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Sexualization of mainstream media refers to the way that sex has become more visible in contemporary Western mainstream media in recent years. Other interchangeable terms are pornification, pornographication, and porno chic, which more specifically describe a fascination in contemporary media with sexually explicit styles of representation and the use of pornographic content or style in popular cultural forms.

Sexualization takes a number of forms that can be categorized in the following way:

- The expansion of pornography and other sexually explicit media representations and their increased accessibility to a wider group of consumers, principally via the Internet.

- A corresponding increase in the visibility, accessibility, and acceptability of commercial sex products, services, and pursuits. In particular, sex toys for women are now available on the main streets in many places. Escort agencies, sex parties, sex tours, and lap dancing clubs are expanding, and older forms of sexual performance such as burlesque are being revived and mainstreamed. In some instances, this involves their repositioning as leisure pursuits for women. For example, pole dancing is now packaged as a form of exercise, and classes are available in burlesque dance and striptease, erotic writing and sexual techniques. Many sex shops actively court female consumers, often through the development of a "feminine aesthetic."

- The integration of media and communication technologies with sexual practice. The increasing accessibility of video and digital technologies has, for example, made it possible for people to make and circulate their own pornography or to include recording and viewing within their sexual encounters. New communication technologies have also become part of people's sex lives, often providing new types of sexual encounters such as phone sex, e-mail affairs, and cybersex. In these instances, sexual representation, communication, and practice are blurred.

- A growing public preoccupation with sexual values, practices, and identities, often in the form of sex scandals and moral panics around sex. Sex has become a staple ingredient in newspapers, magazines, films, and television programs, most notably in confessional talk shows and media coverage of celebrities.

Although a public fascination with sex and sexuality dates back to the 19th century, the more recent process of sexualization can be linked to contemporary concerns with image, lifestyle, and self-exposure. To this extent, sex is becoming a question of aesthetics rather than ethics and a means of public rather than private self-expression. While it retains many of its former cultural meanings, chiefly as an expression of desire and/or love between two people, it also takes on a new significance as a hedonistic practice, freed from reproduction, kinship, or close relationship--a form of recreation rather than relation. In this sense, contemporary sexuality is becoming a form of auto-sexuality, the purpose of which is self-pleasure and self-expression. Representations of and discussions about sexuality increasingly link to consumer culture, presided over by a range of cultural intermediaries who are joining, and in some cases replacing, the moral and medical experts who were previously the custodians of this kind of public expression. To some extent, the cultural, moral, and medical significance of sex combines in contemporary thinking, with sex emerging as a form of self-care and route to self-development.

Sexualization raises questions about the role of the media, technology, and popular culture in sexual practices, relationships, and ethics that are important for academics, researchers, educators, policymakers, and the general public. Often, the context of the use of the term indicates a perception of it as a social problem, most frequently the ways in which the sexualization of particular social groups works to endanger, oppress, or limit them in some way. The extent to which sexualization is a democratizing force is a matter of dispute.

Some see it as part of a broader process in which ordinary people gain access to the means of reproducing sexual discourse and in which sex becomes a matter of more democratic public debate, in the process circulating more diverse and liberating ideas about sex and sexuality. Others argue that the only real significance of sexualization is an increasing commodification of sex and bodies, particularly those of girls and women, and that this involves little real equality or diversity. Despite different views, the sexualization of mainstream media and popular culture, coupled with the increasing difficulty of regulating these, requires that we rethink our inherited notions of sexual representation, regulation, and ethics.

Bibliography:

1) Attwood, Feona. 2006. "Sexed Up: Theorizing the Sexualization of Culture." Sexualities 9(1):7-94.

2) Bauman, Zygmunt. 1999. "On Postmodern Uses of Sex." Pp. 19-33 in Love and Eroticism, edited by M. Featherstone. London: Sage.

3) Giddens, Anthony. 1992. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.

4) Levy, Ariel. 2006. Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. London: Simon & Schuster.

5) McNair, Brian. 2002. Striptease Culture: Sex, Media and the Democratization of Desire. London and New York: Routledge.

6) Plummer, Kenneth. 2003. Intimate Citizenship: Private Decisions and Public Dialogues. Seattle, WA, and London: University of Washington Press.

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