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Feminism & Psychology

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How to have great sex: © The Author(s) 2023

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subjectivities and discourses DOI: 10.1177/09593535231195957
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of desire in mainstream
online media aimed at
women

Jessica Tappin
Massey University, New Zealand

Sarah Riley
Massey University, New Zealand

Tracy Morison
Massey University, New Zealand

Abstract
Affirmative sexual subjectivity and agency are fostered by positive understandings of sex-
ual desire and pleasure. Yet, research shows that print media circulate problematic dis-
courses, including constructing women’s desire as passive, linked to objectification, or as
a form of (postfeminist) empowerment enacted through pleasing men. Developing this
work with a specific focus on digital media and the subject positions offered there, a
Foucauldian-informed discourse analysis was performed on 75 online articles, identified
through a systematic search intending to replicate the information young women are
exposed to during everyday internet use. The analysis produced three subject positions:
the “Made through the male gaze” woman whose experience of sexual desire was con-
tingent on men’s desire; the “Working on it woman” who employed self-help methods
to improve her libido and match a socially acceptable male standard; and the “Sexual
connoisseur,” a postfeminist subject position who is sexually knowledgeable and confi-
dent yet still prioritises men’s pleasure. The analysis demonstrates a hetero-gendered

Corresponding author:
Jessica Tappin, School of Psychology, Massey University, P.O. Box 756, Wellington 6140, New Zealand.
Email: [email protected]
2 Feminism & Psychology 0(0)

discursive framework operating within mainstream media accounts, wherein men’s sex-
ual agency and desire are prioritised over women’s even in apparently sex-positive and
feminist-oriented articles.

Keywords
discourse, femininity, heterosexual desire, media, New Zealand, postfeminism, subjectivity

Sexual desire is typically considered a natural, presocial essence that resides within the
individual. Yet, feminist scholars have highlighted its inextricable connection to hetero-
gendered discourses and hierarchical social relations (Fine & McClelland, 2006;
MacKinnon, 1987). Desire is disciplined by the politics of sexuality, including an
array of norms underpinning determinations of degeneracy, pathology, immorality, and
so on (Foucault, 1984). These norms are re/produced and circulated through mediated
sex advice. For example, psychologists’ and sexologists’ advice feature ubiquitously in
online publications’ health and lifestyle sections and aim to help readers solve various
problems in their sex lives (Barker et al., 2018). In Foucauldian terms, such psy-experts
form part of a “dispositif”; a range of actors and institutions that support forms of sense-
making (Foucault, 1980, p. 194).
Mediated sex advice, accordingly, has the power to shape sexual subjectivities (i.e., an
experience of oneself and one’s identity as a sexual being; Tolman, 2002). In this way,
desire, as “sexual and pleasurable feelings in and of the body … constitutes a form of
knowledge about the self, one’s relationships and one’s cultural contexts or social
worlds” (Tolman, 2012, p. 749). Tolman (2002) argues, therefore, that sexual desire is
central to sexual subjectivity, shaping one’s experiences with others, sense of self, and
the ability to explore and seek pleasure. In this article, we examine the gendered construc-
tions of sexual desire in online media aimed at women, which provide an important arena
for exploring cultural concepts of ideal sexual subjectivities as they shape understandings
of desire, including what and who is desirable.
Media discourses of female sexual desire have been structured by a postfeminist sens-
ibility for over a decade, producing a range of sexual subjectivities. Women have been
positioned primarily as empowered, agentic, sexually knowledgeable, heterosexual
pleasure pursuers (e.g., Evans & Riley, 2014; Gill, 2007, 2017). Scholars of post-
feminism have raised concerns regarding this empowerment rhetoric. Their critiques
show how postfeminist sexual subjectivities are underpinned by essentialist hetero-
gendered discourses that, paradoxically, result in the retraditionalisation of gender and
create new disciplinary and contradictory demands on women in heterosex (Evans &
Riley, 2014; Gavey, 2012; Gill, 2007, 2009, 2017; Riley et al., 2017; Riley, Evans, &
Robson, 2019). These critiques underscore the necessity for nuanced analyses of the idea-
lised sexual subjectivities represented in media aimed at women.
Importantly, in technologically mediated cultures, where the digital is present in prac-
tically every aspect of daily life, digital media play an integral part in creating and
Tappin et al. 3

circulating a pedagogy of sexual desire, authoritatively instructing readers to think and

act in certain ways. As women’s media engagement increasingly shifts from print-based
to digital, women encounter an unprecedented, potentially limitless range of representa-
tions of feminine sexual desire (Attwood et al., 2015). This makes online media an
important site for investigating the pedagogies of desire. Yet, compared to research ana-
lysing print media, this remains a largely unexplored terrain (cf. Farvid & Braun, 2014).
To advance the body of work on media constructions of female sexual desire, we
present a Foucauldian-informed analysis of the subject positions available in online
texts offering sexual advice or commentary that are generated in Western contexts for het-
erosexual (cisgender) women1 readers. To locate our study within the broader literature,
and indicate our contribution, we begin with an overview of existing knowledge on print
(and digital) media.

