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In June 2020, the hasthtag #TF1raciste began trending on French Twitter after the synopsis of a TV series broadcast on France’s first television channel described a female character of Maghrebi des...

The sexualization of girls, currently pervasive in our society, has entered the field of dance education with a vengeance. This critical issue is so ubiquitous as to have become normalized. After e...

Research on sexualized media content has largely neglected an important part of young people’s interactions with such content, namely whether and how young people are able to resist sexualization in the media and build resilience against its influence. This study is one of the first to investigate whether adolescent girls build such resilience by reading and sharing messages (e.g., videos, articles) on social media in which sexualization is criticized (i.e., counter-messages). A focus group study of 24 girls aged 12–17, showed that girls engage very little with counter-messages in social media. Explanations for this lack of engagement are related to uses and gratifications of social media (e.g., hedonic and utilitarian value), social influence processes (e.g., identification and compliance with social norms) and media literacy skills (e.g., perceived susceptibility to and awareness of sexualization).

This study seeks a deeper understanding of the associations between early adolescents’ encounter with sexualizing messages, both through media and peers, and self-sexualization (i.e., performing se...

Through an analysis of anti-suffrage arguments, I identify white supremacist tropes as an important strand in woman suffrage debates. I argue that sexualization and themes of home were signals to r...

Danielle Knafo’s “The Sexual Illusionist” is examined from the perspective of working unobtrusively with unsymbolized and unrepresented states in the register of enactment. Knafo’s paper offers a u...

This paper discusses the pain of oedipal exclusion, especially in relation to the felt loss of the maternal figure. When too acute, this loss may be defended against by omnipotent defenses of disav...

Through the analysis of two years of ethnographic observations and 40 in-depth interviews with a collective of Black and Puerto Rican exotic dancers (referred to herein as "Divine Dancers") who perform exotic dance for other women, this article explores how spatial expressions of sexuality within the context of a woman-only exotic dance venue enables both the resistance and reinforcement of circulating discourses of race, gender, and sexuality that construct sexual desirability under the male gaze. In contrast to literatures on exotic dance that center the heteromasculinist arrangement of the U.S. gentleman's club, this article centers the construction of a woman-only exotic dance space that is absent of men and white women. I situate this analysis within critiques put forward by the feminist sex wars to argue that space and place, in tandem with racialized sexualization, shapes women's potential to enact agency in the domain of exotic dance. In this article, I focus on the contestation of whiteness as a normative standard of beauty by Divine Dancers, and the ways in which norms regarding touch and intimacy are regulated within this exotic dance setting, which I argue allows for new interactions between dancers and audience members. This article disrupts binary understandings of exotic dance as either exploitative or demeaning, focusing instead on dancers' interpretations of agency as expressed through the body in space. I find that the extent to which Divine Dancers find this spatial context sexually empowering is shaped through gendered sexuality and their experiences with racialized sexualization.

Fail videos showing mishaps/accidents are very popular on YouTube. But is this genre affected by sexism, that is, are women portrayed more often than men in an objectifying, sexualized manner in th...

This essay analyzes the representation of female figures in two films of the New Romanian Cinema (NRC), Cristian Mungiu’s Occident (2002) and Radu Muntean’s Boogie (2008). Drawing on Karen Hollinge...

This article explores the anti-‘sexualization of childhood’ rhetoric that has circulated in Australia since the publication of the Corporate Paedophilia report in 2006. I argue that this rh...

This article deploys the recent assault of Audrey Stevenson at The Potter’s House, Fort Worth as an entry point to explore the relationship between the sexualization of and violence against Black w...

This article treats sexualization in the work of Heinz Kohut and argues that his ideas remain relevant. We identify the psychological sequence that leads to sexualization; emphasize the fluid relat...

