By Anette Dina Sørensen
The use of sexuality in mass culture as an attention-catching device and as a means of addressing specific target groups is by no means as new as would appear from the debate. In Denmark pictures of sexuality have been represented legally in the public arena since a change in the legislation liberated pictorial pornography in 1969 (Thing, 1999). However, there is good reason to assert that in recent years references to sexual matters have proliferated. But what is new - and this presents us with a massive challenge - is the vastly increased imprint of pornography in mass culture. This is the case not merely in advertising, but as a general trend in fashion coverage, inyouth magazines, in TV programmes and music videos, and not least in campaigns launched by young people themselves. And it all hangs together: the revival of stereotypes in the representations of genderis very much connected with the breakthrough of pornography in mass culture(Sørensen & Cawood 2002, Sørensen 2002).
The mainstreaming of pornography: "porn chic"
“Mainstreaming” is the term which best designates the presentday position of pornography in our culture. In several of his books the British media researcher Brian McNair has dealt with the phenomenon known in media research as "porn chic" (McNair 2002 and 2003). This designates the cultural process by wich pornography slips into our everyday lives as a commonly accepted and often idealised cultural element. This process is accelerated by three interacting tendencies. The first is volume: this applies both to the fact that pornography has become available in greater quantities and to the fact that it is more easily available. Limitations of time, place and supply no longer apply for would-be users of pornography.Parallel to these changes in supply and availability, there is a clean-up tendency, through which regular pornography becomes respectable. This trend is promoted by the mass media’s growing interest in the field and appears in such diverse genres as TV documentaries, references in ordinary magazines to pornographic internet links, reviews of pornographic magazines, and articles dealing with pornography and pornography use, and in live reports from strip clubs or S/M cellars (Sørensen 2003). In Denmark, one latest manifestation of this clean-up tendency is an ex-porn-model’s autobiographical account of her “amazing” life in the international porn industry (Kean & List 2002).
Normalising porn use
In their dealings with pornography the mass media operate quite consciously in the schismatic field between taboo and liberated explicitness. The motivation for their coverage of the topic is formulated as a public service wish to document and provide information about the shady side of existence. All the same, the real agenda seems to be to challenge norms and shift boundaries. It is argued both explicitly and implicitly that it ought to be acceptable to say and show things which some people regard as going beyond the limits of decency, and it is implied that the reader’s or viewer’s acceptance of pornography and its presence in mass culture is merely a question of broadmindedness. In other words, if one has reservations on the matter one is simply not broadminded or liberated enough. The Danish youth magazine Tjeck, which targets both sexes, is financed by the trade union movement and is distributed free to all young union members - has ridden the porn wave since the mid-90s. In February 2002 the magazine carried an article entitled “Snoop Doggy Dogg – I have fucked one million ho’s”; this is a good example of what is stated above. At first glance the article appears to be a discussion of the ethical dilemmas posed by pornography as exemplified by the story of a young man who suffers moral qualms in connection with the purchase and use of Snoop Doggy Dogg´s hardcore porn video. However, it soon appears that the theme of the article is not so much ethical dilemmas as the fascination exerted by pornography, and that its purpose is to legitimise and normalise pornography use. The main arguments of the critics of pornography are explicitly made to look ridiculous, and the message is underlined by detailed consumer information on where the film can be obtained and by the use of pictures and citations from Snoop’s porn video (Tjeck Magazine 2002/123: 42-45).
Pornographic fragments
 |
| Foto: http://press.benettongroup.com |
Simultaneously with the two tendencies mentioned above, a third tendency emerges via the process known as “porn chic” or mainstreaming of pornography. Fragments of pornography slip out into the mass culture. On billboards, in music videos, in fashion reportage and in youth magazines there is an increasing use of figures, stylistic features and verbal expressions which are not in themselves pornographic though they are studiously cited from a pornographic universe: such things as the postures and dress of photo models, their movements, the scenes in which they are pictured, the lines they are given to speak. Thus the fashion reportage in Sisley’s autumn 2001 catalogue used strongly sexualised images with clear reference to both sex with animals and classic pornographic scenarios. One item in the catalogue carries a reference to the cum-shot, that is, the climax of a porn film’s plot where a male model ejaculates into the mouth or onto the face of a female model. Here a paraphrase of the cum-shot is given in a picture of a young woman squirting milk into her mouth from a cow’s udder. The milk trickles out of her mouth and down her chin whilst she looks ecstatically and teasingly out of the page, her glance corresponding exactly to that directed at the imaginary viewer by a model in a traditional porn film.
Stereotyped gender representations
The mainstreaming of pornography in mass culture gives rise to a set of problems connected with the way in which the sexes are represented. Much regular pornography, and especially ordinary hard-core porn, makes use of a gender-role stereotype which seeps into the mass culture as it draws on pornographic references. This is especially true of advertising, but as stated is also the case in more ordinary fashion reportage. To put it bluntly, the division of roles in mainstream hard-core pornography is the classic one: the women exhibit themselves, allure with voluptuous movements and then provide sexual servicing. The men fall for it, and are unfailingly virile. Naturally, this gender representation does not occur in all pornography; but the point is that it is increasingly present when advertising images and fashion coverage ape pornographic styles. This is not simply a matter of retro, where historical nooks and crannies are rummaged through and traditional gender representations recycled; rather, a more limited, one-dimensional representation of gender is pervading mass culture and securing a foothold as the sole valid account of the meaning of masculinity and femininity.