Media constructions of female desire and postfeminism

Feminist media analyses have identified postfeminism as a dominant Western discourse,
circulating interconnected, although potentially contradictory, notions of ideal femininity
(Gill, 2007, 2017; Riley et al., 2017; Riley, Evans, & Robson, 2019). These newer ideals
cohere around notions of empowerment, individualism, and choice regarding working on
the self and the body. In contrast, traditional ideals of femininity silenced female sexual
desire (Fine, 1988), and sexual subjectivities were orientated towards heterosexuality,
emotional intimacy, and motherhood (Hollway, 1984). The media is a key place of cir-
culation for these ideals.
Feminist analyses of print magazine sex and relationship advice across a range of
Western contexts show these new ideals in a common positioning of women as liberated
and striving for great sex (Farvid & Braun, 2006; Gill, 2009; Gupta et al., 2008). For
example, Ménard and Kleinplatz’s (2008) analysis of print magazines available in
Canada highlighted that women who have great sex are presented as skilful, kinky,
adventurous, and sometimes willing to engage in rough sexual experiences. As part of
this incitement to sexual competence and adventurousness, magazine texts reproduce a
broader pattern of working on the self and self-improvement within neoliberalism, under-
pinned by the postfeminist construction of women as flawed yet fixable (Riley, Evans,
Anderson, & Robson, 2019; Riley, Evans, & Robson, 2019).
From a Foucauldian perspective, magazines can be understood to “operate as peda-
gogical devices” (Frith, 2015b, p. 323), providing readers with the information and
tools for self-improvement. For example, Gill’s (2009) discourse analysis demonstrated
that sex advice in Glamour (a best-selling U.K. women’s magazine) constructed sexual
competency as achieved through significant consumption and work on the self. For
instance, to produce a desirable sexual subjectivity, readers were prescribed a range of
consumption practices (e.g., buying lingerie and sex toys), and interpellated to retrain
their psyche by making potentially fundamental shifts in how they thought about them-
selves and sex.
The language of choice and individualism, indicative of a postfeminist sensibility that
frames contemporary magazine sex advice, has been shown to cohere with essentialist,
4 Feminism & Psychology 0(0)

binary constructions of gender and heterosexuality. This allows the distinction between
an active, desiring man and a passive woman to be maintained in more nuanced ways
than in traditional hetero-gendered discourses, through recourse to the “reality” of
biology (Tolman, 2002). In this vein, magazine sex advice has been shown to link testos-
terone to an insatiable male sex drive, reducing desire to biological functioning (Gill,
2007) and thereby rendering women’s libidos as being “naturally” lower than men’s
(Farvid & Braun, 2006; Gupta et al., 2008; Ménard & Kleinplatz, 2008; Moran & Lee,
2011). This, in turn, ostensibly justifies women’s prioritisation of men’s sexual needs
and gratification in heterosex.
While empowerment and choice rhetoric are prominent in mainstream magazine sex
advice, feminist analyses have shown that male sexual desire remains prioritised (Gill,
2009). Women are often instructed to put men’s needs before their own, as shown in
Gupta et al.’s (2008) analysis of sex advice from Cosmopolitan magazine. This analysis
highlights the positioning of women as responsible for competently pleasing their male
partners while simultaneously giving guidance and encouraging compliments, thereby
managing both sexual partners’ experience. Magazine readers, presumed to be heterosex-
ual women, are thus enjoined to become proficient in what Gill (2009) calls “men-ology,”
that is, “to learn to please men” (p. 345) and to expertly “read men’s minds” (p. 356). No
similar expectation is placed on men. Indeed, Ménard and Kleinplatz noted “an absence
of sexual advice in men’s magazines” (2008, p. 17), while Farvid and Braun (2014) dem-
onstrate that advice in men’s magazines mainly focuses on obtaining sex from women.
Men’s magazines, therefore, reflect hetero-gendered scripts of men having a high sex
drive and women needing to be persuaded to have sex.
Together, the analyses discussed show that magazine sex advice not only directs
women to prioritise men’s needs, but also links women’s sexual subjectivities, and their
sense of self-worth, to their effectiveness as sexual partners. Relatedly, feminist media
research shows that, for women, being a competent (hetero)sexual subject has become
imperative to relationship success, allowing them to “snap up” a male partner (Gill, 2009,
p. 352) and “keep your man” (Farvid & Braun, 2006, p. 301). This scholarship also highlights
how the emotional labour prescribed by magazine sex advice and the positioning of women
vis-à-vis men map onto traditional hetero-gendered power relations, with women expected to
be the ones working on maintaining relationships, including meeting their male partners’
emotional and sexual needs (Farvid & Braun, 2006; Gill, 2009; Gupta et al., 2008).
This positioning of women is reinforced by a discourse of healthism, which dovetails
with neoliberal and postfeminist sensibilities (Riley, Evans, & Robson, 2019), conflating
health with normalcy and, in this case, linking optimal health with a desiring and func-
tional libido. For example, Ménard and Kleinplatz (2008) note that to improve their
sexual performance, readers of women’s magazines are told to take up diets and increase
exercise. Likewise, Frith (2015a) reports that women are advised to extend exercise
workouts to “down-there” (p. 90; i.e., their genitalia). These “simple” changes can be
read as imperative for sexual health and success.
Another key finding in this scholarship concerns women’s performance of desire. For
instance, in their analysis of two popular Australian women’s magazines, Moran and Lee
(2011) demonstrate that to boost a male sexual partner’s ego, women were instructed to
Tappin et al. 5

either visibly indicate pleasure or fake it. This is echoed by Frith’s (2015b, p. 322) find-
ings in an analysis of sex advice in Cosmopolitan. She notes that women are advised to
engage in the spectacle of (real or fake) orgasm as part of various “embodied perfor-
mances” during sex. Thus, as these analyses indicate, women’s performance of desire
is ultimately constructed as less for themselves and more for the role they play in
men’s satisfaction (Farvid & Braun, 2006; Gill, 2009; Moran & Lee, 2011).
As the preceding review of feminist media scholarship shows, print media aimed at
women have consistently offered a limited pedagogy of desire. The constructions of
female desire in the sex advice offered are underpinned by a hetero-gendered binary.
Same-sex desire, if recognised at all, is either invalidated by being construed as a
phase to grow out of (Jackson, 2005) or acceptable only as experimentation or to fulfil
heterosexual men’s fantasies (Diamond, 2005; Gill, 2008). The shift to online media con-
sumption has the potential to radically expand what is available, yet the opposite is also
possible given concerns about algorithmic reinforcement of racism and sexism (Noble,
2018). It is therefore timely and important to advance existing work by exploring
subject positions produced in mainstream digital media aimed at women offering
advice or commentary on sexual desire. Accordingly, the following research questions
guide our analysis of such texts:

1. How is women’s desire constructed and what wider discourses support these
constructions?
2. What subject positions are made available within these texts?
3. What possibilities for subjectivity and practice are enabled (or diminished) from the
vantage point offered by these subject positions?

