Sexual culture in postfeminist media context

The article forms part of the contemporary reflections in the field of girls’ studies, exploring how girls themselves deal with the transformation of gender relations in a context characterised by the highly contradictory messages conveyed by media culture and new resources made available by digital media (Dobson Reference Dobson2015; Ringrose and Barajas Reference Ringrose and Barajas2011; Banet-Weiser Reference Banet-Weiser2011). The contemporary ‘Western’ context which constitutes the background to this research is characterised by what some scholars have defined as ‘postfeminism’. The postfeminist scenario is here thematised as a broad cultural landscape that offers girls complex and contradictory gender models. Following Ringrose (Reference Ringrose2013), I consider postfeminism to be a set of politics and discourses conveying the message that gender equality for girls and women has already been achieved in education, the workplace and relationships (Ringrose Reference Ringrose2013, 1), and that therefore feminism is no longer necessary. Angela McRobbie (Reference McRobbie2009) echoes this view. She considers postfeminism to have an ambivalent relationship with feminism, which is both invoked and presented as no longer necessary, or ridiculed. Yet, she argues, gender power relations have not disappeared, but are disguised under seemingly new forms.Footnote ³

Other scholars in the field of feminist media and cultural studies have analysed postfeminist discourse in relation to digital media. Here, the issue of ‘sexualisation’ emerges as one of the main concerns surrounding girls’ gendered and sexual lives, particularly when associated with new media technologies. In particular, Amy Shield Dobson (Reference Dobson2015) analyses girls’ and young women’s digital practices in social media, such as sexual self-representations on social networking sites. She describes the contemporary postfeminist digital culture in which girls are immersed as one in which moralist discourses about girls and their sexuality persist alongside the prevalence of the ideal neoliberal subject as the basis of a contemporary ‘girl power’, and where the objectification and commodification of female bodies in visual culture is still strong.

As an increasingly visually-based culture takes hold among young people, sustained by the growing use of digital media and social networking sites, public opinion and academic debate have called into question the process of sexualisation or pornification (Attwood, Clare and Barker Reference Attwood, Clare and Barker2013) of society, which crystallises around girls’ subjectivity. ‘Sexualisation’ is an elusive term, and in public debates it generally connotes both a proliferation of images and discourses about sex and sexuality in media culture, and the hypersexualisation and objectification of girls’ and women’s bodies in the media. Public debate often focuses on the risks associated with sexualisation, arguing for instance that it has produced a rise in risky or undesirable sexual behaviours:

Even if concerns about sexualisaton are often expressed in neutral terms, undesirable sexual behaviours are mostly associated with girls. This process is assumed to have a series of negative effects on the girls themselves. Indeed, the idea that girls could encounter, look for and find on a daily basis sexually explicit material is associated with the possibility of developing sexually risky behaviours. In a similar vein, the argument is made that exposure to a hypersexualised imaginary would lead girls to reproduce it, considering them just passive consumers of mainstream culture.

Feminist scholars have assumed diverse positions in dealing with sexual culture and in analysing the roots of stereotyped and commodified models of femininity for young women. While the first academic studies on visual images highlighted how girls and women were ‘objectified’ in media representations, more recent studies reveal a more complex situation in which it is more common to see girls portrayed as figures whose sexuality represents an expression of power rather than submissive, passive sexual objects. There has been a great deal of discussion about the paradigm shift in media language, from sexual objectification of female images to giving expression to an assertive form of sexuality which seems to empower women. Rosalind Gill (Reference Gill2003, Reference Gill2013) has underlined that this process has made it more difficult to reveal and critically distinguish the forms of sexism that are inherent in representations of femininity, as the ‘objectification’ of girls and women is built upon a postfeminist sensibility and so framed as freedom of expression rather than as a requirement to embody heterosexual attractiveness for the male gaze. As Gill explains, speaking about female displays in adverts: ‘women […] are endowed with agency so that they can actively choose to objectify themselves’ (Gill Reference Gill2003, 104). This idea that women embrace mainstream beauty standards freely ‘to make themselves feel good’, following Gill, resonates clearly with the ‘broader postfeminist discourses which present women as autonomous agents no longer constrained by any inequalities or power imbalances’ (Gill Reference Gill2003, 104).

