went on: ‘There is little coverage of, or willingness to cover, gay/lesbian issues let alone trans or to address those markets … The whole issue of open relationships and polyamory is always a no-no.’ Another advisor said ‘Trans is a huge issue – I suspect it will be a long time before genitals do not equal gender in mainstream magazines. And poly, swinging and alternative relationships tend to be condemned to be “real life” stories and presented as outside the norm rather than lifestyles readers may empathize with in any way. Marriage, mortgage and monogamy is the golden triumvirate.’ Advisors who worked for mainstream publishers, titles and programmes agreed that these all made it very difficult to frame sex in anything other than the heteronormative way we have described.
Several described the ways in which they had endeavoured to subvert normative assumptions in the advice they provided, at least to some extent. One advisor for a mainstream men's magazine captured the sense of what is, and is not, possible in terms of opening up lines of flight within mainstream sex advice: ‘It's heteronormative although I try, and am sometimes allowed, to step outside that frame. I took the gig on because I wanted to take advantage of being able to reach a mass mainstream audience and to see how far I could challenge the men vs. women battle for sexual pleasure and power that dominates mainstream discourse and advice. It can be highly frustrating but I try to push the envelope where possible and offer a view that is accepting of sexual diversity. I also very much provide an assertive view of female sexuality and try and steer men away from manipulative sexual behaviours. Lots of things are off limits, particularly anything that challenges heteronormative masculinity. It took nearly two years for me to persuade the editor to run a piece on male submission but I finally got there. I waited until the 50 Shades film was slated to come out and presented the idea as a fresh take on the topic. I had to sell it as a way of giving yourself a rest from being the sexual driver in a male/female coupling. But the opportunity to provide good practical advice on pegging seemed worth the compromise.’
Only the advisors who had control over the media they created were able to challenge normativities more than this. As one put it: ‘controlling the publication is the only way to truly control the message’. Another online sex advisor said ‘I feel a responsibility not to make assumptions of the reader, not to discriminate against particular groups, to celebrate and represent diversity and to make as many people feel included as possible’. They reflected that all these things were possible, but only because they were speaking directly to their audience rather than being mediated by publishers or producers and their agendas.
Our own project (megjohnandjustin.com) gave us the opportunity to discover, first hand, what sex advice might be like which was not grounded on these interrelated normative assumptions. Fortunately our publisher – Icon – was entirely supportive of this aim and even helped us to come up with a book title which explicitly challenged the sexual imperative Enjoy sex: how, when and IF you want to (we were pleased with their decision to put the ‘if’ in upper case, to make it stand out even more).
All the time we were writing we tried to keep in mind a variety of potential readers: asexual/sexual, trans/cis, sex-worker/client, currently disabled or not, kinky/non-kinky, older/younger, different genders of attraction, etc. We addressed this diversity in two key ways: (1) ensuring that the materials were written in a way that was inclusive of all those potential readers, and (2) ensuring that people from all these groups were explicitly represented several times across the ‘multiple experiences’ which we used to exemplify what we were saying. For example, we endeavoured to refer to ‘sexual, sensual, or erotic experiences’, and to always give one or two ‘multiple experiences’ that were not sexual. Similarly we always referred to the ‘person or people’ you might be having these experiences with, rather than assuming a couple dynamic, as well as including solo sex as much as sex with others. With the book we also engaged a number of sensitivity readers from diverse communities to provide us with feedback about whether they felt included or not, and made edits based on that feedback.
We will reflect on how our endeavours to be inclusive played out in specific areas in the subsequent sections of this chapter.
In chapter 3 we explored three ‘takes’ on the body in contemporary culture: the surveilled body, the disciplined body, and the sexualized body. We saw how female bodies, in particular, are under constant – and increasingly magnified – surveillance, including the ‘gynaeoptic surveillance’ of the ‘girlfriend gaze’ (Winch, 2013). We considered forms of bodily discipline and ‘aesthetic labour’ that are normatively demanded to shape bodies for sex and sexual desire (Bartky, 1990), and how attempts to challenge this – for example in Lena Dunham's work – are responded to with punitive regulation. We also described recent concerns around the sexualization of the body and our own take on the gendered, raced, and classed ways in which certain bodies are sexualized – or asexualized – in media and popular culture (Gill, 2008).
Turning to sex advice, specifically, in chapter 4, we saw that (certain) bodies are omnipresent in sex advice books, particularly the sex manual which still appears to be one of the most common formats for such books to take. There was remarkable lack of diversity across the different texts which we analysed. The images of bodies within them were almost entirely young, white, slim, not visibly disabled, depicted in heterosexual coupled combinations with a taller, toned or muscular man with short hair and a shorter, slimmer, more delicate looking woman, with longer hair. In addition to reinforcing the heteronormative complementary gender model described above, such images give strong messages about which bodies are, and are not, deemed to be sexual or appropriate to be having sex. It was disturbing that, where images of older or same-sex couples were used, they were often clothed while other bodies were naked, and the few images of people of colour could be read as being hypersexualized or emotional (illustrating ‘spicy’ sex, or ‘make-up’ sex after a conflict, for example).
