Abstract
BackgroundThe World Health Organization's publication, Developing sexual health programmes, states that the media is an important source of information about sexuality. Although the media can promote awareness of sexual health issues, it also acts as a vehicle for defining and regulating sex norms. In other words, the standards of ‘normal’ sex are in part defined by the media. Accordingly, it has become imperative to analyse the media's construction of sexual norms in order to reveal how they are related to specific ideological views. For the purposes of this study, the focus will be limited to analysing the South African publication Intimacy.AimThe study aims to reveal how the sex advice articles written in Intimacy for women in regard to their male partner's sexuality reflect patriarchal and phallocentric ideologies.MethodA discourse analysis of the sex advice articles in the magazine Intimacy was conducted. It was informed by feminist theories of sexuality that seek to examine the ways in which texts are associated with male-centred versions of sexual pleasure.ResultsThe discourse analysis identified a number of key themes regarding male sexuality. These include: (1) biological accounts of male sexuality; (2) phallocentric scripting of the sex act; and (3) the melodramatic penis.ConclusionConstructions of male sexuality require the inclusion of alternative modes of male erotic pleasure. This requires texts that encourage men to explore and also to experiment with pleasurable feelings associated with non-genital erogenous zones of the body.
Highlights
The World Health Organization’s publication, Developing sexual health programmes, states that the media is an important source of information about sexuality.[1]
The media can promote awareness of sexual health issues, it acts as a vehicle for producing normative notions of http://www.phcfm.org doi:10.4102/phcfm.v7i1.691
The study has revealed that Intimacy’s aim to ‘empower you as its reader and give you permission to take control of your sex life’,34 is, at best, only a pseudo-empowerment for women in heterosexual relations.[8]. It can only ever promote an illusory sense of female control and pleasure as it persists in defining male sexuality according to patriarchal standards
Summary
The World Health Organization’s publication, Developing sexual health programmes, states that the media is an important source of information about sexuality.[1]. As suggested previously, science is not the only underlying contributing factor accountable for this viewpoint as the media is influential in producing normative notions of sex These notions regulate current trends in sexual practices and result in the denial or denigration of sexual practices that depart from patriarchal norms.[2] To this end, a number of feminist studies have revealed that popular texts are reflective of patriarchal ideology.[2,16] In exposing the patriarchal ideology, a number of shared themes are present and recur in popular texts, namely: male sexuality prioritised over female sexuality; and the favouring of penetrative sex over other sexual activities.[2] In reviewing these themes, the reverberating finding is that popular texts articulate a set of sex and gender norms that serve patriarchy.[2]
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