Mediated intimacy: Sex advice in media culture

摘要

"The bold argument of this book", claim the authors of Mediated intimacy: Sex advice in media culture, "is that media of various kinds play an increasingly important role in shaping people's knowledges, desires, practices and expectations about intimate relationships" (p. 1). Whereas we once received our information about sex and sexuality from sex education classes, our families and our peers, it is now the media that play the primary role in forming our ideas about what sex is and, more importantly, should be. Given that "we live in a world suffused and saturated with representations of intimate relationships" (p. 24), we have to move beyond the term 'sex advice' when describing these representations and instead think about the recent proliferation of media depictions of sex and intimacy as forms of 'mediated intimacy'. The term 'mediated intimacy', therefore, refers to discourses of intimacy (which in mainstream culture mostly refers to sex and sexuality) as they appear in film, television, popular literature (e. g., chick lit and sex-advice books), websites, social media platforms, podcasts, blogs, smart-phone applications, and so on. Within these different genres, intimacy is not only didactically taught but is also represented non-pedagogically. The book's mission is to analyze these various discourses and in doing so it provides a timely and insightful critique of both the hegemonic and alternative ways sex and intimacy are conceived within contemporary culture.