These images – and the text of sex advice books – certainly encourages the surveillance and disciplining of the body given the slim, toned and depilated depictions, and representations of high-heeled shoes and ‘sexy’ lingerie. Throughout all forms of mainstream sex advice, women are encouraged to prepare their bodies for sex with beauty routines, garments, and other means of ensuring that sexy ‘brain chemicals’ are present. They are also required to come to know, and work on, their bodies in order to have better sex. For example, women are encouraged to have solo sex in order to better inform their partner about what kinds of physical touch will lead to their orgasm, while men are encouraged to have solo sex in order to improve their ‘performance’ (i.e. their capacity to last a long time before ejaculating). Thus, women's bodies are presented as mysterious and men's as relatively straightforward. Sex is also emphasized as a means towards a more ‘healthy’ body in numerous ways, reinforcing the sexual imperative (Gill, 2009). Heteronormative penis-in-vagina sex is already foregrounded by the focus of sex advice around bodies being predominantly on genitals – often with detailed illustrations of those areas – rather than on entire bodies.
The sex advisors who we interviewed mentioned images as one of the areas which were often most reinforcing of normativity, even when they accompanied magazine or newspaper columns which explicitly challenged normativity. This is because images are often not chosen by the writers themselves, and rely on stock photo type pictures of feet emerging from the end of a bed, for example, or a couple in bed but turned away from each other. Such stock photos are renowned for being overwhelmingly white, young, middle-class, and gender-normative, and for depicting ‘others’ in tokenistic and stereotypical ways (Kay, Matuszek & Munson, 2015). One newspaper problem-page author commented on an important tension here: ‘there are some areas where you won't have any control, from the photos used to illustrate pieces, to the headlines and standfirsts or radio/TV introductions that are all compiled by someone else. How much input you have over those varies across media outlets. And sometimes they pick a photo or headline I'd never choose but it draws people in to read or listen to the advice. So there's a tension there about how much you go for the “worthy” or accurate focus and how much of it may be more sensational but ensures you do get read.’
For Enjoy sex, we decided not to include any images of people through the book due to the impossibility of depicting a full diversity in a small number of pictures. In our other materials, however, we have used a lot of images because we are deliberately endeavouring to produce sex advice across different accessible formats (animations and cartoon-style zines, for example). For the animations – illustrated by Julia Scheele – we deliberately included a visible diversity of bodies. For example, given that we were using the metaphor or a handshake in one video, we depicted the characters Troy and Abed from the popular comedy show Community, as they famously have a specific handshake they do together, and they are well known actors of colour. However, we still run up against the difficulty of representing a multiplicity of body types with a few characters. That animation does not include anybody who is fat or visibly disabled, for example. In our zines we tend to use cartoon faces, which could be of any body shape or disability. However, we were critiqued – in our first zine – for the faces all looking rather queer and/or masculine, and have endeavoured to include more diverse and femme-appearing faces since then (Barker & Hancock, 2016). This is a good example of how our own standpoint inadvertently influenced the inclusivity of what we produced.
In Enjoy sex, we also eschewed the conventional diagrams of ‘men's’ and ‘women's’ genitals as foregrounding both gender difference and genital forms of sex. Instead we disrupted ‘sex-difference’ assumptions by emphasizing the similarities across genders, and the differences between people of the same gender, when it comes to sexual desires and experiences. Writing these materials alerted us to the difficulties inherent in acknowledging the huge power of gendered scripts – around discipline, surveillance and sexualization, for example – at the same time as not wanting to reinforce a binary gender model, to downplay other intersecting dynamics, or to suggest that stereotypically gendered experiences are inevitable or ‘normal’. It may be that we erred on the side of de-emphasizing gender, in our attempts to produce guidance that was applicable to everybody, and that is something we are keen to keep reflecting on in our work going forward. It is telling that the very first question we received for the ‘agony a/uncle’ section of our podcast is about gender and bodies. The cisgender women writing in asks about how to respond when men request her to make changes to her body – such as shaving her legs – but also how she might communicate when a change they've made to their appearance is uncomfortable for her – such as beard being itchy.
In chapters 1 and 2 we introduced current neoliberal, consumer capitalist, postfeminist understandings of the self and described how the history of lifestyle media in general, and self-help in particular, has been shaped by such understandings. Specifically, self-help locates problems within the individual – often assumed female – reader, rather than within wider cultural messages or structural inequalities, for example. The reader is also regarded as responsible for addressing those problems, and as requiring the help of the ‘expert’ advisor in order to do so. We saw in chapter 4 that this is certainly the case in sex advice, as sexual difficulties are individualized and responsibilized, and ‘sexpertise’ deemed necessary to ‘solve’ the ‘problem’ of sex in intimate relationships.