This situation is particularly surprising with respect to the advertising industry, which generally has the repute of being “streetwise”, able to size up societal tendencies and get on board of cultural trends as soon as they appear. Relations between the sexes are no exception. For the last 50 years advertising has functioned as a seismograph recording movements in gender relations. Every expansion of the role repertoire or shift of power relations has immediately been registered, staged and distributed to the consumers.
The diversity of the 1990s
Seen with hindsight, and in the light of the pornographic breakthrough in mass culture, the 1990s was a decade in which the traditional meanings of gender were decisively dissolved in advertising. This was quite in line with the way things were going in society as a whole, as well as with postmodern ideas about the cultural construction and potential alterability of gender. In advertisements women conquered the public sphere, took possession of the car and broke down the doors of male sanctuaries. They were represented as powerful, intellectual, independent beings. The variety of meanings were also characteristic for the descriptions of masculinity served up by the mass culture. It became possible in the 1990s to pull the meaning of masculinity free of power and the breadwinner role, and to represent men as sex objects, sensitive dependent individuals and caring fathers. As Marc O’Polo proclaimed in 1997: “The male swan will watch over the offspring while his mate searches for food” (Sørensen 1997).
Today - or so it seems - the diversity of gender representation has again been forced out to the mass-cultural margins and we are heading towards the ultimate sexualisation of femininity: a reduction of the meaning of femininity to “sexy”. It was recently emphasised that “sex” is the paramount mark of femininity, during all the hullabaloo surrounding the launch of Yves St. Laurent’s new men’s perfume “M7”. The advertisement shows a full-frontal naked man with the penis clearly visible, and a number of men’s magazines, including GQ, found this so offensive that they refused to publish the ad unless the picture was expurgated. Thus, despite 30 years of so-called sexual liberation it is still only possible to show full-frontal nakedness if the model is female. And the reluctance to use pictures which sexualise reified masculinity may mean that the increased sexualisation of mass culture in the wake of the porn-chic tendency will only apply to representations of women and femininity, and that femininity will thus have significance exclusively in connection with sexuality.
Wanted: alternative narratives of gender
The mass-cultural mainstreaming of pornography (the porn-chic tendency) saddles us with the kind of problem which may well have circulated in our culture in earlier times but which now strikes with renewed force. When the range of gender images available in mass culture presents an increasingly one-dimensional view of what masculinity and femininity can mean, the possibilities for identification at the disposal of boys and girls, young men and women, are drastically limited. Media research has taught us that there is a correspondence between reality and the pictures drawn of it by mass culture (Drotner 1996). It is not solely the case that people’s various life practices influence mass-cultural pictures and narratives; the influence also goes the other way: people’s life practices take shape from the images produced by mass culture. Those images, therefore, do not simply screen off reality: they also contribute to forming that reality. So if we are serious about the Scandinavian ideal of equality and wish to create equal opportunities for men and women it is imperative that alternative mass-cultural narratives about gender are created for the generation which is now growing up. If there are no stories about female company directors, professors and presidents, or about male sex-objects and caring fathers, how can the new generation ever realise that these possibilities exist? And how are they to learn that gender need not limit options?
Kilder
Drotner, Kirsten, (1996): Øjenåbner. Unge, medier og modernitet. Skriftserie fra Center for Ungdomsmedier, Nr. 1, Dansklærerforeningen
[Eye-opener. Youth, media and modernity. Publications from the Centre for Youth Media, no. 1, Association of Danish Teachers]
Kean og Henrik List (2002): Katja - Stjerne i syndens by[Star in the city of sin], Tiderne Skifter
McNair, Brian (1996): Mediated sex – pornography & postmodern culture, Arnold
McNair, Brian (2002): Striptease culture – sex, media and the democratisation of desire, Routledge
Sørensen, Anette Dina (1997): ”Kønsrepræsentationer og erotisering – strejftog gennem 40 års reklamebilleder”, i Kvinder,
Køn og Forskning 4/97: 63-71. [”Gender representations and eroticisation – an excursion through 40 years of advertising images”,
in Women, Gender and Research]
Sørensen, Anette Dina og Cawood, Sarah Højgaard (2002): Viden om pornografiens effekter på børn og unge [Pornography’s effect
on children and young people], a memo addressed to the Ministry for gender equality, June 2002.
Sørensen, Anette Dina: “Pornchic – køn og pornografi i massekulturen [Porn-chic: gender and pornography in mass culture ”]
in the anthology Perspektiver på ungdom og køn [Perspectives on youth and gender] (ed. Bibi Hølge-Hazelton), to be published
April 2003
Thing, Morten (1999): Pornografiens historie i Danmark [The History of Pornography in Denmark], Aschehoug Tjeck magazine,
2002/123, February 2002
First published in NIKK magasin 3 2003 © NIKK