© 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Media effects research has confirmed that sexualizing media exposure can negatively affect preteens’ body image and sexual development. While there is a link between sexualizing content and adverse outcomes such as self-objectification and body dissatisfaction, an interest in sexual media content is a normal part of healthy sexual development during the preteen years. Hence, research is needed that examines the variety in preteens’ sexual media diet thereby addressing the subtleties involved in sexualizing media. To what extent do sexual content, appearance-related content, sexual objectification, and objectification occur in Flemish preteens’ favorite TV shows? And, how are these different types of content related to gender roles? Seeking to address these questions, this article reports on a quantitative content analysis of 24 episodes from five TV shows popular among Flemish preteens. Drawing on a sample of 465 scenes, results demonstrated that one in five scenes contained sexual behavior, and one in ten contained sexual objectification. Male characters were sexually objectified as often as female characters. Women were more often judged for their appearance, but were also more often shown treating others as objects in a non-sexual way. Results are discussed in light of objectification and social cognitive theory, culminating in suggestions for future research and implications for parents. ispartof: Journal of Children and Media vol:12 issue:3 pages:346-365 status: published

Sexuality professionals are likely to experience unwanted sexualization based solely on their profession. Sexuality professionals are sexualized by various groups of people including strangers, col...

In this paper, I analyze the discourse of what I argue are two moral panics that played out in the Australian media during the period 2004–2015: the sexualization of children debate, and the sexting panic, which appeared some years later. I argue that while the issue of the alleged sexualization of children is nothing new, the way that the issue has been constructed in the media has shifted during the last decade, with greater focus on children’s use of technology. By comparing these two panics, we can diagnose a shift in the nature of mass-media-based panics, from concerns about external sources of sexualization to concerns about children’s own practices of self-representation via contemporary technologies. Both panics mobilized a range of broader social anxieties about the commodification and sexualization of culture and the increasing agency of children, and panics in relation to contemporary mobile technologies are a collective response to shifts in the power relations between children, their ...

To replicate and expand Reinhard’s 2009 study of video game avatar selection in gamers, a survey was developed that asked 282 respondents to select between sets of video game characters. In each pa...

Teen sexuality has been portrayed as dangerous (i.e., risk of pregnancy, STIs, sexual victimization for girls) yet pervasive in a growing post-feminist culture of sexualization. Adolescents are tasked with negotiating the difficult terrain of desire and danger as adults persistently construct contradictory discourses and panics around teen sexuality. This study examines a sample of online news media through a feminist intersectional lens, considering race, class, gender, and sexuality as mutually imbricated within dynamics of power, to analyze how contemporary news articles on teen sexuality construct adolescent sexuality at the intersection of neoliberalism and the sexual double standard. Our analysis revealed three particular moral panics around risk for girls: (1) pregnancy and STIs; (2) engagements in sexualization; and (3) sexual victimization. We illuminate how the sexual double standard and neoliberal notions of accountability reinstate and reproduce gendered, raced, and classed representat...

Sexualisation is changing the way we think about romantic love. According to recent research, young people are increasingly confronted by narrowing ideals of sexual attractiveness making romantic intimacy increasingly difficult (American Psychological Association, 2007) forcing a choice between “raunch or romance” (Bale, 2011). This article investigates the alleged distinction between romance and sexualisation, in the process challenging claims that the current crisis of sexualisation is a product of societal change in late modernity. Responding to a call to consider sexualisation from a hitherto neglected historical perspective (Egan and Hawkes, 2012), the paper employs critical discourse analysis to identify the formation of gendered meanings and practices in How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter, a late medieval advice text for young women, and twenty-first century advice from the MyBliss website. Focusing on sexualised clothing, contact with others, reputation, and social status, the paper argues that in both medieval and modern advice, discourses of romantic love and sexualisation are mutually dependent. In addition, similarities between medieval and modern advice reveal that our current sexualisation crisis is not solely a product of modern life, but is part of a longer pattern of gender normativity and inequality.

This study investigated the effects of exposure to self-sexualization on young adults’ thoughts and beliefs about gender and sexuality. An experiment in which participants viewed music videos featuring self-sexualization of female artists (experimental) or performance-based music videos of the same artists (control) revealed that the videos primed thoughts about sex, but not power. Among men who liked the artists, watching self-sexualizing music videos predicted modern sexism and the beliefs that sex is power for women, women are sex objects, and men are sex driven. Among women who liked the artists, watching self-sexualizing music videos predicted enjoyment of sexualization.

Worries about fashion imagery sexualizing children have become an integral part of contemporary media debates. Constructing a victim child robbed of her/his essential innocence, these complaints pa...

To test the belief that feminism and sexualization of women in advertising stand in opposition, this study employed a large US national sample (N = 1298) to examine how consumers’ feminist attitudes differentiate and predict their ethical judgment and ad-related evaluations of sexual images of women in advertisements. The results indicate that (1) consumers with higher feminist attitudes evaluated sexual ads more favorably than those having lower feminist attitudes, and (2) consumers’ feminist attitudes positively predict ad-related evaluations with full mediation of ethical judgment. These findings, which diverge from previous research, may indicate that contemporary feminists view sexual images of women differently than in previous decades. Theoretical and practical implications are described.