In chapter 5 we made a deeper investigation into the ‘technologies of sexiness’ that are proffered across sex and relationships media (Evans & Riley, 2014). We saw how the ideal self in such media is regarded as one who has banished repression, overcome taboos, dealt with any ‘issues’, and become a properly adventurous (not boring) neoliberal lover. Chapter 5 drew on recent research into both the ways in which such an ideal self is constructed by magazines and online advice (Wood, 2017a; Favaro, 2017b), and the ways in which individuals draw on markedly similar discourses when discussing overcoming abusive sexual experiences, or ‘working at’ casual sex, for example (Van Hooff, 2013; Farvid & Braun, 2013). Through reviewing such research we saw that, in addition to surveilling and disciplining of the body, people are expected to construct successful intimate/sexual selves through a complex management of their emotional states and self-presentation, all of which is particularly clear in the recent phenomenon of sex apps which encourage people to monitor, evaluate, and change their sexual selves.
When we spoke with sex advisors about the ways in which they endeavoured to produce more helpful or ethical forms of advice, many of them spoke about offering different understandings of the self: particularly one which is culturally and historically located. For example, one writer of books and women's magazine articles said ‘as I've aged, I've become more political and more likely to write about systemic issues that can affect sexuality, rather than “how to” guides which were a major part of my writing in my twenties: the advice is more about changing society than changing an individual's sex life’.
A newspaper columnist we spoke with reflected on the multiple audiences for their sex advice as a way of highlighting the issues with producing any one-size-fits-all advice which individualizes sexual issues. They said ‘although based in the UK I'd say that over half of my audience is not UK based and increasingly questions come from those in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Sub Saharan Africa. Sometimes advice giving is difficult as you're giving people tools to live within situations that are abusive or unfair or unequal but that may be safer, at least in the short term, than a more sex positive and uncritical “yay sex is great!” “being gay is fab!” Ethically though you have to be aware sometimes you'll be encouraging people to live in intolerable conditions because there are no immediate ways out, if at all. For those who only work with Western audiences that can be quite difficult to comprehend, although of course such situations aren't unheard of here and we'd do well to remember that.’
One key feature of Meg-John's ongoing attempt to produce critical psychosocial sex advice has been to find ways of locating people's difficulties within wider cultural narratives and axes of oppression, rather than in some coherent individual self (Barker, forthcoming 2017). For example, in Rewriting the rules (Barker, 2013b), they began their relationship self-help book with a chapter on our relationships with ourselves. This chapter introduced Foucauldian understandings of self-surveillance as a major reason for the high level of self-criticism we experience and then endeavoured to challenge fixed/singular understandings of the self with more fluid/plural possibilities, encouraging the reader to reflect on change over time, and on the different sides of themselves in order to cultivate a kinder, more gentle, approach. These themes are ones Barker has taken up in their self-help style zines since then (Barker, 2015; 2016), as well as in their comic introduction to queer thinking (Barker & Scheele, 2016).
Building on this work, our starting point – with both Enjoy sex and with our website of linked resources – was to explicitly locate people's sexual experiences within circulating cultural scripts and stories, and to encourage reflection on the constraining impact of ideals of ‘normal’ or ‘proper’ sex and sexuality. The first chapter of Enjoy sex encourages readers to reflect on what sex is – as defined by popular media and culture – and what the impact of this might be on themselves and others. Then the second chapter guides them through a chronological consideration of the messages they have received about sex and how this has shaped their experience. An explicitly biopsychosocial approach to sex and sexuality is introduced to help them to understand how bodies, experiences, and social contexts influence each other in a series of complex feedback loops. Building on the sex advisor comments previously, we were explicit about the fact that our book was limited – by our own knowledge and experience – to Western audiences, while endeavouring to raise questions in a way that would be open enough for people to examine their own (sub)cultural and community influences within that.
Self-care is emphasized throughout both the book and web resources as a means to reflect on such expectations and pressures, and a way of ‘going easy’ on ourselves given how difficult it is to resist such cultural scripts and ideals. Here we endeavour to draw on Audre Lorde's understanding of self-care as a political act and a Foucauldian sense of reflexive care of the self, rather than an individualized notion of ‘working on the self’ or a consumer capitalist ‘treat yo'self’ mentality (Barker, 2017). However, we note how the format of advice or self-help can make it difficult not to slip into a more individualistic approach, both because we ourselves cannot step outside of (neoliberal) culture, and because the nature of this format is of an individual writer suggesting to an individual reader what they might do: which lends itself to focusing on individual actions rather than collective ones, for example.
Similarly, in our zines (Barker & Hancock, 2016) we encourage the reader to ‘make your own’ relationship user guide, or sex manual in workbook format. The idea is to encourage them to question cultural messages, to tune into themselves on an embodied level, and to reflect more consciously on how they would like to do their relationships and sexual experiences. However, it is – again – hard to avoid a sense that, in order to do this, they need to scrutinize themselves and discipline themselves into certain practices. This is an ongoing tension that we endeavour to address in our work.
