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The book Rosa Prosa presents “a varied and unique picture of female excitement”, according to the book’s blurb. Launched on Women’s Day on the 8^th of March 2006, this new-feminist anthology represents a thematic and aesthetic examination of sexuality and subjectivity from the perspectives of a new generation of feminists and contains a mixture of genres: fictional and autobiographical pieces as well as essays. Nine of the sixteen texts are different versions of the autobiographical or the personal genres. The texts focus for example on the first orgasm, sexual experimentation in childhood, lesbian sex, the use of pornography and the relationship between equality ideals, sexuality and feminism. Several texts also focus upon the ways in which knowledge about how desire and the grammar of sexual pleasure is intertwined in gendered power relations and sexism splits the female subject. Norwegian state-feminist ideology dismissed this insight into the discursive heritage of sexual pleasure, by programmatically taking a stance against pornography and mainstream sexualisation. According to the young authors, this comes near to a denial of women’s desire and sexuality:

I have been brought millimeters away from orgasm in a sexy role-play – when the irritating matter-of-fact voice inside my head reminds me that the power-relations between the role-characters are based upon gender-roles from the stone-age. (Aurdal 2006, 63-64)

Another theme in the book concerns how discources about freedom and liberation are closely related to sexual self-realization. This is experienced as a cultural call for confessions and social transparency:

Somebody sees you. The eye knows if you are one of those who enjoys being taken while you hang down from a seesaw in the ceiling and someone is playing ‘Sex-Bomb’ on the stereo. The eye knows everything about desire. (Bache-Wiig 2006, 21-22)

Rosa Prosa illustrates that it is fairly meaningless to limit the use of the term sexualisation to popular or low-culture representations. Criticism and experimentation are not limited to the arts and the avant-garde aesthetic. Commercial mass culture can be inspired by art and criticism – and vice versa. Despite this late-modern disorder in the cultural field, Rosa Prosa due to its mixing of essays and popularized, sexualized confessions, was with few exceptions firmly dismissed by intellectuals, commentators and critics. Several commentators criticized the focus on sexuality and autobiographical ‘confessions’ as the final abdication of feminism from politics, and the authors were accused of writing about a banal, pedagogic romanticism of liberation.¹⁰ Inger Bentzrud wrote in Dagbladet that “today, the freedom of women is apparently about masturbation…” (Bentzrud 2006), and Cathrine Krøger in the same newspaper called the authors “daughters (of the 1970s) who are using their women’s liberation to wallow in porn and dirty words” (Krøger 2006). She then continued as follows:

I believe the tyranny of confessions and the making public of privacy consumes the individual. … And here I do, then, see no significant difference between the Rosa Prosa-girls’ written confessions about their sex lives and the visualization of the same done by the reality stars. (Krøger 2006)

The critic Ingunn Økland in the national newspaper Aftenposten wrote:

A handful of Norwegian women become further liberated by telling about the day when they discovered the clitoris … Young feminists are able to publicly rejoice in their own sex organs, apparently without worrying about the fact that others are being mutilated. (Økland 2006)

These arguments presuppose that the book’s personal focus on intimacy, sex, orgasm or porn cannot possibly have any feminist potential¹¹ and disregard the fact that by using the autobiographical genre, the authors also reflect upon which sexual norms and regulations are normalized and which ones lead to shame, power, conformity or independence, desire and experimentation.

The book’s focus on the personal sexual experiences and reflections of young women led the literary critic Susanne Christensen to remark that “in a pedagogical manner, these texts intend to enlighten the reader about the true, culturally repressed, disgusting female lust” (Christensen 2006). According to Christensen, the texts appear in a Foucault-inspired perspective as ‘overrepresentation’ and ‘over-enlightenment’ and represent accordingly “the real enemies of sexuality in the modern [world]”. This argument implies that personal stories of intimacy and sexuality in the late modern media culture, as exemplified byRosa Prosa, should be dismissed as imitations of commercialization as well as the normative sexuality of our time.

Intellectuals’ apparent dismissal of a public sexual culture, possibly with the exception of the transgressive aesthetics and narrow circulation of the art-field, creates – the way I see it – a few problems. First, broadly accessible mainstream representations appear almost as self-contained systems of signification. This implies a logic where changes in signification or destabilisation can exclusively come from outside of the dominant norms and mainstream cultural discourses. We have, then, entered mutually exclusive dualisms between the subversive and repressive. Second, we might consider whether the critiques regard silence concerning personal experiences and sexuality as a counterstrategy facing the overrepresentation of sexuality in the media. Such a ‘counterstrategy’ does coincide with what constitutes the binary relationship between the public and the private: In critical debate, this quite simply implies that sexuality is and should be private. In the essay “Sex in Public”, queer theorists Laurent Berlant and Michael Warner show how the privatization of sexuality leads to an instinctive dismissal of a public sexual culture (Berlant & Warner 2002 [1998]). In other words, critics’ resistance to personal and autobiographical discourses on sexuality apparently coincides with this conventional hetero-normative aversion against public representations and discourses about sexuality. This self-imposed norm of silence also implies that the representation of sexuality is left to the art world where sexual transgressions and autobiographical experiences are welcomed by the critics on the one side, and by commercial low culture on the other. For middlebrow culture, however, the critics recommend silence.

In this sense, it is rather paradoxical that Foucault’s pointing out of the fact that the representations of sexuality are not necessarily liberating is picked up as an argument by the critics in favour of norms of silence so as not to add to the commercialization of sexuality (Foucault 1990 [1976]). Instead, I will suggest that there are good reasons why we need a vital mainstream public sexual culture that is not referred to as low culture.