Fashion and passion: marketing sex to women

Against a backdrop of a ‘pornographication’ of mainstream media and the emergence of a more heavily sexualized culture, women are increasingly targeted as sexual consumers. In the UK, the success of TV shows like Sex and the City and the ‘fashion ‘n’ passion’ of sex emporia like Ann Summers suggests that late twentieth century discourses which foregrounded female pleasure have crystallised in a new form of sexual address to women. This article examines how sex products are being marketed for female consumers, focussing on the websites of sex businesses such as Myla, Babes n Horny, Beecourse, tabooboo and Ann Summers. It asks how a variety of existing discourses – of fashion, consumerism, bodily pleasure and sexuality - are drawn on in the construction of this new market, how they negotiate the dangers and pleasures of sexuality for women, and what they show about the construction of ‘new’ female sexualities.</p

The Pornographic Home: Women, Sex, and Everyday Life

343 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1997.I map connections between literary erotica and other technologies, including the computer, cable, and video. Women have had a longer, more productive history writing and reading erotica than they have in producing or watching visual porn; however, I also show how women as producers and consumers are increasingly entering and slowly redefining the traditionally male domain of pornography.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD

The Pornographic Home: Women, Sex, and Everyday Life

343 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1997.I map connections between literary erotica and other technologies, including the computer, cable, and video. Women have had a longer, more productive history writing and reading erotica than they have in producing or watching visual porn; however, I also show how women as producers and consumers are increasingly entering and slowly redefining the traditionally male domain of pornography.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD

Porn by any other name: Women's consumption of public sex performances in Amsterdam

This paper draws on ethnographic research conducted in Amsterdam, exploring the ways in which women tourists engage with public sex performances, drawing comparisons between these types of shows and other types of pornographic materials. Empirical data collected in Amsterdam, focusing on women's visual consumption of public sex performances at a well-known tourist sexual theatres that features live sex (including vaginal penetrative sex and oral sexual encounters for/by men/women, as well as masturbation and other highly sexualized acts), suggests that sex shows are positioned as legitimate sexual entertainment for men, women, and couples, and that a wide range of tourist women from different backgrounds visit these shows in substantial numbers. By attempting to unpick the ways in which women visually consume public sex performances, and thinking about this in relation to broader discussions around pornography and the literature around women's consumption practices, this paper will argue that many of the current understandings of pornography consumption as an androcentric activity fail to recognize women as active sexual, visual agents. Women's engagement with sex shows in Amsterdam complicates the various ways in which visual consumption of pornography might occur, and opens up questions about the social and gendered practices of watching sex