Abstract
Mainstream and pornographic images and practice norms are becoming increasingly blurred (Paasonen et al., 2007), while sexual entrepreneurship discourses (Gill, 2009) promote ongoing sexual self-transformation. Women’s sexuality, specifically, is expected to be proficient and perpetually practising. We examine what the mainstreaming of pornography means for sexual desire and agency among 27 young women negotiating heterosex. Participants’ accounts of sexuality and pornography are reflected in a (dis)ordering porn interpretive repertoire. Porn is positioned alternately as: ridiculous and recapitulated performance; a (contested) arousal tool; pedagogy and pictogram; and (resisted) re-enactment pressure. Pornography’s regulatory effects are both rejected and recapitulated. Whether they use porn as a template for sexual possibilities or decry its codes as undesirable, porn acts as an unavoidable cultural reference point for considering sexuality for these young women. A sexual syntax that draws on pornographic images and tropes for sexual desire, pleasure and agency is described.
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