Material and method

Online texts about women’s sexual desire were collected by the first author via a series of
keyword searches in Google using five keyword search terms (viz., sexual desire, sexual
attraction, sex advice, female libido, sexual pleasure). The search strategy was to locate
the most prominent English-language articles available through searches from anglo-
phone Western locations, namely, North America, the UK, and Australasia. We kept
the search location relatively wide because we sought to locate popular articles delivered
to large audiences and wanted to avoid local websites with limited readership. We used
Google, which holds the market share of search engine use, and took into consideration
its content delivery algorithm.
We selected articles appearing in the first 10 results, which receive approximately 95%
of web traffic, and are prioritised by the algorithm (Bradley, 2015; Chaffey &
Ellis-Chadwick, 2019). We sampled texts over 3 years (2018–2020), using a targeted specific
time frame search query falling on either side of Valentine’s Day (9–16 February), which is a
time of increased discussion of sex, desire, relationships, and dating. We retained the first five
relevant results from each keyword per year and excluded texts that were unrelated or not rele-
vant to the research questions (i.e., articles aimed at/about men, scientific articles, dictionary/the-
saurus results, media reviews, advertisements) or nontextual formats (i.e., videos or images). The
6 Feminism & Psychology 0(0)

articles were associated with a broad range of over 30 media companies; Vice, Buzzfeed, and
Condé Nast are among the most well-known (see supplemental dataset for full details).
The dataset thus represents the default algorithmic choice, which aligns with dominant
or normative content. This was achieved by using Google’s Incognito mode to mask
search history, thereby generating generic results not specific to the first author’s
online profile. We tested this by conducting region-specific searches (as if the query
were from the UK, North America, and Australasia), which yielded very similar
outputs to our Google Incognito results. Therefore, although the search was conducted
by a specific person in Aotearoa/New Zealand, we consider our dataset to represent
similar results to those that would be obtained in comparable searches conducted from
other Western anglophone countries. However, it is possibly more the case for those in
Australasia, and without very specific search histories or demographic data.

Dataset
The dataset of 75 texts represents a focused snapshot of mainstream media aimed at
women over a 3-year period. These texts were categorised by a range of characteristics,
including the type of text and the country of origin, as summarised in Table 1 and Table 2.
See also the Appendix for a list of article extracts used, and the supplementary file for a
detailed dataset spreadsheet.

Data analysis
The data were analysed using Foucauldian-informed discourse analysis, which illumi-
nates how talk or texts construct different versions of reality and how these delimit
what people can say, think, feel, and do (Riley et al., 2021; Willig, 2013). Each text
was coded for the ways that desire was constructed, adhering to the method set out by
Riley et al. (2021). This included noting mentions of keywords that referenced the
topic of study or related topics, including desire, sexual pleasure, and sexuality. As lay
media often use the terms sexual desire, libido, pleasure, and experience interchangeably,
and so too sexual identity and sexuality, we sometimes use these terms in the analysis in
corresponding ways, although our focus is on sexual desire.
To attend to our first research question, we asked, regarding women’s desire: “what is
being constructed?” (i.e., the nature of reality produced in the text), “how is it being

Table 1. Type of text.

n %

Blog 14 18.7
Opinion piece 24 32
Online magazines 25 33.3
Product blogs 12 16
Note: Total N = 75.
Tappin et al. 7

Table 2. Country of origin.

n %

USA 43 57.3
UK 13 17.3
Australia 6 8
Canada 3 4
New Zealand 1 1.3
India 1 1.3
China 1 1.3
Denmark 1 1.3
Ireland 1 1.3
Philippines 1 1.3
Bosnia and Herzegovina 1 1.3
Unknown (published on Medium.com) 3 4
Note: Total N = 75.

constructed?” (paying attention to rhetorical strategies such as use of extreme case formu-
lations), and “why is it being constructed in this way?” (which includes considering wider
discourses that “enable these ideas to be thinkable”; Riley et al., 2021, p. 293). In this
study, for example, such discourses included postfeminism, neoliberalism, and healthism.
Once this work was done, we examined any conflicting constructions of desire to identify
variation in the discourses within texts and across the dataset.
Regarding our second research question, we identified common subject positions by
reviewing the above codes and asking, “who is being talked about” (Riley et al., 2021,
p. 297)? We drew on Davies and Harré’s (1990) conceptualisation of subject positions as
types of culturally recognisable persons or roles produced within a discourse and available
for individuals to inhabit (e.g., the sexually confident woman). Subject positions have asso-
ciated ways of speaking and acting, and come with a set of rights, obligations, and vantage
points from which the subject can view themselves and the world (e.g., visibly enjoying sex).
Finally, to attend to research question 3, we considered what was made possible for
subjectivity construction (how the reader could view themselves; e.g., sexually confident)
and practice (what the reader could do/imagine doing; e.g., appropriate frequency of sex).
Foucault’s (1980) concept of the “dispositif” (discussed earlier) helped us consider how
expert positions were mobilised, giving us further analytic insight into the rhetorical
power of the talk.

Analysis and discussion

We identified three common subject positions, which we entitled: (a) “Made through the
male gaze,” (b) the “Working on it woman,” and (c) the “Sexual connoisseur.” These
subject positions were produced through material that reinforced both heteronormativity
and gendered heterosexuality in ways that consistently foreground men’s sexual desires,
needs, and interests. The following analysis uses exemplary extracts from relevant texts
8 Feminism & Psychology 0(0)

to illustrate analytic points; each quote is labelled with the number of the article from
which it originates. The full references are listed in the Appendix.

