The Social Construction of Female Sexuality in Teenage Magazines

 

Linda McLoughlin

Liverpool Hope University College

 

ABSTRACT

 

Since the early 1990s there have been an increasing number of features appearing in British magazines aimed at girls of teen age years or younger which offer various forms of sexual knowledge. Such material is controversial because of the social and cultural climate in which it takes place. Social anxieties concerning precocious sexual maturity and the loss of innocence in teenage girls have caused a moral panic in Britain. In a context of anxiety about the sexual ‘abuse’ of children by adults any material with a sex content, directed at children, is axiomatically subject to censure. The sex information, hereafter referred to as the ‘sex special’ has opened up an interesting site for cultural analysts in the light of allegations that the purveyors of mass culture are complicit in the sexualisation of young girls.

 

The primary aim of my research is to investigate the social construction of female sexuality through teenage magazines and to gain an insight into how ‘sex specials’ are consumed by their readers. The intensification of interest in sex within teenage magazines has raised tremendous public concern but little has been written about the ways in which sexuality is represented or about how the readers themselves make sense of such texts. This paper will include a short discussion of the public debates about sex in teenage magazines and the academic accounts that have been offered and, within that context, characterise the range of materials on offer through the various magazines available to a British readership. The approach adopted comprises two components: one focuses upon texts (sex specials in teenage girls’ magazines) which are subjected to detailed analysis using Critical Discourse Analysis and one focuses upon the readers of those same texts: tape recorded discussions amongst groups of readers are explored in relation to the findings from the textual study. It is the latter component that will be the focus of this paper.

 

The data for discussion comprises focus group ethnography leading to the qualitative analyses of discussions of selected ‘sex specials’ with two groups of young women magazine readers. The method of data analysis was aided with the computer programme NUD*IST. The research, seen from the perspective of sociolinguistics, represents an attempt to apply the methods of critical discourse analysis to the analysis of sexuality as it is represented within teenage magazines. From this perspective the fieldwork element involving focus groups represents an attempt to do what many critical discourse analysts advocate but rarely attempt, that is, to explore, via reception analysis, the interpretive systems of the actual readers of texts. From this perspective the focus group component is more than just a corrective to the dangers of interpretive excess in CDA but an equally weighted part of an enquiry into representations of sexuality in teenage girls magazines, focusing upon the reception of sexually explicit materials. Two broad categories ‘evaluation’ and ‘subject positioning’ were constructed in order to code the data generated in the discussions. ‘Evaluation’, deals with how the young women judged the material. The data was further coded into three sub-categories ‘transgression’, ‘regulation’ and ‘emancipation’. ‘Transgression’ deals with comments where the young women consider the material to violate moral standards in relation to sex. ‘Regulation’ is where they talk about the protective nature of the material. ‘Emancipation’ is where they explore the libratory potential of the material.

The category ‘subject positioning’ coded all the data which considered the relationship between the text producer and reader by examining the subject position(s) adopted on reading. This data was further coded into ‘ideal reader’, ‘aware reader’, and ‘resistant reader: critical’. The ideal reader might engage with the text in an uncritical manner and adopt the position of the ‘ideal subject’. For example, she may not see through the synthesised relationship that the text producer attempts to construct. The ‘aware reader’ may be aware of the strategies used by the text producer such as ‘synthetic personalisation’. For example, she may recognise that since the text producer cannot possibly know her personally the relationship enacted therefore is of course a false one. Such a reader may be aware of the strategies used and the ideological messages permeating the text but not necessarily critical of them. The ‘critical reader’ may adopt a critical position, in other words, she may be aware of the strategies used by the text producer and in addition she may be critical of the messages encoded in the text. I will discuss my finding that no group and no individual were consistently in one of these positions but rather subject positions were continually shifting. I will also discuss dynamics within the group. Finally, I will explain the ways in which the focus group discussions confirmed or refuted my own analyses of the texts.