Sex and the city: Branding, gender and the commodification of sex consumption in contemporary retailing

Louise Crewe,Amber Martin

doi:10.1177/0042098016659615

Abstract

This paper explores the changing spatiality of the sex retail industry in England and Wales, from highly regulated male-orientated sex shops, pushed to the legislative margins of the city and social respectability, towards the emergence of unregulated female-orientated ‘erotic boutiques’ located visibly in city centres. This is achieved through an exploration of the oppositional binaries of perceptions of sex shops as dark, dirty, male-orientated, and ‘seedy’ and erotic boutiques as light, female-orientated and stylish, showing how such discourses are embedded in the physical space, design and marketing of the stores and the products sold within them. More specifically, the paper analyses how female-orientated sex stores utilise light, colour and design to create an ‘upscaling’ of sexual consumerism and reflects on what the emergence of up-scale female spaces for sexual consumption in the central city might mean in terms of theorisations of the intersectionality between agency, power, gender and class. The paper thus considers how the shifting packaging and presentation of sex-product consumption in the contemporary city alters both its acceptability and visibility.

Highlights

One of the most interesting developments in the recent study of sexuality has been an increasing focus on its spatial dimensions
Highly visible generation of female-focused sex shops be indicative of the liberatory and celebratory social and economic position that women enjoy? There is an emergent body of work that attests to the new freedoms and powers that consuming women enjoy in the contemporary city as a result of the normalisation and democratisation of desire (McNair, 2002: 166)
The paper focuses on one particular space, the female sex product retail store, in order to explore how the contemporary city acts as a key site for the representation and sale of new forms of gendered sexual consumption

Summary

Introduction

One of the most interesting developments in the recent study of sexuality has been an increasing focus on its spatial dimensions. The new generation of city centre female-focused sex shops are the latest stage in a long-standing process of the neoliberal colonisation of all aspects of public and private life, a means of creating new markets for hungry, unsatiated female consumers ready for their shopping fix From this standpoint, the pornification of contemporary culture is leading to “a form of hyper-sexism that entails an increase in physical, sexual, mental, economic and emotional cruelty towards women” (Tankard Reist and Bray, 2011: xiv). The paper focuses on one particular space, the female sex product retail store, in order to explore how the contemporary city acts as a key site for the representation and sale of new forms of gendered sexual consumption. We conclude with a series of reflections about what the emergence of up-scale female spaces for sexual consumption in the central city might mean in terms of our theorisations of the intersectionality between agency, power, gender and class

The shifting spatiality of the sex store

Into the Light: the affective properties of luminosity

Designing Desire

Findings

Conclusion