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The need to understand current changes in the construction of intimate and sexual relations has been central for many authors (Giddens 1992, Beck and Gernsheim 1995, Plummer 1995, Bauman 2003). In the past, the heterosexual couple has represented the privileged alliance of intimacy and sexuality, but recently the varieties of intimacy and sexuality, as well as care and friendship, have proliferated in decisive and unpredictable ways and in new kinds of alliances and relationships (Andersen 2003, Roseneil 2000). Despite these changes in attitudes and practices and despite the widespread depiction of intimacy and sexuality in culture and the media, the normative expectation that remains dominant politically, culturally and emotionally is that intimacy and sexuality belong in the private sphere.

Sexualisation implies a step further in the medialization and commercialization of intimacy and sexuality as an offer to broad groups of audiences. The trend toward sexualisation in the market economy implies “a shift from a relational to a recreational model of sexual behaviour, a reconfiguration of erotic life in which the pursuit of sexual intimacy is not hindered but facilitated by its location in the marketplace” (Bernstein 2001, 397). Likewise, the trend of sexualisation implies a shift in outlook from one based on morals and ethics to one based on taste and aesthetics, and it also implies the breakdown of those norms and regulations that were supposed to keep obscenity at a distance (Arthurs 2004, Attwood 2006, Juffer 1998). Although sexualisation is primarily understood as mainstream, commercial phenomena, this trend is apparent in the entire cultural field including middle and high culture such as literature, theatre and the arts as well. A variety of ideas about sexuality, sexualized aesthetics and sexualized modes of communication create the framework for sexualisation in culture and media, in all genres, and formats.

Brian McNair uses the term “pornographisation of the mainstream” to describe sexualisation of both the arts and popular culture, a development he sees as concurrent with an expansion of the “pornosphere” which provides easy access to so-called obscene representations (McNair 1996, 23). Both these representational trends are understood by McNair as a movement in the direction of a “striptease culture” as the last step in the commercialization of sexuality and as part of a broader engagement in “public intimacy” in Western capitalist societies (2002, 87, 98).

Susanna Paasonen and Kaarina Nikunen, introduce the concept “pornification” in an analysis of popular culture genres in Finland that are characterized by visual material with explicit modes of representation and aesthetics that are borrowed from pornography (Passonen & Nikunen 2006, 2007). The close semantic relationship between ‘pornification’ and ‘pornography’ restricts the connotation of first the first term in a similar manner as with ‘pornographization’.

I want to propose mainstream sexualisation as an alternative term for the broad engagement and diversity of representations of sexuality in high and low culture. The terms pornographisation or pornification seem too narrow to encom pass sexualization because its associations and meanings tend to be limited to the generic conventions of pornography which are relatively resistant to change (Arthurs 2004, 43). Neither the aesthetics of the existing diversity of representations about sexuality, nor the range of content and forms of address can be reduced to the list of representational conventions that are typical for what is commonly understood as pornography. The terms pornographization and pornification connote mainstream commercial heterosexual pornography and its generic gendered structuralism, limited content, stylized aesthetic and stereotypical modes of address. ²

It is true as McNair argues that representational modes that traditionally were limited to the genre of pornography are leaking into mainstream media blurring the boundaries between porn and mainstream culture. Even so, it is still the case that mainstream media avoid explicit hard-core pornographic representations – even if some soft-core aesthetics are blending into mainstream culture.³ On the other hand, mainstream sexualisation, which is the focus of this article, is not limited to hard- or soft-core pornographic visual elements. Mainstream sexualisation includes instead a much wider range of discourses and public interest in sexuality and intimacy related to transformations in practices, values, communicative modes and aesthetics. Since pornography traditionally has been censored or regulated by law (and partly still is) and still inhabits a relatively low status in the cultural hierarchies, the connotations associated with both pornification and pornographization restrict an understanding of the range of cultural and societal meanings of representations of sexuality in media and culture today.