Coming to the fore: the audibility of women's sexual pleasure in popular music and the sexual revolution

Abstract

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S026114301300055XHow to cite this article: Jon Stratton (2014). Coming to the fore: the audibility of women's sexual pleasure in popular music and the sexual revolution . AbstractThis paper examines the genre of tracks centred around the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s which include aural representations of female sexual pleasure. The two most important tracks, and the ones on which this paper focuses, are Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg 'Je t'aime . . . moi non plus' and Donna Summer 'Love To Love You Baby'. The paper argues that this new audibility of female sexual pleasure related to the transformation in the understanding of female orgasm associated with Alfred Kinsey and with William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the American sexologists who radically changed Western understandings of sexual behaviour in the 1950s and 1960s. More broadly, the paper argues for a link between the so-called sexual revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s and the popularity of tracks in which sounds identified as female sexual pleasure were upfront in the musical mix.

Analyzing Vocables in Rap

“…(20) For example, Sylvia Robinson's "Pillow Talk" (1973) features breathy singing, inhalations, whispers, and creaky groans to sonically convey intimacy and pleasure (Audio Example 4). (21) More theatrically, Donna Summer's extended disco release "Love To Love You Baby" (1975) consists of a series of build-ups and break-downs structured around the singer's vocal imitations of sex, as explored in depth by Fink (2005), Stratton (2014), andHeidemann (2016). Audio Example 5 presents the beginning of one of these builds: Summer starts by moaning lightly with a "mmm" or "oh" syllable on beat 2 every other bar before singing the repeating melodic figure, always with vocal fry.…”

La Petite Mort: Techniques of Orgasm in Electronic Dance Music

“…30 Even today, journalism often seems to maintain the rhythms of male ejaculation as a shorthand for discussion of orgasm and sexual fulfilment. 31 Where it does appear, scholarship on female sexual experience within music largely focuses on the quality and volume of orgasmic vocalizations 32 rather than more comprehensive and holistic representations of sexual pleasure, whilst the music industry focus only on women conforming to masculine ideas of pleasure by "'ejaculating' through moaning and making noise, thrashing and performing as sexually excited… rather than [focussing on] pleasure in general". 33 16 When we push the metaphor of the male orgasm beyond a basic build-up and arrival/ release schema, it soon becomes apparent that it does not stand up to scrutiny in describing the experience of ecstasy at the moment of a drop.…”

Specters of Sex. Tracing the Tools and Techniques of Contemporary Music Analysis

“…Turning to the visibly sexualized images of musical performers, Patricia Hill Collins's Black Sexual Politics opens with four wide-ranging musical case studies from three distinct time periods: 77 (1) Jennifer Lopez's 2000 musical breakthrough on the heels of her successful role as influential Mexican-American singer Selena -"the uncontested Queen of hybrid pop culture"; (2) Destiny's Child's Survivor album from 2001; (3) Josephine Baker's topless appearance in La Revue Nègre from 1925, and (4) early nineteenthcentury exhibitions in Paris, London, and Ireland that placed excessive emphasis on the "freakishly" large nature of Sarah Baartmann's buttocks. 78 Collins introduces these four examples as evidence of the global fascination with the sexuality of women of color and specifically black women, a fetishization of visible sexually explicit content that permeates twentieth-century visual culture: J-Lo's butt, the animal print bikinis sported by the members of Destiny's Child on their Survivor album cover, Baker's bare breasts, and 75 Davis 1995, xii. 76 See Bradby 1993, Loza 2001, Stratton 2014. 77 Collins 2000 78 See also Stavans 1995, 24. Baartmann's iconographic portrayal of the "Hottentot Venus."…”