According to McRobbie (Reference McRobbie2004), the circulation of sexually-charged messages is chiefly the expression of a culture of ‘commercial’ sexuality, not a matter of free and self-determined sexual expression. The relevance of this observation is crucial: deceived by a false idea of sexual liberation, young women risk embodying and reproducing the ways in which they are objectified. This debate revolves around concepts such as ‘choice’, ‘agency’, ‘empowerment’, and, in particular, girls’ (in)capacities to resist, or re-signify, this sexualised culture. In this regard, feminist scholars’ positions are diverse: while some are mainly concerned about the (im)possibility of escaping new postfeminist gender norms, others have a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between structure and agency, giving space to processes of subjectivation. Bartky conveys an example of the former. She explains the complexity associated with sexuality by the Foucauldian idea of disciplining,Footnote ⁵ which works productively through women’s ‘active’ participation. In checking make-up or feeling fat and monitoring everything they eat, according to Bartky, women and girls practise a self-surveillance ‘on and against their own bodies’, which ‘is a form of obedience to patriarchy’ (Bartky Reference Bartky1997, 81). More recent approaches criticise the very terms of the discussion and try to recognise the biases and limits of current debates on girls’ sexuality and sexualisation in the postfeminist context. Bale (Reference Bale2011), for instance, has pointed out that the debate on sexualisation risks fostering the idea that girls’ sexuality is passive, something they simply endure, thereby limiting explorations of girls’ potential sexual agency. Renold and Ringrose (Reference Renold and Ringrose2013) also highlight the limits of this discussion, arguing that it often casts girls as victims and overlooks their sexual agency, rights and pleasure, shifting the judgement and critique from the process of eroticising/objectifying images of femininity supported by mainstream media to the forms of sexuality that girls themselves enact. According to these two authors, critiques of sexualisation risk focusing mainly on the harmful effects of media exposure, overlooking the ways girls themselves negotiate media content. Moreover, they also risk legitimising a heteronormative and linear trajectory for the development of appropriate female heterosexuality (248). To stress that it is sexism and not sexuality that should be the subject of critique, Dobson (Reference Dobson2015) points out the heteronormative norms which are often present in ‘hypersexualised’ arenas. She also suggests that we should look at the way that girls and women are socialised in line with femininity and heteronormativity instead of speaking about ‘sexualisation’, in order to describe the set of representations and behaviours which refer to an ideal female model, where the problem is not the association between the body and sexuality, but rather the reproduction of rigid heteronormative gender norms (Dobson Reference Dobson2015, 48).

Therefore, in the next section I will briefly outline the contradictory aspects of the sexual culture that characterises the reproduction of these heteronormative gender norms in the Italian context, in order to shed light on the elements of the postfeminist context in which the girls who took part in my research engage with processes of subjectivation.

Gender norms from post-war to contemporary Italy

Understanding girls’ sexualities in Italy involves a number of ambivalent elements and contradictions. Girls and women currently enjoy new possibilities for acting out their desires beyond a strictly heteronormative framework, but there is also strong resistance to social change. Young people in Italy navigate a highly gendered cultural landscape, which is marked by the persistence of a sexual double standard which disciplines female and male sexual habits differently (Ferrero Camoletto Reference Ferrero Camoletto2011). Here, furthermore, we see a negotiation of traditional gender norms in which female sexuality is still often associated with, and subordinated to, male desire.

Studying the transformations of sexual morality in Italy, Carmen Leccardi (Reference Leccardi2011) has highlighted the contradictions that have been traversing the cultural landscape in Italy from the aftermath of the Second World War to the present. Italy has been characterised by the transformation from one extreme in which expectations in heterosexual relationships have been sharply gendered, to another, characterised by permissiveness, sexual liberation and the affirmation of personal choices. The collection of Italian women’s letters to popular female magazines contained in the volume Le Italiane si confessano (Italian Women Confess), edited by journalist Gabriella Parca (Reference Parca1959), well conveys the kind of atmosphere characterising the first tension. Here, women shared experiences and asked for advice on aspects of emotional and sexual life that they could not find anywhere else. As Penelope Morris (Reference Morris2006) points out, the image emerging from this volume is that of a society in which women’s lives are almost entirely oriented towards marriage and concerned with the maintenance of a reputation as a good woman. As Morris (Reference Morris2006, 124) highlights, that is not surprising given the legal situation for women, the code of honour and the double standards that were common in that period.Footnote ⁶ At the same time, unusually, the book disclosed women’s concerns and desires concerning sexuality, enabling them to be shared in a public space. According to Morris (Reference Morris2006, 124), ‘the very fact that the book was even published and was so widely read in Italy could be taken as an important token of cultural change’.

