Sex sells. Our world has been pornified. Culture is sexualized and it’s making our children grow up too quickly. Porn is everywhere. Porn changes your brain. There is an epidemic of porn addiction. Porn is a public health crisis. Sexting is a growing problem. Raunch culture is damaging girls. Virtual reality is the future of porn. The future of sex is with robots.

These kinds of sensationalist claims are made repeatedly in the public discussion of sex media.¹ While sex media are part of many people’s lives, they are increasingly used as a focus for discussing a range of other questions – what access we should have to the internet, what it means to be sexually healthy, how men and women differ in their relation to erotic and intimate life, what the relations between media, fantasy and sexual practice are.

This book is about sex media – those media forms in which sex is the primary focus of representation. As studies of pornography and other sexually explicit media have shown, sex media are diverse, interesting in and of themselves, and worthy of study.² They are also a good starting point for thinking about sexuality and gender, the body, fantasy and representation. They provide interesting ways into considering how policy and regulation work, how norms, customs and values develop and the ideas they depend on.³ They allow us to consider how media are increasingly part of public and private life; part of people’s practices and their sex lives. They can help us to think about the changing place and significance of sex in contemporary society.

My argument in this book is that we need better and more critical frameworks and approaches for understanding sex media. While being ‘critical’ is often associated with being condemnatory or ‘pessimistic’ about something, critical thinking does its best to avoid a binary approach which sets up a ‘debate’ in terms of whether we should be pessimistic or optimistic about it, or which asks us to decide definitively whether something is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, healthy or unhealthy, progressive or oppressive.

A critical approach to sex media questions assumptions about the way things are or appear to be, draws on insights from disciplines that acknowledge the complexity of culture, and takes into account the shifts and continuities in the ways that sex and media are constructed historically. It understands that research is framed by asking particular kinds of questions, and recognizes that both advantages and problems arise from doing things in particular kinds of ways. It considers the contexts of sex media – their relation to other media genres, forms and aesthetics and to the broader social and cultural frameworks of regulation, work, leisure, intimacy, health and education.⁴

I have not been able to cover everything that I would have liked to in this book. The book is also focused primarily on examples, histories and debates from English-speaking countries, and the arguments I make about these do not necessarily apply to other countries. For example, while I have spent quite a bit of time talking about the ways in which pornography has been an important issue for feminists, this has played out in quite different ways in different countries.

The book begins with an overview of what is meant by sex, gender and sexuality, moves on to questions of regulation and the issue of sexualization, and then considers a range of sex media and their relation to labour, leisure, education and health.

Chapter 1 introduces the terms sex, sexuality and gender, and shows how definitions and representations of these often depend on a hierarchy that marks out ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and presents sexuality and gender as binary – where there are only two ways of being: heterosexual or homosexual, male or female, masculine or feminine.

While definitions and representations can work to restrict and police the way sex and gender are understood, they can also be used to challenge norms and create new types of experience, community and ways of thinking. I describe how sexual politics that attempt this have developed since the 1960s, and how countercultures and political activists have worked to shape these politics. I also show how critical approaches – in lesbian and gay studies, queer theory, sexuality and gender studies – have provided frameworks for understanding sex and sexuality.

The chapter ends with a look at how some contemporary forms of sex advice often privilege certain kinds of practices and identities, while others suggest a move towards different ways of thinking about sex. This is happening in a context where both sex and the media are increasingly central to our culture and a range of technologies play an increasingly important role in our experiences and understandings of sex.

Chapter 2 considers the regulation of sex and sex media, showing how concerns about sex have come to focus particularly heavily on media. It shows how regulation often takes the form of categorizing and labelling texts, for example in the kinds of classification used by the British Board of Film Classification or the use of terms such as pornography and obscenity in law.