In this article, I examine fans’ consumption of mixed-race Japanese Brazilian female bodies in Japan. The article does this by examining two case-study representations of Japanese Brazilian female bodies: Miss Nikkei in Karen Tei Yamashita's mixed-media collection of essays and short stories, Circle K Cycles (2001); and performances by the Japanese idol group Linda Sansei (2013 debut). I argue that although the Japanese Brazilian population has largely been represented as minor characters in Japanese history, literature, and culture, the degree of consumption by fans belies this and points to the multiplicity of Japanese Brazilian identities. Moreover, the gendered, feminized body in these texts becomes a stereotyped, Orientalized, and fetishized Japanese body that is oftentimes juxtaposed to a sexualized, racialized Brazilian body. While this could distance fans and disavow the mixed-race Japanese Brazilian female body, Miss Nikkei and Linda Sansei perform gender and race in ways that demand recognition ...

This article introduces two new concepts—dispersed submission (DS) and sexation—in an interrogation of the general structures and nuanced practices of the global sex industry. There is considerable stress on the ways in which practices of domination during colonialism set up a form of racio-gendered ‘path dependence’ now imbricated in the current neoliberal global political economy. The arguments emerge from both material practices and careful consideration of the extant literature on the subject. One of the most significant aspects of the article is the effort to go beyond the already rich literature on the trafficking–sex-worker binary debate. Methodologically, the article employs a spacio-temporal model much informed by the work of Frantz Fanon and Fernand Braudel of the French Annales.

This study explored the perspectives of lesbian, bisexual, and queer women on the sexualization of women in media. Three focus groups at a Northeast university were attended by 12 sexual minority women who talked about their thoughts, feelings, and experiences related to sexualization. An interpretative phenomenological analysis revealed themes related to (1) how women and queer people are treated by the mainstream media; (2) the ways in which media compromises women's relationships to their own bodies and to other women; and (3) unique insights that queer sensibility contributes to the discourse of sexualization, including possibilities of empowering, transgressive female sexuality.

This paper critically analyzes the ‘top shelf’, where softcore pornography magazines are sold in convenience stores and newsagents. The top shelf is contextualized in relation to scholarship on pornography and the sexualization of culture, as well as retail spaces and commoditized sex. Drawing on feminist and queer theory, media studies and cultural geography, the top shelf is theorized as a public text shaped by the tension between pleasure and power in the form of patriarchal capital. Based on a reflexive participant observation of newsstands, a visual essay of the top shelf is presented as a record and a counterpoint for a critical discussion of two key semiotic characteristics of the top shelf. The first is the explicit branding of the top shelf as ‘for men only’, which privileges the heterosexual male gaze and attempts to exclude feminist and queer ways of looking. The second is the extent to which porn consumption is regulated and certain types excluded by the elevated placement of the top shelf. Th...

First I explore how far and in what way sexuality is considered within the theoretical framework and in key texts of the Person-Centered Approach. This is followed by a characterization of the natu...

An excess of sexualized images increasingly pervades public spaces in the United States, Europe and Australia. The article will discuss how the sexualized events of urban life have not only moved from the interior spaces of private consumption into public space but that the multi-modal proliferation of “hypersexualization” normalizes sexual transgression. A series of case studies will be analyzed through a feminist rubric to foreground emergent sociocultural sexualized systems “at play” in the city and will argue that sexualized urbanism legitimizes gender stereotypes and contributes to violence toward women.

In this article I advance an alternative exegesis of perverse sexuality that permits an analyst to regard it not from within a state of alarm but with the capacity to recognize perversity’s generative potential. Pleasure and pain are often approached as independent experiences that become soldered together under the aegis of trauma or pathology. In this essay, I argue that pleasure and pain are developmentally coextensive phenomena. I rely on Laplanche’s theory of infantile sexuality to suggest that the sexualization of suffering is developmentally installed in sexuality’s very ontology. Although frequently and reflexively conceptualized in psychoanalysis as a demise of the sexual function, perversity can be, I propose, oftentimes sexuality’s aspiration. Through its interembodied transgressiveness, perversion recruits the body’s materiality to perform meaningful psychic labor: to facilitate the transformation of intergenerational debts we have inherited from others in the form of enigmatic parental and cu...