As we have explained throughout this book, particularly in chapter 6, pleasure has a contradictory place in mediated sex advice. Pleasure is present as an ‘imperative’ (to have sex, and to demonstrate pleasure, particularly through orgasm), but it is also strangely absent in any more detailed sense. It is rather assumed that the range of acts presented in sex advice will be pleasurable, and there is little unpacking of what pleasure is, of the multiple potential pleasures possible from sexual and erotic experience, or of the complex interweaving of pleasure and other experiences in sex (e.g. duty, shame, validation, disappointment, relief).
Our analysis of the TV show Sex Box revealed that even when the equation of pleasure and orgasm is questioned, orgasm is still reinforced as the correct climax or end-point of sex, with couples who did not ‘reach’ that ‘goal’ being sent back into the box! Similarly, while one of the presenters continually asks the all-important question ‘what is sex?’ to disrupt the coital imperative, penetration is subtly reinforced as constituting sex in the way in which couples who do not penetrate in the box are treated.
Chapter 5 also demonstrated that mainstream sex apps – like the sex advice books analysed in chapter 4 – very much focus on the ‘what’ of sex rather than the ‘how’. For example, not only does the Couple Foreplay Sex Game construct non-coital activities as ‘foreplay’, like the books, it also presents a range of activities as inevitably relevant and pleasurable to all users of the app, the only thing to ‘rate’ being how good each person was at achieving skill at the techniques. Similarly, other apps construct sexual ‘mastery’ as learning a variety of one-size-fits-all techniques and positions which are assumed to constitute ‘good sex’ for everybody.
The sex advisors whom we interviewed stated that there were limits around the types of sexual practices and pleasures that they felt able to cover: particularly those who advised for more mainstream publications or programmes. For example, one advisor said: ‘largely, most editors are wary of suggesting anal sex, even nowadays. BDSM is either off limits or perhaps even worse recommended in its “lite” form but without any awareness of “safe, sane, and consensual” ’. Another magazine and book author agreed: ‘Though 50 shades has helped, kink is still very much kept between “acceptable” parameters – maybe handcuffs and light BDSM, but watersports, fisting, same-sex activity, gender play and many aspects of role play are still much less likely to be allowed.’
In terms of what they were able to cover, one said: ‘I have huge problems with the way that sex is presented as required, heteronormative (with all the pressures that entails) and orgasm-focused. I think we need to redefine sex as being a form of communication that can take many forms rather than assuming it is one sex act (that many people do not practise or enjoy – namely, PIV).’
An online sex advisor discussed pleasure specifically, saying: ‘I don't place any limits on myself in terms of talking about sex as a pleasurable activity. Because I shy away from talking about “techniques that always work” but talk about pleasure in the context of consent.’ They went on to talk about how they subverted the kinds of questions people tend to ask about sex, given the wider cultural messages they have received, saying: ‘For instance I've started to title my pieces as “How to …” or “What's the Best …” A good example is “What's the best sex position (for me)?” – this does well in search engines because “what's the best sex position” is a popular search term, but I'm making it clear in the title of the piece that there isn't a best sex position for everyone.’
In our own sex advice project, we focus very much on the ‘how’ of sex rather than the ‘what’, explaining that different things work for different people and at different times, so there is not much point presenting specific techniques or positions. Instead it is about learning how to critique wider discourses around sex, and to communicate with yourself and others within these, in order to increase your capacity to tune into your own desires, and to know what is – and is not – working for you and for a particular partner or partners. With the book we found that it was necessary to throw out any kind of conventional sex manual style structure, given that these are often grounded on a normative sexual script (see chapter 4). We also explicitly covered a wide variety of solo and partnered sexual activities, across the diversity of kink and non-kink practices, online and offline contexts, in order to normalize all forms of sex as ‘counting’.
We unpacked the concept of pleasure in some detail in chapter 2 of Enjoy sex, by asking the question of ‘why’ we have sex, having already asked ‘what is sex?’. This opened up the idea that there are many different reasons for having sex (including multiple kinds of pleasure, as well as many other motivations). There are also many different kinds of pleasure that are possible in addition to orgasm.
A recent experience from our project, however, demonstrates how difficult it is to present such sex-critical forms of advice without them being reterritorialized into a normative model. We were asked – as we often are by mainstream media outlets – to provide some top sex ‘hacks’ or ‘tips’ to form part of an article a journalist was writing. We replied that our top hack was to ‘re-think what we mean by sex’, explaining how we are all constrained by limited ideas of what counts as sex, and giving practical advice about how people might expand their understanding and try different things. When the article was published, our ‘hack’ was presented after seven others including advice to ‘edge’ orgasms, to try different positions, to use solo sex as practise, to go for multiple orgasms, etc. Our advice was sub-titled ‘Climax Creatively’ and was presented as ‘rekindling the experimentation of the early days by bringing each other to orgasm in creative ways that don't involve penetrative sex’. The section presented our version of ‘yes, no, maybe’ lists but contextualized this as a way of ‘trying to climax in a different way instead of falling back on what you know’.
