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?KeywordsFemale SexualitySexual IdentitySexual ObjectCulture IndustryPublic DisplayThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.