Mediated Sex

Mediated sex is everywhere. In popular cinema and television, the press, pop music and advertising, images of sexuality abound. Pornography has spread, not only in its mainstream, heterosexist forms, but in gay communities and in "porn for women". Cable and satellite television and the coming of the Internet have intensified the trend. It is about the proliferation of sexual discourse in all these variants, from pornography as narrowly defined to the "s/m chic" of advertising and the art of Jeff Koons and Madonna. This work examines the place of these representations in late 20th-century, post-HIV and AIDS culture, and in the context of the history of sexual representation from Greek antiquity onwards. With reference to examples from the USA and the UK, the book aims to assess the many contradictory and conflicting claims made about the impact of sexual representation on individuals and societies.