Raunch Culture Research Articles

The pornification of America: How raunch culture is ruining our society By BernadetteBarton. NYU Press, 2021

The pornification of America: How raunch culture is ruining our society By BernadetteBarton. <scp>NYU</scp> Press, 2021

Generation OnlyFans: Examining the Effects of “Raunch Culture” on Depression via Social Media Use and Social Comparisons

“Raunch culture” is a term describing the promotion of overtly sexual representations of women. This concept may provide people opportunities to engage in positive social comparisons, but also negative social comparisons. As such, this concept could also relate to the phenomenology of depression in women. In an attempt to further investigate the effects of raunch culture, this study examined relationships between raunch culture, depression, and social media use in undergraduate students. Participants (N = 199) from a moderately-sized university in the Midwest completed measures of raunch culture, depression, social comparison, and social media use via an online platform. Primary hypotheses centered around the impact of raunch culture on depressive symptoms, as well as other variables such as social comparison and social media behaviors and their involvement regarding the relationship between endorsement of raunch culture and depression. Findings suggest that students with greater depressive symptoms were more likely to be accepting of behaviors associated with raunch culture, and that this effect may be more prominent in women. Results also indicate that raunch culture may be associated with an unfolding pathway, wherein endorsement of these features is associated with more intense consumption of social media, which in turn can lead to higher rates of social comparison and ultimately affect depressive symptoms. Future research may benefit from examining raunch culture and social media involvement in the context of other important psychosocial variables.

The Pornification of America: How Raunch Culture Is Ruining Our Society

The Pornification of America: How Raunch Culture Is Ruining Our Society

Book Review: The Pornification of America: How Raunch Culture is Ruining Our Society by Bernadette Barton

Book Review: <i>The Pornification of America: How Raunch Culture is Ruining Our Society</i> by Bernadette Barton

Keeping It Casual: Stripping Behaviors in Non-sex Worker Populations

Arguably due to the influence of raunch culture, stripping is now a normalized female behavior that is encouraged and may even be expected in Western culture. The purpose of the current studies was to examine the behavior of casual stripping in the general public and examine potential correlates and predictors of that behavior. We began by examining the traits that have been highlighted in past research that are often associated with professional stripping. Specifically, we examined parental rejection, sociosexuality, and personality traits. Overall, we produce evidence that sociosexuality and paternal neglect do predict engaging in casual stripping behaviors. This study is important because the behavior of ‘casual’ stripping is fairly common, yet virtually unexplored in current research. Additionally, the implications of this hypersexualized, but normalized, behavior can include debates in feminism theory, normalization of various sex behaviors, self-esteem, and the sexualization of young people.

Andro-privilege, raunch culture, and stripping

This study notes a rising number of female customers at heterosexual strip bars and explores the reasons for this change. Drawing methodologically on audio-taped interviews with strip club employees and 150 hours of observation in strip bars, we explore the dynamics of raunch culture—a hypersexualized climate—and andro-privilege, a new concept in feminist theory that we originate here. Patriarchal cultures condition members to preference practices associated with hegemonic masculinity, and uphold masculinism, the ideology that justifies male domination. Andro-privilege is a new Western cultural practice that cloaks masculinism in a discursive mantle of gender progress. That andro-privilege exists at all is a sign of growth. It demonstrates that progressive ideas about gender equality have affected people, and created, at least among some, a misalignment with unfairness. Andro-privilege resolves this discomfort by temporarily allowing some girls and women to be “one of the guys” while allowing no parallel for boys and men to benefit from being “one of the girls.” We argue that andro-privilege thrives in raunch culture because it permits a woman or girl to resist objectification and position herself as a subject—a lad or bro—rather than a sex doll.

Weepies Going Dirty and Machos Doing Masti: Unveiling the Female Chauvinist Pigs in Indian Cinema

This paper aims to examine Raunch culture, a strand of post-feminism in the recent Bollywood movies, The Dirty Picture and Grand Masti. Both these movies critique the perception that the investment in raunch feminine sexuality empowers female characters, but if observed profoundly, they celebrate the commodification of women's body. Frequently revolving around sex and consumption, it celebrates female agency through its discernment that women in such movies are provided the capacity to “have it all” (Genz, 98). Drawing upon Levy's notion of “Female Chauvinistic Pigs” and McRobbie's notion of “double entanglement”, the focus is that this apparent empowerment is hollow for celluloid females; their actions incite cultural anxieties about the ways women are to be represented and simply reinforce the patriarchal norms that envisage women as objects.

