From 2015... Walking a fine line: Young people negotiate pornified heterosex

From 2015... Walking a fine line: Young people negotiate pornified heterosex. Monique Mulholland. Sexualities, 2015, Vol. 18(5/6) 731–74. DOI: 10.1177/1363460714561721

Abstract: Heteronormal histories have been shaped by a recurring set of debates about what
kinds of explicit sexual expression and representation are publicly allowed, structured
by a form of line-drawing that sanctions certain forms of public heterosexual practice in
popular culture and representation. While depictions of heterosexual activity in popular
cultural representations are tolerated within certain parameters, and while such
parameters around what is possible and acceptable have shifted over time in
Anglophone discourses of sexuality, overtly pornographic depictions are consistently
cast as a non-normative, deviant form of heterosexual expression.
Over the past decade, the emergence of ‘pornified’ culture prompts us to ask new
kinds of questions about heterosexual practice, pointing to some interesting transgressive potentials. What happens when a historically non-normative form of public sexual
expression attains a measure of social acceptability? Does this challenge the historical
signifiers of good heterosex? To explore these questions, this article draws on a study
with young people aged 12–16 in South Australian schools who have some interesting
things to say about the ‘explicit’ in public. They describe an alteration to the historical
relegation of explicit porn sex to secret private spaces, and articulate how pornified
culture works as moments for curious exploration: a fun, fleshy spectacle. However, in
making this claim, I (and they) walk a careful line. The extent to which heterosexual
porn can be a matter of ‘fun’ and experimentation is simultaneously moderated
by historically persistent signifiers of classed and gendered respectability. While the
repertoire for open acknowledgment of certain forms of play and pleasure may be
opening up (perhaps disrupting existing orthodoxies of heteronormativity in some
key ways), heteronormal conventions simultaneously constrain these possibilities.

Keywords: Gender resistance, heteronormativity, pornography, pornification, respectability, young
people