The aim of this article is the presentation and interpretation of the coverage of female football players in the largest German boulevard paper (tabloid) during the 2011 FIFA Women’s World Cup. Main issues are the ways in which the players are portrayed and women’s football is ‘framed’. In addition, the article explores the self-presentations of the players and their reactions to the mediated messages and images. Drawing on constructivist approaches to gender, playing football is considered as a gender performance, staged by the players and presented as well as interpreted by the media. A content analysis of the BILD newspaper shows that the game and the players were ‘gendered’, meaning that their femininity was emphasized. In addition, the paper published texts and images with a focus on eroticism and sexuality. Some of the footballers complied with these framing strategies, while others rejected any sexualization with the argument: ‘We want to market our sport, not our looks’.

Centerfold images (i.e., still-shot depictions of lone, provocatively posed, scantily clad women) are one of the most enduring, pervasive, and popular forms of sexual media. This study measured young women's attitude toward the male gaze following exposure to centerfolds of varying explicitness. Explicitness was operationalized as degree of undress. Women exposed to more explicit centerfolds expressed greater acceptance of the male gaze than women exposed to less explicit centerfolds immediately after exposure and at a 48 hour follow-up. These results support the view that the more media depictions of women display women's bodies, the stronger the message they send that women are sights to be observed by others. They also suggest that even brief exposure to explicit centerfolds can have a nontransitory effect on women's sociosexual attitudes.

There is currently no validated model explaining the variability of sexual expression. This has created a scenario where sexuality, as a construct, is purely intuitive. Sexuality educators have frequently presented the Circles of Sexuality, a model that contends that sexuality is a combination of intimacy, sensuality, sexual health/behaviors, sexual identity, and sexualization. Adapting photovoice methodology and using the social media site Tumblr, the current analysis used this model to assess the social conceptualization of sexuality. Results indicate that the circles are unequally represented, with intimacy underrepresented and sexual identity overrepresented. Implications for sexuality educators, clinicians, and researchers are discussed.

In the past in Ireland, the very idea that sex could be enjoyed outside of the intent to procreate was dismissed. Contraception was only made legal in 1979 if prescribed by a medical professional a...

This piece is an experiment in a Gaga feminist reaction to the undertone of sex and sexuality in militarism in contemporary global politics. It looks at the sexualization of war/rape/porn, arguing that revealing and considering the grotesque is the only path to denormalize it.

Clinical observation and correlational studies with nonclinical samples suggest that a linkage between negative affective states (especially shame) and engagement in erotic pursuits typifies sexual compulsivity. The present study tested whether experimental induction of shame leads to increased interest in erotically suggestive targets among more sexually compulsive individuals. A total of 74 age-traditional heterosexual university students first recalled either an emotionally neutral or a shame-inducing personal experience, then completed a nonpredictive gaze-cueing task featuring flirtatious or emotionally neutral faces of the same or opposite sex. They also rated the faces' attractiveness and completed a validated sexual compulsivity scale and two control measures (executive control, sociosexuality). Higher (versus lower) sexual compulsivity predicted weaker gaze-triggered attentional orienting in response to the flirtatious opposite-sex face in the shame (versus neutral) condition, and this was accounted for by (higher) attractiveness ratings of the flirtatious opposite-sex face. Shame thus appears to increase sexualization (i.e., reduces salience of agentic features and increases appeal of physical attributes) of erotically suggestive targets among more sexually compulsive individuals.

This essay combines Burke's burlesque frame and Jamieson's double binds to create a hybrid gendered theory for rhetorically analyzing the aggressive sexualization of 2008 United States vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. The essay develops our theory titled the “burlesque binds” and explicates a specific form of a burlesque bind: the “MILF frame.” Palin's aggressively sexualized representation was united under the crass acronym MILF, which stands for “Mom I'd Like to Fuck.” The MILF frame emphasized Palin's feminine qualities, positioning her as a “trophy vice” with no political acumen, and highlighted her masculine behaviors, but deflated them through sexual objectification. The unification of the binds and burlesque theories reveals how Palin's role as a social actor was not simply circumscribed but shut down: she was deemed unfit by both masculine and feminine standards, by both public and private sphere conventions. Although Sarah Palin has arguably been the most prevalent subject of the politica...