Made through the male gaze

In the “Made through the male gaze” subject position, sexual desire is predicated on being
sexually alluring and desirable to men. For example, readers are told that “in women,
sexual desire is often responsive, so allowing your partner to initiate sex is the only
way to ensure that it happens” (Article 19-M). This quote starts with a normative state-
ment about women’s sexual desire as “often” in response to another, but the claim is
cemented with an extreme case formulation (“the only way”), which significantly
limits what women’s desire might look like.
The construction of women’s sexual desire as responsive to an instigator who is
opposite (i.e., male) reinforces the norm in media aimed at women to assume a male
partner, despite commonly using gender-neutral language. Accordingly, women must
expect their male partners to initiate sex, and their own feelings of desire will follow.
Women are therefore not entirely without desire (given that they are reading advice on
“how to have great sex”), but an agentic desiring female subject position is excluded
from the data. Fine (1988) contemplated what it might look like to “release females
from a position of receptivity” (p. 33), but as we can see in this article 31 years later,
women are still rendered as “responsive” recipients of male desire.
The “Made through the male gaze” subject position conflates desire with being a “turn
on for the man” (Article 18-C). For example: “Many women don’t just want sex. They
want to feel desired first. If a woman doesn’t feel desired, then the sex itself may not
seem so appealing” (Article 19-B). This subject position is sustained by a heterosex-
ual script (Kim et al., 2007) that constructs women and men as complementary oppo-
sites, invoking a passive-female/active-male binary based on biology (Tolman, 2002).
Gender difference is thus attributed to a one-way interactional dynamic in which male
desire is directed toward female recipients. Accordingly, women must ensure they are
sexually desirable to men, by being physically attractive and/or pleasing them
sexually.
Thus, although men are positioned as both sex-needy and sex-ready, a contradiction is
evoked whereby women must work hard to be sexually desirable to men. For example,
making “sure your lipstick is blue-based, not yellow based” (Article 18-G) is recom-
mended because research shows men’s preference for these colours. Women are also
instructed on how to covertly detect men’s sexual attraction to them, such as: “If he is
changing his body position to replicate one of yours (like crossing his legs), it’s
usually a sign of attraction” (Article 18-I)—echoing the “men-ology” identified by Gill
(2009). Such advice can be understood as reinforcement of the “male in the head”: intern-
alisation of the male gaze and self-regulation to be appealing to men (Holland et al.,
1998). Thus, over 20 years after groundbreaking feminist research identifying this ten-
dency, we find that in the context of widespread postfeminism—with its associated
agentic sexual subjectivities—women are still being directed to understand that his
desire is their own.
Tappin et al. 9

In a similar vein, women’s desire was portrayed as reliant on penetrative sexual inter-
course. Men were typically depicted as “preheated” (Article 20-A), whereas women were
lacking sexual desire and needing to have their own embodied desire aroused. For instance:

Portuguese sex researcher Ana Carvalheira found that women who said that sex preceded
desire outnumbered those who reported desire first by a margin of 2 to 1. Today, sex thera-
pists increasingly accept [a psychiatrist]’s view that for many (if not most) women, desire is
not the cause of sex, but its result. (Article 20-A)

These claims make sense in relation to an essentialist hetero-gender discourse that constructs
men as biologically distinct from women, decontextualising sexuality and reducing it to
physiological function (Frith, 2015a; Gill, 2007). This construction reflects the enduring con-
strual of women and men as innately different, propagated by popular psychology in titles
such as Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, and critiqued by feminists over
20 years ago (Potts, 1998). Reference to experts and research statistics (“a margin of 2 to
1”) are rhetorical strategies that, in this case, rebrand these outdated ideas and grant validity
to essentialist claims about women’s desire.
As shown in the extract above, articles generally referred to sex in ways that were syn-
onymous with coitus, based upon the taken-for-granted view of penile–vaginal penetra-
tion as the key element of “real” sex (McPhillips et al., 2001). Penetrative sexual practices
were constantly referenced or implied within the data, constructing penetration as the nor-
mative route through which women can participate in and enjoy sex. For example, “Have
you ever noticed that your partner’s penis seems to ‘fit’ better in your vagina once things
get going?” (Article 20-S). Not only is the heteronormative coital imperative normalised,
but it also constructs women’s desire as being the result of penetrative sex, rather than
preceding it. Thus, while previous research has indicated that penetrative sex is con-
structed as the only kind of sex (Gupta et al., 2008; Jackson, 2005; McPhillips et al.,
2001; Moran & Lee, 2011), here, we show it is also being constructed as the only
kind of turn-on.
The construction renders sexual desire as something that happens to women rather than
embodied and originating in or from themselves. Accordingly, the “Made through the
male gaze” subject position works in the interests of heteropatriarchal practices, providing
a vantage point from which women can understand themselves as sexual objects (rather
than subjects) whose own desire is a product of being an object of men’s desires, including
engaging in penetrative sex even when not “warmed up.” Such advice enjoins women to
submit to heterosex regardless of their own feelings, and men to disregard their female part-
ners’ arousal, desire, or even refusal. These constructions of sexual desire potentially support
rape myths and groom female readers into accepting sexual coercion.