Interestingly and frustratingly, as with the analysis of Sex Box presented in chapter 6, our endeavours to take the focus away from orgasm were misinterpreted in a way which ended up putting even more pressure on that very thing. We actually had not mentioned orgasm anywhere in the ‘hack’ which we wrote for this journalist, but their inability to conceptualize sex in a way which did not involve this meant that what they wrote around our suggestion couched it entirely in this goal-focused way. Also our caveats about the difficulties in challenging cultural norms did not make it into the final version.
Fortunately social media provides a more fluid format for sex advice than the static book or magazine article, so we were able to publish our original hack on our blog, and to reflect on our experience of being asked for ‘hacks’ or ‘tips’ on our podcast. This has enabled us to highlight – yet again – the problems with this ‘what rather than how’ individualizing technique-focused approach to sex advice.
Chapter 7 focused on the ways in which public health discourses of safety and risk have fed into media sex advice. We saw how mainstream safe sex promotion has tended to focus on the use of condoms to prevent HIV and other STIs, and how understandings of safe/r sex in sex advice materials have tended to offer similar understanding of what constitutes safety and risk. Sex advice generally only covers the need to communicate about – and use – condoms for penis-in-vagina sex, rather than considering protection for other physical sexual activities (e.g. dental dams for oral sex, risk-aware consensual kink practices) or any forms of emotional risk involved in sexual activity. Also this is wrapped up in the language of sexual entrepreneurship: having the skills and technique to communicate about – and use – condoms in appropriate, or sexy, ways.
In chapter 7 we also saw how – in online sex advice – the suggestion of other sexual practices as potentially safer than penis-in-vagina sex often actually served to reinforce the idea of penis-in-vagina (and to some extent penis-in-anus) sex as ‘proper’ sex. In television coverage – like The Jeremy Kyle Show which we analysed – the STI-test format reinforces both the individual responsibilizing of sex, and a mononormativity as those with multiple partners are shamed for this ‘risky’ practice, in addition to those who do not use ‘protection’. We also saw how recent moral panics around chemsex serve to reinforce homonormativity and mononormative intimacy as more acceptable contexts for (gay male) sex.
In our interviews with sex advisors, many spoke about the fact that the kind of education and information people receive about sex when they are young is still very safety- and risk-focused, and the impact this has on their understanding of what constitutes sex. One online sex advisor said that ‘formal sex education in the UK is very patchy and is often too focused on preventing STIs and unplanned pregnancies. So much of young people's sex education focused on condoms, STIs and contraception – which are important topics but when taught in isolation they send a message to young people that sex is usually penis-in-vagina, that it's risky (but not necessarily pleasurable), and it's expected that everyone will have it.’
Interviewees also agreed that these limited understandings of safe/r sex predominated in sex advice. For example one advisor who had worked across multiple media formats said that there were issues with much sex advice ‘not being prepared to warn about the great care needed in some practices and arrangements.’ For example, ‘very few sex advice columnists are prepared to say that oral sex without protection can be dangerous’. Speaking about sex advice on a more global level, another advisor pointed out that ‘general advice tends to be restrictive, limited, conservative and supports the values of the NGO, publication or charity supporting it. So you may well see oversimplified HIV messages of “abstain, be faithful or use a condom” rolled out without looking at the complex reasons these three suggestions are often beyond many or not even wanted. Or avoiding looking at multiple inequalities rather than whatever fashionable focus is currently being promoted via charities, governments or other organizations.’ With the election of Trump and the reinstatement of the ‘global gag rule’, this focus on abstinence is only likely to intensify, particularly in US-funded NGO programmes.
As mentioned in the previous section, the megjohnandjustin.com and Enjoy sex projects explicitly locate people's sexual experiences within wider cultural discourses around sex. In this way, we construct the messages that we all receive about sex – including those in sex advice – as themselves risky and unsafe. For example, in Enjoy sex we draw on Simon and Gagnon's (2003) sexual script theory to invite readers to consider the self-critical messages they receive about sex on a cultural, community, interpersonal, and intrapsychic level, and to consider how these might be resisted at all these levels through self-care and communicative practices (Barker & Hancock, 2017a, p. 33). This approach of positioning cultural messages as risky/unsafe serves both to question standard understandings of what constitutes risky versus safe/r sex, as well as to contextualize sexual behaviours within wider relationships and communities, so that they can then be considered in a very different way to the standard individualizing, responsibilizing approach of much mainstream sex advice.
Rather than having any specific section on safe/r sex, the whole of Enjoy sex is a meditation on how we might approach sex in a more self-caring, and consensual, way – where physical risks are just one of the aspects we are mindful of. Our zine ‘Make your own sex manual’ (Barker & Hancock, 2017b) took the different approach of having a page titled ‘safer sex’ and then inviting the reader to consider various possible risks of sex and how they might reduce them in their own sexual experience – if they wanted to. Risks included things like injury, shame, not enjoying it, and going beyond agreed boundaries, in addition to STIs and unplanned pregnancy. The aim was to open up the concept of risk/safety in the same way that we elsewhere open up understandings of what ‘counts’ as sex, or why people have sex.