Looking at the transformations which took place from the second half of the 1960s, Leccardi shows the process through which sexual morality became more ‘hedonistic, tolerant and experimental’ (2011, 303), and sexuality started to be detached from the exclusive domain of couples’ relationships and established as a sphere in which desiring subjects could legitimately affirm and express themselves beyond a strictly monogamous, heterosexual framework. Significantly, the women’s movement of the 1970s was fundamental in driving this transformation. Their assertion that ‘the personal is political’ played a key role both in defying the middle-class, heterosexual family ideal, and in redefining pleasure and the body as political dimensions. At the same time, the public discourse on sexuality started to be dominated by the idea that individuals should have a variety of choices and that their lifestyles ought to be considered a matter of personal preference, supporting the rise of the current ‘individualized normative framework’ (Leccardi Reference Leccardi2011, 298), where new moral norms grow from the recognised need for individual autonomy. The result of all these tensions is that ‘as the absolute principles that govern sexuality fail, the terrain of sexual morality becomes richer with contradictions and light and shade’ (Leccardi Reference Leccardi2011, 298). However, some changes in cultural landscapes do not automatically entail a transformation in young women’s biographies (see, for example, Bertone, Ferrero Camoletto and Torrioni Reference Bertone, Ferrero Camoletto and Torrioni2011; Magaraggia Reference Magaraggia2013), and my research findings, which I discuss in the next section, indeed point in this direction.

Consistent with my earlier discussion of sexualisation and postfeminism, in Italy critiques tend to portray the association of ‘sexuality’ and ‘girls’ negatively. Girls are contradictorily situated between the message conveyed by media that they have to ‘be sexy’ and that of public discourse which demands them to be ‘not sexual’. Together, these messages build a contradictory ideal of a ‘girl’, who is supposed to be attractive and pleasing to a male gaze, and at the same time not be too sexually explicit and vulgar. This issue became particularly relevant during the years when Silvio Berlusconi was the Italian prime minister (1994–2011), the last of which were deeply marked by debates about sexuality, power and gendered imageries. Here, as I argue, girls’ bodies became the metonymic site of the country’s cultural battles over power, politics and women’s self-determination.

Several scholars have discussed the gendered imagery fostered by ‘Berlusconism’, by interrogating the politics of sexuality (Albertazzi, Brook, Ross and Rothenberg Reference Albertazzi, Brook, Ross and Rothenberg2009; Crowhurst and Bertone Reference Crowhurst and Bertone2012; Hipkins Reference Hipkins2011; Bonfiglioli Reference Bonfiglioli2015), the production of gendered representation supported by the mainstream media (Virgili Reference Virgili2014) and also the postfeminist models which commercial TV has sustained (Giomi Reference Giomi2012). The sex scandals that accompanied the decline of Berlusconi have had a great impact on the national media, and they were the catalyst of a women’s and feminist movement that has questioned the gender violence inherent in the sex-power system and in the sexist and objectified representations of women supported by commercial TV. This huge movement (Se Non Ora Quando) has tried to reverse the order of discourse sustained by mainstream media; nevertheless, the kind of femininity it proposed as a counter-model was often based on a discursive repertoire of sobriety and normality, contributing to the spread of a ‘neo-moralistic discursive order’ (Peroni Reference Peroni2012, 111). The binary categories of the bad and the good woman have often been used to articulate the boundaries of the ‘correct’ femininity,Footnote ⁷ producing and sustaining a moralistic view of the sexuality of young women (Gribaldo and Zapperi Reference Gribaldo and Zapperi2012). The debate about the sexist gender stereotype present in media representation overlapped with the prostitution scandal, reinforcing this dichotomy: both the ‘velina’ and the ‘escort’, even if they refer to completely different semantic orders, became in public debate the epitomic figures of the ‘wrong’ femininity.Footnote ⁸

Research on how girls negotiate and understand these kinds of discourses is rare. For example, Rossella Ghigi (Reference Ghigi2013) analysed this in the context of gendered representations in Italian media. She showed that young people, both boys and girls, are critical about unrealistic and artificial gender models. Yet, at the same time, they transpose discussions about the commodification of female bodies on TV to the idea that girls and women who agree to perform these roles in their work or career are sexually available. Moreover, their answers seem to be in line with the individualistic culture that sustains the postfeminist context (McRobbie Reference McRobbie2009); the slogan would be ‘take responsibility for yourself’. Indeed, they characterise young women’s personal choices as regrettable, instead of questioning the system that benefits from the commercialisation of female sexuality (Ghigi Reference Ghigi2013).