Working on it woman
In contrast, the “Working on it woman” has sexual desire but needs to work on maintain-
ing or increasing her sex drive. Women’s sex drives were repeatedly depicted as not just
10 Feminism & Psychology 0(0)

distinct from men’s, but also not sufficiently high. The “Working on it woman” is thus
interpellated to continually work to boost her libido.
Women are portrayed as able to “go for a long time without feeling desire” (Article
19-B), unlike men (their assumed sexual partners), who are positioned in the male
sex-drive discourse (Hollway, 1984) and are understood to “think about sex all the
time” (Article 18-M). It is women’s bodies, however, that are rendered problematic,
and their fluctuating sex drive is routinely troubled as they are commanded to “find
out what the problem is and do your best to address it” (Article 18-L). Thus, rather
than problematising a needy male sex drive, the measure of “normal” and appropriate
desire is modelled on men, with women being blamed when those standards are not met.
This construction of problematic low and fluctuating female desire was supported by
drawing on science and expert authority. Psychologists or medical professionals were
often authors or quoted as expert commentators, and readers were usually advised to
seek their help, as shown in the example below:

If your sex drive is lacking, it is likely that there is a medical reason for that. You should
speak to your doctor about the problem. If they are able to identify the reason for your
low sex drive, they will be able to work with you to find a solution. (Article 20-N)

The above extract directs readers to seek help from a doctor, and other articles attributed
low libido to a hormonal imbalance (e.g., Articles 20-D and 19-A). These explanations
draw on biomedical discourses that situate women’s sexual desire in the realm of dys-
function and disorder (Tiefer, 1996). Stress and exhaustion from paid employment or bal-
ancing domestic responsibilities are also presented as the culprit. For example:

Women are always on, but is this stopping us from getting turned on? If we’re not actually
doing something we’re thinking about doing it (washing up or filing our tax return or any of
those 3,000 things on our to-do list that aren’t sex). (Article 20-M)

Locating women’s low libido within the social, provides potential for critiques of
gender inequality, but this potential is not met. Instead, the suggested solutions are for
women to work on themselves—reframing a social issue as a personal one and aligning
with the neoliberal trope of individualising social problems. In the data, women’s fluctu-
ating desire is rendered as both problematic and their responsibility to fix, usually through
monitoring and disciplining their bodies. For example, readers are told that their “sexual
desire flourishes” when they “eat well, exercise, control blood pressure, and don’t eat
sugar” (Article 18-B). Thus, the “Working on it woman” needs to maintain control
over multiple aspects of her life.
Other examples of individualist solutions include meditation to manage stress. For
example, in an article entitled “Live Better: Ladies, Meet the Hidden Force Behind
Your Sex Drive,” readers are instructed to “Rewire your brain’s stress response
through a daily meditation practice and try to become more conscious about how you
handle your stress in general” (Article 20-Y). Relating women’s lack of desire to a
Tappin et al. 11

faulty body (a brain that needs “rewiring”) renders women individually responsible for
addressing the problem through stress management. Accordingly, a prevalent post-
feminist trope of linking regular sexual activity with normative, desirable health is repro-
duced (Frith, 2015a; Riley, Evans, & Robson, 2019). This becomes explicit as readers are
told, for example, that “Most people are happier when they have a satisfactory sex life”
(Article 20-N) and an active libido is “a positive force for health” (Article 18-A). This
conflation of health, sex, and happiness is underpinned by wider postfeminist discourses
of optimal living and expectations for happiness through self-reflexive work (Riley,
Evans, Anderson, & Robson, 2019).
The incitement to self-regulate and engage in associated self-help practices also inter-
sects with neoliberal discourses of good citizenship and healthism (Crawford, 1980; Gill,
2007; Riley, Evans, & Robson, 2019). Within healthism, health is an expectation and
outcome of lifestyle choices. Thus, a call to health intersects with normalcy and the dis-
courses of individual responsibility evident in the “Working on it woman” subject pos-
ition. This expectation was not similarly extended to men. The gendered asymmetry is
consistent with other broader postfeminist analyses showing how contemporary self-help
advice is focused largely on women’s flaws, and often correcting feminine behaviours to
be more like men (Riley, Evans, Anderson, & Robson, 2019).
Not only is the “Working on it woman” commonly positioned in the data as responsible
for their own desire but, consistent with analyses of women’s print media (e.g., Gill, 2009;
Gupta et al., 2008), they are also tasked with maintaining their relationship by taking care
of their (usually) male partner’s sexual needs. Frequent sex, for example, is rendered a
“pretty accurate barometer of the state of a relationship” (Article 18-L), and differences in
sexual desire, cause for therapy. The potential relationship repercussions of failing to
match a male partner’s desire are depicted in the extract below. This is also an example of
how women’s lower desire is constructed as a medical problem resolved by medical experts:

This is what wrecked [name]’s relationship with her boyfriend. She was experiencing vaginal
dryness and super low libido, which made sex painful and also lead to decline in the frequency
to have sex. This took a direct hit on her relationship, ending her 2-year-old relationship with her
partner. Finally, after a couple of visits to gynaecologists, she got her sex life back on track, and
rekindled her relationship with her boyfriend. (Article 20-D)

Here, anecdotal evidence of a relationship being “wrecked” due to infrequent sex func-
tions rhetorically as a warning. The ideal outcome, and main concern, in this extract is
restoring the relationship. The protagonist is shown as taking the correct course of
action to do so: seeking expert medical help (gynaecologists) to correct her dysfunctional
desire, thereby restoring her sex life and, in turn, her relationship. Notably, responsibility
for the “wrecked” relationship is attributed solely to the dysfunctional woman, while the
male partner’s role in the deteriorating relationship is not considered.
Overall, the “Working on it woman” subject position constructs women as a sexually
desiring agent, rather than a sexual object, but still lacking compared to men and thus
required to remedy this. Consequently, the “Working on it woman” can view herself
12 Feminism & Psychology 0(0)

as flawed, yet fixable. All she needs to do is engage in self-health practices and seek
expert medical advice to “fix” her desire and be normal and happy.