Importantly, unlike the mainstream sex advice considered above, our decision to cover all sexual activities in as equal depth as possible, and our explicit critique of notions of ‘proper’ sex, hopefully encourages a broader range of activities – many of which carry little or no physical risk. Also we were careful to contextualize non-consensual sex as a key type of risky sex: something that very little sex advice does (see chapters 6 and 8).
The final topics that we covered in the book were communication and consent. In chapter 8 we touched on several common discourses around each of these topics, which were sometimes drawn upon in the same book, article, or website.
In relation to communication, we found that ‘talking about sex’ was constructed in the following ways. Firstly, it was portrayed as unnecessary, either not being mentioned at all, or being warned against as something that would ‘kill the mood’. We suggested that, given that communicating about sex relates to the ‘how’ rather than the ‘what’ of sex, it did not fit well into the technique-oriented sexual entrepreneurship agenda, which is how sex advice is generally sold to consumers. Secondly, in order to fit better into the ‘what’ of sex, communication was constructed wholly in terms of ‘sexy talk’: a skill which could be taught and learnt, particularly as part of the wide seduction industry, aimed at men (O'Neill, 2015). Thirdly, the most common way communication was constructed was as necessary but simple: the capacity to talk about sex should come easily unless there is a problem in your relationship. This construction had some things in common with the fourth construction of communication as foundational. In both cases, advice given was very gendered. Readers – generally assumed female – were encouraged to discover how they work sexually and to communicate this gently to – assumed male – partners, thus reinforcing the idea that women's sexuality is complex and men's simple, as well as the idea that ensuring a good sex life is women's emotional labour. Finally, some more sex-critical advice drew on the idea of meta-communication: that not only are there no one-size-fits-all sexual techniques, but there are also no one-size-fits-all kinds of communication – different things work for different people at different times. In this kind of advice, communicating about how to communicate lays the groundwork for communicating about sex – or anything else – in a relationship, and this is located within a constraining cultural context which makes it challenging. Sex-critical advice was also more likely to regard consent as one of the most important things to communicate about, in juxtaposition to other advice which focused on contraception and communicating what you like sexually.
Turning to consent, we highlighted the notable absence of this topic across sex advice in many mediums: how it was generally not covered in books, newspaper or online advice except in specific contexts such as in relation to kink or young people. Sex between adults – particularly within existing relationships – was assumed to be consensual. When consent was mentioned, it was generally constructed in a simple ‘no means no’ manner, generally with a gendered assumption that men will initiate sex and women will be free to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’. In this way, adults are assumed to be entirely agentic and capable of simply consenting to sex: something that flies in the face of statistics around the extent of non-consensual and unwanted sex. We also mentioned that the same advice that presented a ‘no means no’ understanding of sex often also puts pressure on people – generally women – to have sex even when they did not want it. For example, women were encouraged to provide unwanted quickies so as not to risk losing the relationship, or told that they should begin having sex because women generally do not get into it until they have been doing it for a while. In this way, readers are encouraged to become even less in touch with their bodily reactions, such that tuning into whether they do or do not want sex will likely become increasingly difficult.
We also examined more sex-positive and sex-critical understandings of consent on social media: enthusiastic consent and consent cultures. Enthusiastic consent requires all participants to be articulating a clear ‘yes’ before sex takes place. However, we pointed out that this still regards consent as a one-off moment rather than ongoing, and fails to acknowledge the cultural pressure on people – particularly women – to perform enthusiasm when they do not feel enthusiastic about things. The consent culture movement suggests that sexual consent is very difficult if the surrounding relationships and culture are non-consensual. Thus it encourages people to consider consent across their whole relationship – and all kinds of relationships – as well as recognizing structural oppressions and power dynamics in play which make it difficult for people to tune into themselves and to freely consent – or not.
The sex advisors who we interviewed for this project were in agreement that consent and open communication were often missing from mainstream sex advice, and were perhaps the key feature that they wanted to ensure was present. They spoke about experiencing difficulties around this, for example one said: ‘I have often been appalled at the cavalier way copywriters or even other sex advisors recommend that one tie up a partner or administer a spanking as a delightful surprise. Argh.’ Another, who wrote for men's magazines, said ‘I try very hard to stress communication, no emotional game-playing, the importance of mutual pleasure and following through.’ They continued that their ideal sex advice would have ‘consent, mutual pleasure and good communication at its core’.
Speaking to the issue of consent cultures, many of the advisors discussed how difficult it was to create adult sex advice around consent in a world where children are brought up steeped in non-consensual culture. One women's advisor said that in their ideal world, ‘sex education would start young, with kids given the basics of gender and sexuality in age appropriate ways from the moment they entered school and parents taught the basics too. There would be a focus on consent, boundaries, and self-awareness/finding out what works for you rather than any idea that some things are “normal” and others aren't. If that happened, hopefully there would be no need for adults to get advice as they'd be able to navigate sexual matters on their own, and/or in conversation with their partner(s).’
