Wanna Get Dirrty? Determining Authentic Sexual Subjectivity

Abstract

Coming of age in girl power media culture, girls receive a series of discordant messages about female sexuality. Female sexuality is something to be guarded; girls are taught not to come home pregnant and to protect themselves from sexual predators. Female sexuality is something to be used; as Thea describes earlier, it is a powerful commodity available as exchange for economic, cultural, social, and emotional capital. Female sexuality is also a political issue; as Meg intimates, girls learn that institutions, corporations, advertisers, and producers may try to conflate girls and women with their bodies, seeing them only as objects rather than as humans, and that girls may or may not be complicit in this equation. This chapter turns its focus to pop music and female performers’ public displays of sexuality. By doing so, it explores how the girls in this study work to make sense of girl power media’s incongruous messages about sexuality. The girls’ discussions of sexual imagery raise several important questions about sexuality in the era of girl power: How do girl audiences determine who is a sexual subject and who is a sexual object in a contradictory mediascape? Does objectification result strictly from control by others or is it linked, in part, to the specific visual imagery of sexuality and sexiness? How do girl audiences make sense of a woman who presents herself as in control of sexual encounters yet maintains a sexual image that is rooted in a stereotypically male-coded fantasy?

thea: Look at The Apprentice. It’s like men versus women and the women used the fact that sex sells. They used what they knew and they won. They won every challenge. Those women are doing awesome and they are just really great businesswomen in addition to everything else. They are intelligent and they are kicking the men’s asses and these are the kinds of women that we can look up to that we see on TV. You know what I mean? If we accept what is here now, we’ll be able to know how to change it. Like, once these women impress Donald Trump and they get into power, they’re in a position to change how things are run. (Thea, seventeen years old, White)

meg: OK. Sex sells. It’s a given but it doesn’t mean that women should continue doing that. Think about it, if women weren’t OK with objectifi… of, of putting themselves out there like that, it wouldn’t be so normal. They’re not using their brains. Well, I guess you can say they’re using their brains to sell things ‘cause they know that sex sells so they use that but… Why can’t you use your brain and come up with some other great way to sell things? You think, Thea, that if we sort of, like, accept it, we might be able to change it, but at the same time, it could get a lot worse. (Meg, seventeen years old, Caucasian)