Sexual connoisseur
The “Sexual connoisseur” is also interpellated to work on their sex life, not in response to dys-
function but to optimise the quality of sex, as well as their experiences of both sexual desire and
sexual pleasure in the context of heterosex. In contrast to the “Working on it woman,” who is
working primarily to match their level of desire to their male partner’s, the “Sexual connois-
seur,” a subject position initially described by Evans and Riley (2014), is a pleasure pursuer;
they are sexually confident, knowledgeable, desiring, and want to develop new sexual skills
to maximise their pleasure. In the extract below, for example, boring sex is construed as prob-
lematic (whereas a lack of sex is the “Working on it woman’s” problem):

Bored in the bedroom? That’s no excuse for giving up on your sex life. If you find that you’re
too sexually complacent with your spouse, mix it up! Bring toys into your sexual activity, act
out fantasies, roleplay, and tease and entice each other with dirty text messages throughout
the day, or focus on different nights of pleasure. (Article 18-H)

The “Sexual connoisseur” subject position describes a woman who desires sex and needs
to work to further optimise potential pleasure. Women who do not work on having an
exciting sex life are positioned as problematically “giving up.” Solutions to sexual
boredom are offered in a six-part list which works rhetorically to support the claim
that there is “no excuse for giving up on your sex life” and encourages readers to
“spice-it-up.” Other suggestions include, “Open your mouth and let those dirty thoughts
spill out,” “Concoct a sexy to-do list for his eyes only,” and “Pick a new place to give him
oral sex like in the car or while he’s in the shower” (Article 20-T).
In particular, the “Sexual connoisseur” is encouraged to work on increasing the quantity and
quality of orgasms she experiences. Orgasms were consistently closely linked with desire and
pleasure, and often described using esoteric language: “life-force,” “mystical,” “euphoric,”
“powerful” (Article 19-S), amid claims of health benefits (e.g., Articles 18-U, 19-S, and
20-K). This is similar to analyses of print media that show how the female orgasm is represented
as both the performance of desire and pinnacle of pleasure (Frith, 2015b; Riley, Evans, &
Robson, 2019), constructing what Potts (2000, p. 56) calls the “orgasmic imperative.” This
imperative, to understand your own desire as linked inexorably with orgasms, is evident in
the following extract from an article entitled “I Orgasm Every Single Time I Have Sex”:

I’m not some anomaly. I’m not some magical creature. I simply know what I like, know how
to ask for it, and don’t settle for anything less. Life is too short not to have an orgasm. Here’s
how I get the job done during sex, every single time. (Article 18-V)

Orgasming during sex is rendered normative through the extreme case formulation
disclaimers that position her as ordinary (not an “anomaly” or “magical creature”),
Tappin et al. 13

and describe the ability to orgasm regularly as “simple.” These statements are given
authority and support with the use of an assertive and simple three-part list.
Orgasming is also related to notions of productivity and performance (a “job”), with
anything less than orgasming “every single time” rendered a failure by the statement
“I … don’t settle for anything less.” The onus of pleasure is thus on the woman to gain
self-knowledge (“know what I like”), communication skills (“know how to ask for it”),
and a sense of self-worth intersecting with assertiveness (“don’t settle for anything
less”). Subsequently, those who do settle for less can view themselves as failures
since the individual is centred in this advice, rather than the relationship in which
the sex is happening.
In a similar vein, orgasms, sexual desire, and good sex are also generally related to
psychological work, such as meditation and mindfulness to become “more attentive
and aware of my own senses and desires” (Article 20-B). The implication is that
women may be disconnected from their own sexual desire, but able to reconnect
through increased self-knowledge, echoing the injunction to “know thyself” central to the
construction of modern subjectivity (Foucault, 1994). The call to increased self-knowledge
invokes the ideal psychological, reflexive self, engaged in the project of self-improvement
as it relates to sex (Riley, Evans, & Robson, 2019). Accordingly, the labour involved in
having good sex and, by association, enhancing a sense of desire, is linked not just to regu-
lating behaviours but also effecting inner change such as “increasing the number of sexual
thoughts that you have” (Article 18-A). This imperative for emotional transformation is
common in the data and has also been noted in previous analyses of magazine articles
(e.g., Barker et al., 2018; Gill, 2009).
Given the focus on psychological labour and personal development, many of the texts
were instructional in which experts like sex therapists and sexologists identified areas of
sexual selfhood and performance to be worked on to improve one’s sex life and ultimately
become “sexually enlightened” (Article 18-S). Such work has been called a “technology
of sexiness” in which women work on themselves in order to produce themselves into the
desired, and desirable, sexual subjectivity of an agentic, up-for-it, sexually savvy pleasure
pursuer (Evans & Riley, 2014; Gill, 2009; Radner, 2008). These technologies are often pro-
foundly heteronormative and consumerist (Evans & Riley, 2014; Harvey & Gill, 2011), as
evidenced in our data in instances where, as part of the labour of the sexual connoisseur,
women are tasked with buying sex toys, lingerie, or novelty lubricants to enhance sex
with male partners. Such products were constructed as widening one’s sexual repertoire
and, implicitly, keeping male partners satisfied, as shown in the extract below:

I was recently talking to a wife about how her husband is constantly trying to put her legs
over his shoulders. For years, it wasn’t her favourite position because, well, everybody
ain’t a gymnast, ya know? But once she invested into a sex pillow that supported her
back while elevating her body, it became an instant go-to for her as well. (Article 20-E)