In our own sex advice we have endeavoured to place consent at the heart of the project instead of being any kind of add-on. The book Enjoy sex starts by demonstrating how hard it is to tune into what we want, and to communicate with others, in such a non-consensual culture. It focuses on helping people to develop self-consent as a foundation for sex in relationships. It also draws on the notions of meta-communication and ongoing consent mentioned above.
One of our main pieces of work has been to develop a metaphor for consent that can help people to understand it as both culturally located and ongoing. The idea of consent metaphors became very popular as we were working on our project with the ‘tea and consent’ video produced by Thames Valley Police, based on the Rock Star Dinosaur Princess's blog post which came up with the analogy (Hancock, 2015). The tea video suggests that non-consensual sex is like forcing somebody to have a cup of tea when they have said they do not want one, or are unconscious. In this way it constructs consent as a one-off activity where one person initiates and another says a clear ‘yes’ or ‘no’ (no means no consent). It also frames the non-consensual tea-forcer as either stupid or malicious – individualizing them and ridiculing them – and fails to take account of the wider cultural systems within which the interaction is happening.
Through our workshops, book, and website we developed an alternative metaphor for consent: that of the handshake. We encourage people to experience a standard handshake, a highly negotiated-in-advance handshake, and a handshake where they aim to tune into each other throughout the experience. In this way the ideas of strong cultural scripts and power dynamics impacting our behaviour and experiences are highlighted, as is the idea that consent is non-verbal as well as verbal, and needs to be ongoing. Importantly, the metaphor makes it clear that it is not easy to do things consensually within a non-consensual culture, and encourages people to – themselves – imagine what that might be like with a less loaded interaction like a handshake, and to apply this thinking to sex. In response to the tea video we created our own animation based around this metaphor (on megjohnandjustin.com). We do not feel that the video is in any way perfect, because it was incredibly difficult to balance the need for simplicity – necessary in a short accessible animation – and the complexity of the message we were trying to get across. However we hope that it goes some way towards offering an alternative set of understandings of consent and to encourage a more sex-critical reflection on the part of the viewer. We are now encouraging people to view both the tea and handshake videos alongside each other and to reflect upon what each metaphor opens up and closes down, in terms of understanding consent.
We have seen through this chapter that the experience of long-term sex advisors, and our own experience of producing sex advice, largely supports our analyses through this book about what mainstream sex advice is like. Broadly speaking, mainstream advice is hetero- and mono-normative, constructing sex – and the demonstration of pleasure – as imperative, and as the individual responsibility of the consumer. Sexperts across a range of media largely offer skills and techniques to alleviate constructed anxieties around being ‘bad in bed’, in a ‘sexless relationship’, or ‘losing the relationship’. Advice is gendered as it is women who are regarded as being primarily responsible for the emotional labour of maintaining a sex life, through a variety of modes of bodily and self-surveillance and disciplining, although we see a masculine version of this in the seduction industry (O'Neill, 2015). There is little-to-no consideration of the diverse contexts of people's lives or of the cultural messages which could reasonably be implicated in sexual struggles. Also consent is largely absent in considerations of safety, risk, and communication, because individuals are constructed as free agents, easily able to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to sex. As one sex advisor put it, much advice is ‘unhelpful, judgemental or overly simplistic. People are given overly brief, commercialized and aspirational messaging about their lives they most likely cannot enact. For example recommending a relaxing bubble bath to solve a complex problem, or to someone who doesn't have a bath or no ready water supply. Or telling someone to just “leave the bastard” without recognizing how many steps are needed in that journey. Or recommending someone comes out as lesbian, bi or gay in a homophobic country where doing so could be a death sentence.’
Over the course of the book – and this chapter – we have considered many different modes and genres of sex advice, as well as other media which contains messages about sex and intimacy, blurring the boundaries around what constitutes self-help (as in the film of He's just not that into you, the relationship between The Rules and Sex and the City, or Lena Dunham's writing following Girls, see chapter 1). It seems that some media may offer more potential than others for destabilizing normative assumptions or offering alternative understandings. For example, in chapter 4 we saw how the most common problems covered in newspaper sex advice columns relate to infidelity and to attractions to the ‘same sex’, suggesting that neither mononormativity nor heteronormativity are as stable as sex advice books present them as being. We also saw in chapter 8 that the format of online blogs can open up the possibility of considering sex as a highly social situation, where agency operates within multiple intersecting power dynamics.
