Sex, Feminism and Lesbian Desire in Women's Magazines

This book explores how pop culture representations of sex and relationships have changed since the 1970s, highlighting the parallels between the feminist movement and positive portrayals of women's sexuality. It found that despite surface-level changes, the underlying paradigm of hetero-monogamy remains unchanged, with women's sexual and emotional maintenance of male partners and self-objectification still prevalent. The book validates the assumption that a feminist social milieu improves cultural narratives about sexuality for women.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 204 pages
Publication date: 29 April 2022
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

This book delves into the evolving representations of sex and relationships in pop culture since the 1970s, seeking to establish a correlation between the strength of the feminist movement and positive portrayals of women's sexuality. Through a comprehensive analysis of the content of women's magazines over time, the study reveals that despite surface-level changes in sexual and relationship content, the underlying paradigm of hetero-monogamy remains unchanged. While contemporary magazines present a more diverse, empowered, and liberated sexuality for women, the reality is that such feminist rhetoric often masks an enduring model of sexuality that relies on women's sexual and emotional maintenance of male partners, as well as their own self-objectification and self-surveillance.

Where substantive changes can be identified, they rise and fall in tandem with feminism. By demonstrating this empirical relationship between cultural products and feminist organizing, the book validates an assumption that has rarely been tested: that a feminist social milieu improves cultural narratives about sexuality for women.

Sex, Feminism, and Lesbian Desire builds on groundbreaking feminist texts such as Susan Faludi's Backlash to present an empirically focused, comprehensive study interrogating changes in content over the lifetime of women's magazines. By charting the representation of sex and relationships in two women's magazines—Cosmopolitan and Cleo—since the 1970s through an analysis of over 6,500 magazine pages and 1,500 articles, this timely work interrogates and ultimately complicates the apparent linear progression of feminism.

This book is a valuable resource for researchers and students in the fields of women's and gender studies, queer studies, LGBT studies, media studies, cultural studies, and sociology. It offers a deep understanding of the complex interplay between sex, feminism, and lesbian desire in contemporary culture and sheds light on the ways in which cultural narratives shape women's experiences and identities.

Weight: 380g
Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780367544201