Pantomime Dames

The British Broadcasting Corporation's television show Snog, Marry, Avoid (SMA) states its mission is, ‘to reveal a nation of stunning natural beauties who are currently hiding behind layers and layers of slap’ [BBC. 2008. Snog, Marry, Avoid Season One. United Kingdom: Remarkable Television]. This article considers SMA as a useful text for deconstructing contemporary norms of femininity. I utilise queer and affect theory perspectives from Berlant [2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press], Halberstam [1998. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012; Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal. Boston, MA: Beacon Press] and Puar [2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press] to reveal the queer dimensions of the excessive femininity represented in the show. Berlant's work illuminates attachments to particular stylings, to understand where ‘cruel optimism’ operates. Further, I apply the idea of ‘queening’ as an inverse reference to Halberstam's ‘kinging' [Halberstam, J. 1998. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 259]. Lastly, Puar's ideas are used to analyse the affective dimensions of excessive feminine embodiment in order to consider how this involves a queering of the body. This article departs from recent feminist scholarship on the rise of raunch culture and post-feminism. Rather than focusing on the participants of SMA as symptoms of a problematic hypersexual culture, I argue for seeing these contemporary young women's excessive femininity as queer, that is, as troubling the boundaries of gender ‘normality’.

Fat and Thin Sex: Fetishised Normal and Normalised Fetish

Fat and Thin Sex: Fetishised Normal and Normalised Fetish

"({})": Raunch Culture, Third Wave Feminism and The Vagina Monologues

This article considers Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues in the latter part of the 2000s, in respect of tensions between Second and Third Wave feminism in an era of raunch culture, in the contexts of exploratory university teaching and in performance, and against the background of experiences of cultures of feminist activism in Greater Manchester, and the trashier end of feminist literature.

Carnal teachings: raunch aesthetics as queer feminist pedagogies in Yo! Majesty's hip hop practice

This essay puts forward a notion of “raunch aesthetics,” theorizing raunch as an aesthetic, performative, and vernacular practice: an explicit mode of sexual expression that transgresses norms of privacy and respectability. Raunch aesthetics describe creative practices that often blend humor and sexual explicitness to launch cultural critiques, generate pleasure for minority audiences, and affirm queer lives. The author activates her formulation of raunch in analyzing Yo! Majesty, a hip hop group comprised of black female emcees who openly describe their sexual desire for women, and explores how the queer youth of color she works with have responded to their music. Working beyond the unexamined moralisms that give critiques of raunch culture their legitimacy, the author argues that Yo! Majesty's raunch aesthetics transmit queer and feminist teachings. While celebrating carnal pleasures, these artists critique heterosexism, subvert narratives about the incompatibility of belief in Christ and queer sexualities, and trouble notions concerning the emancipation of coming out of the closet and declaring a stable homosexual identity. In demonstrating how raunch aesthetics generate consciousness raising, the author discusses how her youth participants critically read and consume hip hop while negotiating unwieldy meanings of sexuality and gender presentation.

The Aims of Sex Education: Demoting Autonomy and Promoting Mutuality

AbstractIn this essay, Paula McAvoy critiques a commonly held view that teaching young people to be good choice makers should be a central aim of sex education. Specifically, she argues against David Archard's recommendation that sex educators ought to focus on the development of autonomy and teaching young people that “choice should be accorded the central role in the legitimation of sexual conduct.” Instead, McAvoy argues that under conditions of gender inequality this view advantages boys and disadvantages girls. Juxtaposing a case of a culturally arranged marriage with a spring break scene from Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, McAvoy shows that focusing on sexual choice making obscures and reifies the unequal social conditions that young people navigate. She concludes by suggesting an alternative that is in line with Sharon Lamb's argument in “Just the Facts? The Separation of Sex Education from Moral Education” that intimate encounters are better governed by attending to our ethical obligations to others.

Examining the raunch culture thesis through young Australian women's interpretations of contradictory discourses

According to a series of recent accounts, the sex industry is now a key facet of youth culture and sexualised imagery has infiltrated both the public imagination and the most private of practices. Unsurprisingly, there is greater concern over the implications of this new ‘raunch culture’ for young women, than young men. Rather than resisting, it is argued that young women are conforming en mass to soft-porn imagery and practices and in doing so, have lost touch with their own desires. To highlight some of the problems with these accounts, in this paper I draw on interview data from research into young Australian men and women's interpretations of sex and sexual risk. However, to pursue my key argument I focus only on the young women's accounts. Findings show that rather than being saturated in raunch culture, young women are exposed to multiple, often contradictory cultural discourses relating to gender and sex, which they differently incorporate, transform and sometimes reject as they construct sexual narratives. I conclude that the raunch culture literature is couched in a series of damaging generalisations which ignore youth diversity and position women as agents of their own oppression but not of their own desire.

Complicating a Rudimentary List of Characteristics: Communicating Disability with Down Syndrome Dolls

Apparently some people upon coming across [Down Syndrome dolls] were offended. […] Still, it’s curious, and telling, what gives offense. Was it the shock of seeing a doll not modeled on the normative form that caused such offense? Or the assumption that any representation of Down Syndrome must naturally intend ridicule? Either way, it would seem that we might benefit from an examination of such reactions—especially as they relate to instances of the idealisation of the human form that dolls […] represent. (Faulkner)

Lad magazines, raunch culture and the pornification of South African media

abstract This Article examines the role of the media in the pornification of society and the subsequent rise of laddism and raunch culture, by looking specifically at lad culture and lad magazines as a genre. Comparisons are drawn between 2008 issues of the local lad magazine FHM and the international pornographic magazine Playboy in order to show how these magazines function as soft pornography. The research was conducted prior to the launch of the South African version of Playboy. The Article examines raunch culture and its subsequent influence on contemporary women and how they respond to its representations, illustrating the manner in which lad and raunch culture can be seen as part of an anti-feminist backlash, rather than being post-feminist, as the latter has claimed.

