Introduction

Abstract

It is commonly understood that people’s sex lives and sexual orientation are private concerns, preferably and properly restricted to intimate relationships. Paradoxically, these supposedly private practices and relationships are simultaneously everywhere in the public domain, often in fetishised forms: in advertisements; in the media, in film, television, magazine and social media; in pornography, sex work and sexual commerce; in the representations of everyday life mediated through the culture industries and presented to us in what has been regarded as sexually saturated societies. Most societies have prohibitive or regulatory laws and policies with respect to sexual commerce and public and media representations of sex. Yet at the same time, the interest in sexual pleasure, diverse tastes and appetites and expressions of orientation and preference—even when strictly prohibited and so expressed in ‘underground’ sub-cultures—are considered a feature of most Western societies in the twenty-first century. Religious and self-proclaimed moral leaders—often politicians—may rail against the degree of interest in sex, but there is no evidence that it is waning.