Popular contemporary film and music aestheticize what is already well known throughout the Americas, but cannot be spoken at the state’s threshold: the global expansion of checkpoint architecture as the voyeuristic mechanism of state securitization. From Baauer’s Harlem Shake and Sean Paul’s She Doesn’t Mind, to Latin American films such as Maria Full of Grace and Por Sus Propios Ojos, I demonstrate the erotics of power simultaneously concentrated and disavowed within the space of the checkpoint. As a form of “security sexualization”, checkpoint technologies require the physical, optical or digital stripping of human bodies – a gatekeeping procedure of sovereign command, intrinsic to the satisfaction of security officials’ professional duties, in which denuding surveillance is rhetorically denied any sexual content. This article opens up critical discussion about the fantasy worlds of security sexualization as such, pointing attention to necessary filmic “abstractions” of the security state’s imposing hom...

In 1987, the face of British political life was forever changed when Diane Abbott became the first black woman elected to the House of Commons. Key to her work is her unwavering belief in making things better for others through determined advocacy combined with projects of social justice. Her longevity in the world of politics is in itself striking, and her loyalty to people and to her strong principles has consolidated a distinguished career as a parliamentarian, broadcaster and commentator. In this interview, Ms Abbott reflects upon the importance of calling herself a feminist and voices concerns about the sexualization of girlhood, an area she has particularly made her focus recently alongside her long-standing activism for young people and black children's education.

This study explores the culture of sexualizing the (female) body in music entertainment television. A quantitative content analysis was conducted, analyzing 9,369 scenes from 1,393 music videos and 180 programs, broadcast on Belgian music entertainment channels. Results indicated that 39.3% of the coded scenes contained sexualizing messages. These sexualizing messages were predominantly messages equating (female) Western body ideals to being sexually attractive. Music videos were shown to be a more sexualizing genre than nonfictional programs and fictional programs. Findings are discussed in light of objectification theory.

A number of scholars and journalists have argued that Western culture has become ‘sexualized’. Both women and men, they maintain, are highly sexualized in popular media. At the same time, scholars have examined the sexualization of women as part of a broader cultural ‘backlash’ against the gains of second-wave feminism and women's increasing power in society. We contribute to both of these fields with a longitudinal content analysis of four decades of Rolling Stone magazine covers. First, we analyze whether both women and men have become more sexualized over time and, if so, whether such increases have been proportionate. Second, we examine whether there is a relationship between women's increasing power in the music industry (as measured by popularity) and their sexualization on the cover of Rolling Stone. In the first case, we do not find evidence that US culture as a whole has become sexualized, as only women – but not men – have become both more frequently and more intensely sexualized on the cover of...

Starting from the concept of confusion of tongues between passion and tenderness, the authors illustrate two clinical situations of traumatized children and adults and try to show how these kinds of patient are not able to give voice to and symbolically represent their archaic anxieties connected with their having been Ferenczian “unwelcome children.” Therefore, in the therapeutic situation, they often make use of the language of “passion” and sexualization in order to communicate to the analyst their early broken intimacy and their traumatized “tenderness,” related to a lack of parental libidinal involvement and of maternal permeability to their raw emotions, which gave rise to their “passion of death.” Sketching out two clinical cases (an adolescent and an adult), the authors describe how, in their opinion, this confusion of tongues may be the only way for some patients to represent and share the traumatic events of their past, while at the same time it may become a deep-rooted, strong, rigid, a...

The aim of this study was to analyse the consequences of child sexual abuse (CSA) on the psychological adjustment of survivors, as well as to determine the role of the feelings provoked by the abuse, following Finkelhor and Browne's traumagenic dynamics model (1985), on the adjustment of CSA victims. The sample of the study comprised 182 survivors of CSA, and another 182 participants selected as a comparison group. Results showed that CSA survivors, in contrast with the group of non-victims of CSA, had significantly higher scores on state anxiety, trait anxiety and depression, and lower on self-esteem. With regard to the role of traumagenic dynamics, feelings of powerlessness, self-blame, traumatic sexualization and, to a lesser extent, betrayal, predicted the scores of the CSA survivors in the four psychological adjustment variables assessed. To summarize, the results confirm the relation between CSA and the development of psychological problems in adulthood, explaining the survivors' feelings to a subst...