There are some elements of the “Working on it woman” present here regarding the
sexual labour required of women. But where the “Working on it woman” is focused
14 Feminism & Psychology 0(0)

on increasing her desire for sex to match her male partner’s, here, the change made
(buying the sex pillow) is framed as her further development as an active sexual
subject in pursuit of her own pleasure, since it becomes a “go-to for her as well.”
However, the narrative is also about fulfilling her husband’s desires, who is described
as “constantly” trying a position she did not like. Rather than problematising his
behaviour, responsibility for resolving the problem is placed on the woman. The solu-
tion of buying a product, using the language of economy (“invest”), creates a highly
individualised, consumerist solution. This extract also shows how the “Sexual con-
noisseur’s” experiences of desire were often discussed in relation to men and men’s
pleasure, in similar ways to the previous subject positions. Thus, despite a focus on
her own desire and the construction of an agentic, self-directed female sexuality—
in sharp contrast to the “Made by the male gaze” subjectivity—the “Sexual connois-
seur” was often (but not always) directed to prioritise male pleasure.
In sum, this subject position allows for female desire in and of itself, as women are
enjoined to learn how to increase the quality of their sex, maximise their pleasure, and
connect with their inner selves to unlock their sexual expertise (Ménard & Kleinplatz,
2008; Moran & Lee, 2011). The “Sexual connoisseur” subject position we identify in
mainstream mediated sex advice contrasts somewhat with Harvey and Gill’s (2011)
“Sexual entrepreneur” in that the subject already views herself as desirable but requires
skills and resources to maintain her desirability. As Evans and Riley (2014) argued, the
sexual connoisseur is the quintessential neoliberal subject perpetually labouring to be, do,
and have more in the face of the threat that one will never be good enough or able to
obtain sexual contentment. Thus, the compulsory performance of sexual expertise reflects
the requirement to constantly work on oneself that is central to the postfeminist sensibility
pervading these texts (Evans & Riley, 2014; Gill, 2007). The “Sexual connoisseur”
subject position interpellates women to meet ever-increasing demands and expectations
placed upon them and simultaneously creates the possibility for readers to understand
themselves as failures if they do not successfully, continuously engage in this labour
on the sexual self.

Concluding discussion
Our Foucauldian-informed analysis of mediated sexual subjectivities focused on the
largely unexplored area of online media (a notable exception being Farvid and
Braun’s, 2014, analysis of online casual sex advice). Our focus on subject positions is
relatively novel to this area of scholarship and allowed us to clearly see what kind of
subject is constructed and interpellated in mediated sex advice circulating online. An ana-
lysis of this nature gives a unique perspective on how readers might see themselves
reflected in and through these positions. We can understand not only how desire is con-
structed, but how women might adopt particular subject positions to make sense of them-
selves and their sexual subjectivities, and consider the potential implications for the
readers of these texts.
Our analysis indicates that a discourse of women’s desire may not be missing, as
shown in earlier analyses of women’s sexual subjectivities (Fine, 1988), but it is certainly
Tappin et al. 15

stifled. All the subject positions we identified allow female sexual desire and agency,
since each expects women to want to enjoy sex. This gives the advice we analysed a
broadly sex-positive, feminist orientation. Yet, as we showed, even within such an orienta-
tion, women’s pleasure is consistently rendered secondary to that of men, with some accounts
“grooming” women into accepting sexual coercion, and reinforcing rape myths. Sex and
desire were bound tightly in binary logic, perpetuating a relentlessly hetero-gendered narra-
tive that is supported by discourses appearing in media analyses for over 20 years (Farvid &
Braun, 2006, 2014; Gill, 2009; Potts, 1998). Therefore, rather than the internet broadening
possible sexual subjectivities for women, we show an intensification of a particular narrative
of female desire as constructed through, and in inescapable reference to, male pleasure. This
strictly limits possibilities for sexuality and desire.
Importantly, our findings add to the scholarship by highlighting how the re/production
of this narrow framing of female desire in mainstream online media is enabled and
achieved within an overarching postfeminist sensibility. The discursive reappropriation
of feminist rhetoric of female empowerment, gender norms, and sexual liberation in
mainstream media, postfeminist scholars have argued, enables sexist constructions of
women’s desire, sexual subjectivity, and practice. It is the seemingly feminist framing
that allows such advice to be given, and heard, in our contemporary moment (Gill,
2009; Riley, Evans, & Robson, 2019). Established discourses of sexuality (e.g., medical-
isation, biological essentialism) are reproduced and made over as they interconnect with
newer, contemporary discourses (e.g., postfeminism, neoliberalism, healthism). These
accounts were further supported with reference to expert authorities, who often reproduce
dated popular psychology such as Mars/Venus male and female sexuality.
The resultant subject positions bid female-identified readers to work on themselves in
the pursuit of gendered normalcy. The embedding of men’s pleasure as an innate priority
negates women’s desire, limiting sexual agency, expression, and subjectivity. And just as
McRobbie (2007) argued that the postfeminist sexual contract allows women public par-
ticipation only if existing within nonthreatening parameters, our work demonstrates that
women can hold agentic sexual subjectivities if they still focus on pleasing men. In much
the same way as heterosexuality was assumed in the articles, race or ethnicity were rarely
mentioned. Our interpretation of this is that failing to mention ethnicity created a White
norm, rendering racialised women as Other (Hines, 2019, 2020). This highlights the need
for future research on the racialised constructions of online sex advice.
The promise of online media to expand the range of available representations and
choices for women has, therefore, not been delivered in mainstream digital media. The
widely circulated content aimed at women, mostly generated in the United States,
simply repackages many of the ideas evident in print media for decades, reproducing a
limited set of Western (specifically North American) discourses and subject positions.
What is different in the new media landscape is content delivery algorithms and per-
sonalised advertising; clicks beget clicks and amplify these limited cis-centric, hetero-
gendered accounts of female desire. Given that what ultimately drives the dissemination
of ideas and discourse online is the popularity of content, as clicks are tied to advertising
revenue and product sales, we must infer that this well-worn narrative is commercially
beneficial for media companies (Bradley, 2015; Chaffey & Ellis-Chadwick, 2019).
16 Feminism & Psychology 0(0)

