Feminist scholars define ‘postfeminism’ as a set of ideas that both endorse and disavow feminism. Recent work documents postfeminism in interviews of women talking about experiences with gender inequality at work. The present study extends existing theorizations by showing how postfeminism obfuscates ongoing inequality at work. To do this I specify postfeminism in the terms of two mechanisms by which work becomes gender typed: gender essentialization and feminine devaluation. By relating the literature on postfeminism to sociological research on the persistence of gender typing of work, I show how ‘postfeminist ideology’ amounts to a double entanglement with gender typed work. In other words, postfeminist ideology drives distinct stances towards gender essentialization and feminine devaluation. I draw on 40 interviews with product designers in the United States to show this presents empirically. Designers essentialize differences between men and women designers, even mobilizing difference to claim greater inclusion of women designers, who are thought to empathize best with women consumers. Yet when essentialization is accompanied by feminine devaluation, designers deny it and it goes unrecognized. Because of this, the postfeminist ideology celebrates essentialized gendered differences, but insists on overlooking devaluation, which is a key element of ongoing gender inequality.

In this article, the author explores the gendered dynamics of “grinding,” sexualized dancing common at college parties. Drawing on the observations of student participant observers, the author describes the common script for initiating this behavior. At these parties, men initiated more often and more directly than women, whose behaviors were shaped by a sexual double standard and (hetero-) relational imperative. The heterosexual grinding script enacts a gendered dynamic that reproduces systematic gender inequality by limiting women’s access to sexual agency and pleasure, privileging men’s pleasure and confirming their higher status.

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This article characterizes norms of sexual morality in the sex toy market, revealing a core contradiction in the morality of gendered heterosexuality. Taking a novel approach to the study of the sex industry, the study’s data focus on producers rather than consumers of sex toys. Sex toy professionals understand women as ideal users whose sexual desire and consumption are morally defensible. Not only do girl-power sex positivity discourses valorize women’s orgasms, but men’s sex toy use is disavowed and even openly reviled by producers. This seems to upend existing configurations of heterosexual privilege, which ordinarily benefit men’s sexual desire. However, the reversal reveals a shared moral feature of gendered heterosexuality, which privileges women as sexually purer than men, who are encumbered with tainting lasciviousness.

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