This paper examines a broadly based and pervasive cultural pattern – the media-driven campaign of the sexualisation of girls and young women – and its effects on physical theatre training in particular, and on theatre pedagogy as a whole. This article argues that these sexualising discourses have measureable negative effects on the capacities of female acting students in physical theatre training. The piece originated in observations collected over years of classroom experience, and produces its results based on observable differences rather than hard data. The effects of sexualising influences on student actors' work are tested by summarising gender differences in the realisation of an assignment that tends to reveal such differences in a marked manner. Offered in support of the hypothesis is the body of evidence assembled as part of the Report of the Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls commissioned by the American Psychological Association, and the case is made that conventionalised notions of the ...

The medicalization of sex is part of an already-in-place discursive problem that can be illuminated by looking at efforts to sexualize the medical. "Erectile dysfunction," "female sexual dysfunction," and their real and imagined pharmacopia, do not constitute the medicalization of sex; they are effects of sex already having been-to borrow a term from Peter Conrad ( 1992 )-healthicized. The equation of sex and health, as cultural common sense, has made health seem like the natural discourse for thinking about sex in the first place. Reversing the terms of this special issue, and using the methodology of rhetorical analysis, this article looks at the person with cancer as a sexualized subject-someone whose health is represented as intimately tied to his or her sex life. It suggests that, in public discourse-and notably in movies and on television-sex is the comic ending of the illness narrative. In light of this narrative move, the ability to have good sex joins the ability to be positive and cheerful as a (Western) cultural imperative of illness experience, in general, and cancer experience, in particular. Public representations of illness virtues often fail, then, to answer realistically the compelling question, "How shall I be ill?"

Contemporary discourse about the figure of the velina, or showgirl, in Italy rotates around, amongst other things, a misreading of (youthful) female spectatorship practices (O'Rawe), culture and ambitions, a profound confusion about how to read narrative film and television, and a fundamental resistance to 'popular' taste (O'Leary). I will examine how contemporary popular cinema in Italy has handled the figure of the velina through the recurrent trope of the audition, suggesting that it mobilizes a contradictory set of messages about the female body and agency that complicate the often Manichean discourses circulating in the current debate, and that it intersects with the debates about the 'sexualization of culture' and postfeminism in the Anglophone context. Developing my earlier work in this area, I will show, through reflection upon the theoretical prisms of class, taste, genre, and dance how popular Italian cinema nuances the often polarized velina debate.

This article explores some popular constructions of young femininity on MySpace profiles through an examination of the affirmative or ‘inspirational’–style mottos and self-descriptions commonly posted on a sample of 45 public profiles maintained by Australian women aged between 18 and 21. In these texts self-esteem, self-worth, and self-determination are expressed in markedly uncompromising tones. Such textual expressions, I argue, may indicate an internalization on the part of young women of neo-liberal discourses of individualization. At the same time, the mottos discussed also suggest that traits and characteristics besides ‘sexiness’ are central to young women's online, socially moderated self-constructions. That is, the demonstration of a bold attitude and a fearless sense of autonomous self-definition also appear to be important aspects of feminine performativity on the profiles viewed, which is significant in light of recent panic around young women and ‘sexualization’.

The present study examines the use of sexual objectification by popular female music artists in their music videos. To obtain a current assessment of sexual objectification within pop, country, and...

In Children and the politics of sexuality Liza Tsaliki invites readers to recognize that the aversion to exposing children to any form of sexuality is not natural and necessary but is in fact cultu...

This article examines the representations of men and masculinities in contemporary crime narratives featuring a female protagonist. These “chick dick” stories (which adapt elements from the hardboiled detective novel, film noir, chick lit, and chick flicks) repeatedly engage with the gendered power dynamics made visible and problematic through the intersection of “chick” and crime genres, most particularly the sexualization of violence. In these narratives, popular masculinities operate as deployable concepts to dramatize contemporary gender relations. By tapping into the popular sentiment of a “crisis in masculinity,” chick dick texts also mobilize a rhetoric of unrepresentable male victimization and individual male pathologies. This strategy highlights the spaces and places in which masculinities are made vulnerable at the same time as it offers simplistic and individualized explanations for the systemic sexualized violence that dominate these narratives.

In 2006 the American Psychological Association formed the Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls. They were charged with examining and summarizing the best psychological theory, research and clinical experience addressing the sexualization of girls. This article provides an outline of the Task Force report, reviews the recent work in this field, and discusses the implications for study in the field of sexual addiction.