The question, then, is how the largely unchanging narrative, with its relentlessly hetero-
normative focus on male desire, might be disrupted and resisted. To address this question, it
would be fruitful to explore alternative online media that often resist dominant discourses
and incorporate diverse representations of sexuality, as well as gender, race, and other
social locations that rarely feature in our data. This would be a significant next step in
this underresearched area of online media, potentially identifying new and more empower-
ing ways for women (broadly understood) to construct agentic sexual subjectivities. Such
content is largely produced by independent or smaller scale online writers, and is therefore
pushed outside the default algorithmic choice, hence its absence from our data corpus.
Analysis of nonmainstream or alternative media could identify possible resistant discourses
with more liberatory sexual subjectivities and determine how to amplify these. It might be
here, for example, where discussions of how power intersects with hetero-sex in response to
the #MeToo movement would be circulated, which was absent in our corpus.
It would also be useful to expand research beyond text-based analysis and consider
other online platforms where sex advice circulates through image, video, and text
(e.g., TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube). Doing so is important for the underresearched
area of online media given rapidly changing online engagement trends, especially in rela-
tion to young people. At the same time, we must also find ways to challenge and persuade
mainstream media outlets to move away from the limiting, relentlessly normative dis-
courses of heterosex.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article.

Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

ORCID iDs
Jessica Tappin https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7170-0520
Sarah Riley https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6712-6976
Tracy Morison https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9088-1662

Supplemental material
Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Note
1. This paper analyses mainstream media which tends to use binary terms such as women, men,
boyfriend etc. Therefore, we have used these terms for reference throughout. However, we rec-
ognise that this is problematic and have included this critique in our analysis.
Tappin et al. 17

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Author Biographies
Jessica Tappin is a PhD candidate in the School of Psychology at Massey University
(Aotearoa/New Zealand). Her research is focused on sexual desire and the social dis-
courses that define and delimit women’s experiences of embodied pleasure. Her research
takes a postfeminist and neoliberal perspective within the broader area of critical health
psychology.

Sarah Riley is a Professor in Critical Health Psychology at Massey University, New

Zealand. Her work is on identity issues around gender, embodiment, health, and citizen-
ship, often from a poststructuralist perspective and contextualised within neoliberalism
and postfeminism. Her coauthored books include Critical Bodies: Representations,
Practices and Identities of Weight and Body Management (Palgrave MacMillan,
2008); Doing Your Qualitative Research Project (Sage, 2012); Technologies of
Sexiness: Sex, Identity and Consumer Culture (Oxford University Press, 2014); and
Postfeminism and Health (Routledge, 2018).

Tracy Morison is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology at Massey University

(Aotearoa/New Zealand) and an Honorary Research Associate of the Critical Studies in
Sexualities and Reproduction programme at Rhodes University (South Africa), where she
obtained her PhD. She uses in-depth qualitative methodologies, underpinned by feminist
and other critical theories, to investigate topics related to gender, sexualities, and repro-
duction. She has also written on qualitative methodology and feminist theory.
20 Feminism & Psychology 0(0)

Appendix

Table A1. Full references for included extracts.

Article Title Website Country Type

18-A Low Libido? The 8 Reasons Why dailymail.co.uk UK News media

You’re Not in the Mood for Sex
18-B Most People Have Unsatisfying insidehook.com USA News media
Sex. Here’s What to Do About
It
18-C How to Initiate a Conversation mindbodygreen.com USA Blog
About Sexual Desires,
According to a World-Famous
Relationship Expert
18-G Here’s What a Man Perceives huffpost.com USA News media
When a Woman Wears Red
18-H How to Fix Sexual Problems in a thefix.com USA News media
Relationship
18-I 5 Signs You’re More Than Just a womenworking.com USA Blog
Friend (but He’s Afraid to Take
It to the Next Level)
18-L Sex Advice With Suzi Godson: irishexaminer.com Ireland News media
Pressure of a Romantic
Weekend Puts Me Off
18-M 15 Ways to Prep Your Man From metro.style The Online
Morning to Sex Philippines magazine
18-S Can Being More Mindful Make Sex thelily.com USA News media
Better?
18-U Can an Orgasm a Day Keep My bbc.co.uk UK News media
Stress Away?
18-V I Orgasm Every Single Time I Have womenshealthmag.com USA Online
Sex magazine
19-A Deconstructing Sex Drive: What everydayhealth.com USA Blog
Your Libido Says About Your
Health
19-B Women’s Sexual Desire Is sexualityresource.com USA Product blog
Different
19-M How to Have Great Sex: Sex womanandhome.com USA Online
Advice for Grown Ups magazine
19-S The Guide to Living Orgasmically sakara.com USA Product blog
20-A Why Men Are Hot for Sex but huffpost.com USA News media
Women Warm to It
20-B “Sex Meditation” Is a Thing—and glamour.com UK Online
It Totally Changed My Sex Life magazine
20-D Your Dry Vagina Could Be … The https://bleucares.com India Product blog

(continued)
Tappin et al. 21

Table A1. Continued

Article Title Website Country Type

Culprit for Your Murdered Sex

Life
20-E So, Who Wants to Have Some xonecole.com USA Blog
Really Good Valentine’s Day Sex
20-K 18 Tips for a Better Orgasm marieclaire.com USA Online
magazine
20-M This Is the Key to Female Orgasm, huffingtonpost.co.uk UK News media
Say Sex Experts
20-N Sex Tips for Women Health and womenfitness.net USA Online
Happiness magazine
20-S Why Sex and Masturbating Feel So instyle.com USA Online
… Different magazine
20-T 20 Best Foreplay Tips for Women promescent.com USA Product blog
to Please Him in Bed
20-Y Live Better: Ladies, Meet the beekeepersnaturals.com Canada Product blog
Hidden Force Behind Your Sex
Drive

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