New girl heroes: the rise of popular feminist commentators in an era of sexualisation

The level of public interest in what has variously been called ‘raunch culture’, ‘pornification’ or more broadly ‘sexualisation’ of culture, has created new opportunities for enterprising women. In recent years, a number of immensely popular books have emerged raising concerns about girls and sexualisation by female authors across Western nations such as the USA, Australia and the UK. Here, I explore the media work of two prominent Australian media commentators on girls and sexualisation, Melinda Tankard Reist and Dannielle Miller. I explore how, in their educative work designed to empower girls and free them from the stifling, damaging aspects of sexualised popular culture, these commentators may be citing and performing other normative dimensions of contemporary young femininity that go unremarked upon and are thus reinscribed as normal and expected.

Spinning the pole: A discursive analysis of the websites of recreational pole dancing studios

Pole dancing is an activity that came to prominence in strip clubs. Despite its widespread reinvention as a fitness activity for women, pole dancing is still strongly associated with, and indeed trades on, its exotic, erotic and sexual connotations. In this article, we examine how the pole dancing industry portrays itself to potential participants via a discursive analysis of the websites of 15 major pole dancing studios in Australia. In particular, we examine some of the ways in which pole dancing trades on its erotic associations and capitalizes on the emerging postfeminist sensibility in western countries and its advocacy of empowerment through sexual agency, while at the same time promoting an alternative, ironic construction in which pole dancing is simply something a bit different – a novel way to get an upper body workout while having ‘a bit of a laugh’. We argue that the tensions between authenticity and parody uncovered by our analyses reflect a tension that infuses ‘raunch culture’ more widely, and discuss the insecurity and contingency of the ‘empowerment’ offered in these practices.

Factors influencing young women’s sexual and reproductive health

This descriptive study of first year university students, utilising a survey questionnaire, explored sources of information including, but not limited to, the media, factors influencing decision making and young women’s health seeking behaviours in terms of reproductive and sexual health. The overall aim was to add to the body of knowledge for health professionals developing appropriate programs targeting adolescents and young women. Understanding of sexual and reproductive health was variable with only approximately half of respondents demonstrating an adequate understanding. Contrary to an increasing picture of this generation as increasingly engaging in risky and potentially damaging behaviour as depicted in Female chauvinist pigs: The rise of raunch culture by Levy (2005), respondents in this study appeared for the most part to take considered decisions utilising the sources at hand, including popular magazines, while also grappling with expectations imposed by a culture that sexualises girls at younger and younger ages and depicts promiscuity as the norm. The importance of family values, particularly mothers as role models, emerged as important determinants of behaviour, while religious values were identified as important to only 15% of respondents. At the same time, pressure to engage in sex at younger and younger ages and continuing pressure to engage in unprotected and risky sex was a concern. Cynicism was expressed regarding the double standard perceived to be still operating in relation to young men’s and women’s sexual health. Young women in the study were forceful in identifying a need for a much better approach to education within schools directed at both sexes and one that is factual, relevant and all encompassing.

Raunch Culture Goes to School? Young Women, Normative Femininities and Elite Education

Public concern about popular culture's sexualisation of women and girls is regularly voiced in the Australian media. Young women grow up against a backdrop of ‘raunch culture’ (Levy, 2005), which for some scholars represents a ‘new’ femininity (Gill, 2007), in which ‘hyper-sexual’ forms of (hetero)sexual expression are now expected of young women and girls, despite ostensibly being about choice and personal empowerment. In this article, I explore the constructions of girlhood and femininity amongst young women attending an elite, single-sex, private school in Melbourne, Australia. Elite schooling for girls is often associated with highly classed notions of (hetero)sexual modesty and propriety, epitomised in the reality television program Ladette to Lady. Here I consider how hypersexualities are configured within students' constructions of themselves and others, and I explore their relationship to classed expectations of identity for privileged girls. I examine the role that classed norms of identity play in mediating these girls' negotiations of hypersexualities.

Everything is Child Abuse

In 2008, the Australian federal Senate held an Inquiry into the Sexualisation of Children in the Contemporary Media Environment. I made a submission to this Inquiry, noting that in public debate about this topic a number of quite distinct issues, with distinct aetiologies, were collapsed together. These included: child pornography; children being targeted by any form of marketing; young people becoming sexually active; sexual abuse of children; raunch culture; protecting children from any sexualised material in the media; and body image disorders. I suggested that commentators had collapsed these issues together because the image of the helpless child is a powerful one for critics to challenge undesirable aspects of contemporary culture. The result of many different ideological viewpoints all using the same argument — that the forms of culture they didn't like were damaging children — gives the impression that there is no element of culture today that isn't (somebody claims) causing harm to children: everything is child abuse. The danger of such discourses is that they draw attention away from the real harm that is being caused to children by sexual and other forms of maltreatment — which overwhelmingly occur within families, and for reasons ignored in these debates.