The sex advisors we interviewed spoke about the fact that different modes of sex advice often had very different aims. For example, a movie or fictional TV programme is generally primarily concerned with providing entertainment, and the same can be said for TV and radio advice shows. One advisor said that ‘radio can become too informal and there's the risk of humour or empathy being misunderstood if things are live and fast-paced.’ They continued that tensions between the aims of entertainment and advice-giving ‘can often bring in ethical dilemmas as the more “juicy” problems would certainly appeal in entertainment/audience terms but for the person in crisis may well be best kept just between you and them.’ An online sex advisor reflected on how they navigated this tension: ‘I think humour is an important part of [my] voice but it's super important that this does not make fun of the reader, put people down or make people feel stupid. All people providing sex advice have different tones of voice for their various intended audiences. I think this diversity of voices is important and I think it's okay for some folk to be gentle and inviting and for others to demonstrate brash tough love [but] we should also remember how vulnerable and scared many people feel about their sex lives and as such readers should be treated with respect and compassion.’ Certainly in the megjohnandjustin.com project we have found that a light humorous approach works well, particularly for our podcast and animations, and that such media help us to reach audiences who would not manage or enjoy reading a whole book, for example, or even written blog posts. However, we are mindful of navigating these tensions around being both entertaining and respectful.
Continuing the theme of ethics, advisors we interviewed spoke of the shifting territory of sex advice, particularly in relation to who was providing the advice. Certainly concerns over ‘celeb’ advisors with few – or no – qualifications is a common theme in the Sense about Sex and Bad Sex Media Bingo online discussions. One advisor said there were issues with ‘non-specialists/untrained commentators giving sex advice. Gone are the days when the most junior journalist did “agony” but that trend has been replaced by celebs being asked to give “common-sense” advice, which is often unhelpful or inaccurate.’ Another commented that ‘there is a pull for some advice-givers to pursue fame and fortune at the expense of what is helpful to a particular reader and of course to the readership at large,’ and a third said that ‘being aware of you taking advantage of your position or using the job to boost your own ego is really important’. However, there are tensions here around what is deemed appropriate expertise, and what is not, with some of the more popular sex-critical advice currently being produced by those with a background in sex work (Magnanti, 2012) or simply reflecting on their own experiences (Girl on the Net, ongoing). YouTube sex advisors like Laci Green and Hannah Witton are very popular, as is the more peer-to-peer sex advice on Scarleteen and other websites. However, there are risks around the validity of such advice. One advisor said that ‘supported peer-to-peer advice’ was something they would like to see more of.
These examples raise a further issue of how much advisors draw on their own lives in the advice they give. Most of those we spoke to felt that this was not appropriate, and gave examples of problematic columns where writers related every issue to their own – rather more privileged – lives. However, there is a risk of being overly distant or reinforcing a sense of sex as a taboo subject if advisors write as though they never struggle with such issues themselves. In the megjohnandjustin.com project we endeavour to ground reflexively all of our advice in our own experiences, despite not talking about these explicitly as our advice, in order to ensure that it is practically helpful. We also endeavour to imbue our advice with a sense that ‘we all struggle with this stuff’ and normalize the difficulty of ‘stepping outside of culture’ by explicitly stating that we ourselves still find it hard not to be drawn back to self-criticism in these areas.
Another ethical point comes from Boynton (2009), reflecting on the shifting role of ‘agony aunts’ over time. She has found that more established advice-givers feel that advisors should reply to every problem sent in, despite publishers and broadcasters only paying for columns or broadcasts that actually go out to audiences. There is a further tension here between ethical practice and the creation of an elitist situation where only those who can afford to provide free labour are able to afford to be ethical advisors. Again, we have found it necessary to create enough space and time around the megjohnandjustin.com project to respond to additional comments and issues that arose. For example, one time we found that a journalist who had written positively about our book had also written pieces which put sex workers at risk. It was important that we had time to engage with that journalist about their unethical practice, and with sex worker communities about how we might most usefully intervene in this situation.
Throughout this chapter, we have reflected on the tensions around working within the ‘mainstream’ (potentially reaching wider audiences, but being far more constrained in terms of challenging normativities) and creating our own more sex-critical advice (with the freedom that entails, but the risk of only preaching to the converted). Of course, as we have said, we are also mindful that this mainstream/critical binary can – and should – be questioned! Reflecting this tension, one advisor said ‘I'm keener on reaching many via potentially problematic outlets than reaching a few via my own platform. The people you need to reach may often not reside in the comfortable places you've created for yourself and likeminded people.’ On the flip side, others said things like ‘I feel hugely constrained by mainstream media – it's one of the reasons I founded my own website and magazine.’
We would like to finish this chapter – and the book – with an invitation to you to please get involved in the production of sex-critical advice yourself, and with a sense of some initial guidelines which might be helpful when doing so (see also Boynton, 2007). Whether you are a scholar or researcher who wants their work to inform sex advice, a practitioner or educator drawing upon existing advice, and/or somebody who would like to produce their own advice materials, we hope that the following ideas, which we have gleaned from our project, are useful. Consider these to be our top five tips for sex-critical advice!
We would like to leave the last word on sex-critical advice to one of the advisors we spoke to who echoed the view of many who would like to see themselves out of a job:
Mostly I'd like to see wider structural and cultural changes about inequalities, poverty, access to healthcare and education; that means much of the advice that's given wouldn't need to exist at all. In an ideal world my job shouldn't have to exist. But if people need information then they should have a variety of choices of media and messaging with ideas they can action for themselves as well as support and means of challenging inequalities and societal structures that cause them harm.
We do hope that this book has contributed to that project.