Mainstream and pornographic images and practice norms are becoming increasingly blurred (Paasonen et al., 2007), while sexual entrepreneurship discourses (Gill, 2009) promote ongoing sexual self-transformation. Women's sexuality, specifically, is expected to be proficient and perpetually practising. We examine what the mainstreaming of pornography means for sexual desire and agency among 27 young women negotiating heterosex. Participants' accounts of sexuality and pornography are reflected in a (dis)ordering porn interpretive repertoire. Porn is positioned alternately as: ridiculous and recapitulated performance; a (contested) arousal tool; pedagogy and pictogram; and (resisted) re-enactment pressure. Pornography's regulatory effects are both rejected and recapitulated. Whether they use porn as a template for sexual possibilities or decry its codes as undesirable, porn acts as an unavoidable cultural reference point for considering sexuality for these young

Postfeminist and neoliberal discourses that characterize sexual meanings, messages, and mandates in a contemporary Western context invoke choice, liberation, and mastery to propel a perpetually performing female sexuality. Agency and autonomy have been co-opted as robust scaffolding for regulatory regimes, such that practices of mandatory self-objectification and self-surveillance are rebranded as playful practices arising from a range of preferences. We plot several intersecting theoretical coordinates, along which sexuality is usefully traced: affect scholarship, Lacanian and post-Lacanian feminist psychoanalysis, and feminist poststructuralism. This is followed by two elaborated examples from an ongoing research project on sexual agency and desire among young women. Our analysis traverses these varied but interconnected theoretical frames, arguing for their joint usefulness in thinking about how sexual messages and ideologies permeate and persist across social and psychic spaces, with both resistance and recapitulation at work. We join a body of feminist scholarship directed at expanding epistemic and empirical conversations beyond sexual empowerment/oppression oppositions by addressing the ways social meanings, symbolic representations, affects, and fantasy about sexuality cohere in subjectivities.

Our article describes findings from a project exploring sexual agency and desire among young women, focusing on the negotiation of sexuality within relationship contexts. Adopting a social constructionist framework, we used discourse analysis to examine semi-structured, audio-taped interviews with 39 Canadian young women (aged 18–26). Three related interpretive repertoires were identified, namely, (a) Sex as Relationship Hygiene (i.e., beneficial to the health of one’s relationship), (b) Sex as Exercise-esque (i.e., part of a wellness regime), and (c) Sex as Economy Exchange (i.e., a commodifiable practice within the heterosexual marketplace). Desire was not absent from participants’ accounts, however, it was channeled into specific forms of sexual expression and mediated by multiple and competing cultural imperatives. The interpretive repertoires provided spaces for agentic sex within which subjective sexual desire was not the primary motive but rather was subordinate to a rhetoric of self- and relationship improvement as a key register of sexuality. We discuss these findings in the context of postfeminist directives about sexual desirability and proficiency that young women must traverse as they develop ideas about successful female sexuality within heterosexual relationships.

This article describes findings from a study examining men’s sex advice centered on cultivating masculinity markers by obtaining sex from multiple women. Employing a feminist poststructuralist framework, discourse analysis is used to investigate how casual sex with multiple women is positioned as a crucial requirement in accruing social status and esteem in men’s online Pick-Up Artist (PUA) advice media. Three interpretive repertoires emerged: (a) Embattled Masculinity – defensive and combative themes are invoked to defend male privilege through the concealed pursuit and sexual command of women; (b) Feminine Commodities – women’s bodies are framed as commodities to signify masculinity achievement; and (c) Pressured Pursuit and Consent as Control – men are positioned as authorities in sex, presumed to hold both the responsibility and power to overcome the obstacle of female consent. Obtaining sex from women is the primary objective of PUA advice – an accumulation resource used to bolster an “authentic” masculinity. While securing sex from women is promoted as the main goal, and a fundamental requirement for masculine subjects, references to the value of the women themselves are conspicuously absent or disclaimed.

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