The regulation of sex and sex media tends to focus on what is considered excessive, extreme, playing with power or pushing the body to its limits – as in the kind of pornography created by the American producers, Larry Flynt and Extreme Associates. It also often focuses on young people, as in the recent attempts to police ‘sexting’. This kind of regulation may be presented and intended as a protective measure, but it also often operates according to a sexual double standard and works to restrict and shame young people – especially young women and girls.

The chapter ends by considering some contemporary trends in the regulation of sex media. While it is often argued that sex and sex media are now less heavily regulated than in the past, there is nevertheless evidence of a process of juridification – an expansion and intensification of regulation as part of a broader move towards the surveillance of communication. This increasingly involves an interest in regulating people’s creative and fantasy worlds.

Chapter 3 examines the claim that contemporary mainstream media and culture have become ‘sexualized’. It considers the development of a ‘sexualization debate’ that has become the most public and visible way in which sex and media are discussed and a means of expressing concerns about children, young people and women.

The chapter looks at the approaches and evidence used in policy reports on sexualization and how these relate to other sorts of evidence about gender and sexual equalities, young people and sex, relationships, crime, education and well-being. These reports do little to shed light on the conditions experienced by women and girls around the world, or on the experiences of young people. They do not explain the advances in the situation of some groups, for example in terms of access to education, or the continuing inequalities that others face in terms of health and well-being, or vulnerability to poverty and violence.

The chapter shows that while the sexualization debate tends to focus on an abstract figure of the child, research with actual young people reveals complex and varied relationships with media and suggests that these can be resources and spaces for talking and learning about sexuality, relationships and pleasure.

The chapter ends by concluding that while it is true that sex has become particularly visible – or ‘onscene’ – in Western cultures, various forms of sexism and double standards around sexual behaviour persist, and these are far from new. Yet, if culture is now sexualized, this is marked not only by sexism but by a diverse range of sexual communities, representations and ideas about sex.

Chapter 4 looks at a broad range of sex media and the similarities and differences between them. It begins by examining ideas about aesthetics, cultural capital and value and the place of sex media in relation to these. Sex media tend to be placed low down in a cultural hierarchy which is suspicious of media forms that invite the viewer’s involvement.

Although forms of sex media are often depicted as lacking in variety, they include a wide range of conventions and characteristics. Broad categories mark out hardcore from softcore, and art from porn and erotica, but these frequently overlap and there are further distinctions within these categories too. For example, there are a wide range of pornographies – in this chapter I look at drawn pornography, gonzo porn and amateur porn – and many more divisions within each type. There are also other genres that have a distinctive set of conventions for representing sex; for example, the various types of sexploitation movie, sex comedy and erotic thriller.

As well as tracing the variety of sex media, the chapter considers how they are related to mainstream culture and to entertainment. It ends by looking at the various ways media have come to provide new spaces for sexual interaction in cybersex, online sex games and virtual worlds. It considers the development of interactive and immersive sex media and the overlapping of media, space, representation and communication in the development of apps and networks for dating and hooking up. As with other aspects of life, sex is increasingly intertwined with media.

Chapter 5 puts sex media into a broader social context. It shows how sex can be seen as a form of intimate labour, both in terms of paid sex work and of ‘sex as work’ performed on the self and within relationships. Sex is also increasingly related to leisure, with particular types of sex seen as recreational and a developing range of sex leisure products. The chapter considers how the ways in which we experience and understand sex are linked to changing intimacies, relationship structures and sexual cultures. They also depend on the use of media and other technologies that are becoming steadily more important in the way we live, and that make possible new forms of public and private life. As these technologies become involved in the fashioning of our bodies and selves, they complicate our ideas about what is natural and authentic about human life and sexuality.

I end the book by discussing developing ideas about sex media in relation to healthy sexual development, sexual ethics, sex and sexuality education, and sexual citizenship. The book is designed to provide an accessible introduction to the area of sex media. I hope it will be useful for people at advanced school level who want to read more widely, and for undergraduates – and indeed anyone else – who wants a broad and critical introduction to the topic.