ABSTRACT
Postfeminism and Health. Sarah Riley, Adrienne Evans, Martine Robson. Chapter 4 . Chapter 4 focuses on a central theme of postfeminist sensibility – women’s sexuality. We develop this theme in relation to health, considering how a ‘healthy sex life’ became the marker of the good life. The chapter examines the explosion of talk about sex and sexuality from the Victorians onwards. Governmentality, normalisation and confession are used to develop an analysis of the role of experts in directing desires. The chapter shows the way that apparently radical sex advice often supports traditional gender relations, such as the need for women to please men and the construction of heteropenetrative sexual relationships as normal and ideal, absenting lesbian sexual experiences and despite statistics suggesting that heterosexual women rarely experience penetrative orgasm. Sex advice thus leaves most women outside the norm, creating another paradox in postfeminist healthism whereby what is normative is unattainable.>>