In sum, the social and cultural transformation in Italy is characterised by ambivalences and contradictions. The contemporary Italian postfeminist landscape, therefore, can be described in terms of the redefinition of sexual roles, along with the persistence of strict gender norms and a moralistic discourse about girls’ bodies and sexualities, such as the timeworn and dangerous distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ femininity conveyed by public discussion. Since the voices of young women are rarely addressed when speaking about the issue of sexuality and sexualisation, in the following sections I will present my empirical research, which directly involved girls’ voices.

Methodology and analytical framework

The methodological perspective adopted in the research follows a girl-centred approach (Mitchell and Reid-Walsh Reference Mitchell and Reid-Walsh2008) informed by feminist methods. Hence, it combines methodological approaches developed in critical youth studies (Best Reference Best2007) and women’s studies, which consider aspects of gender and age with regard to both the subjects of research and the researcher herself. In order to understand the cultural and social appropriation of the internet by girls in everyday life, I have used discursive interviews, which best enable girls to express their voice, limiting the interference of the researcher. There has been a huge transformation of the media’s role in girls’ everyday life, due to the increase in internet access, and the rise of mobile media, which makes connecting with friends and parents much more ubiquitous and blurs the boundaries between consumption and production (Andò Reference Andò2017). Hence, I consciously adopted an in-depth interview format in order to try to understand what meaning girls themselves give to their own practices and decisions in their online and offline experiences, specifically related to gender and sexuality.

The girls involved all lived in Milan and hailed from a variety of socio-economic and religious backgrounds. In order to ensure that the group of participants included girls from different contexts, I used the type of school they attended (high school, technical and vocational school) and its location (centre or periphery of Milan) as a proxy for their socio-economic status. I first conducted exploratory interviews with a small number of interviewees, then, using the snowball sampling technique, the group of subjects was calibrated in order to ensure the necessary representativeness of the schools.Footnote ⁹

With a very rough draft of the points I wanted to discuss with girls (basically asking them to speak about their daily life in relation to digital media), the interview was free to follow a personal path each time, and it was open to reflections and digressions driven by the interviewee. Without my posing any direct question, one of the most recurrent topics that emerged from my interviews with girls was the criticism many of them levelled against pictures featuring young women in sexy poses. The activities they mostly referred to were those which take place on and through Facebook. Facebook itself was perceived by the girls interviewed as one of the most normative SNSs, especially due to the fact that it is anchored in the constraints of the daily offline experience.

Girls’ use of SNSs involves the body and its representation – which I refer to as ‘mediated body practice’. In this space, as I will discuss, girls produce their gendered subjectivity through everyday online and offline interactions with their peers. This paper specifically aims to investigate the link between gender norms and visual display in the mediated experiences of girls on Facebook, considering the postfeminist context in which they live. The analytical goal presented here arose clearly from inteviews with the girls during the fieldwork. Two questions that derive from this are: which gender models are being sanctioned and which ones are supported? Which subject positions allow for recognition and which lead to failure?

To answer these questions, this paper adopts a gender analytical perspective, because of its ability to challenge the dominant discourses that root differences between men and women in biology, thereby naturalising the power structures they engender. Hence, I position my approach in continuity with authors who consider gender a social construction, a culturally specific set of practices, rather than a natural trait or disposition. Erving Goffman (Reference Goffman1976) termed ‘gender displays’ the idea that gender is expressed during social interaction through a form of interactive performance. Analysing photo advertisements, Goffman argued that the poses depicted have nothing to do with natural traits, but rather with how our culture defines femininity and masculinity. Through a ritualisation of subordination, according to Goffman, a definition of feminine as subordinate in relation to what is defined as masculine is culturally constructed. Candace West and Don Zimmerman (Reference West and Zimmerman1987) expanded on Goffman’s work on ‘gender display’, conceptualising gender as a routine performance rooted in everyday interaction: gender is something we do rather then something we are. They highlight that the act of everyday ‘doing’ gender legitimises social structures and creates the male/female hierarchical dichotomy as though it were natural; and because society allocates resources on the basis of sex categories, the performance of gender is, for individuals, compulsory (West and Zimmerman Reference West and Zimmerman1987, 137). Gender performance, then, is not linked only to individual experience, but incorporates subjects into social structure. An even more complex understanding of gender as social structure is evident in Connell’s (Reference Connell1985) practice-based theory of gender, which suggests focusing on the cultural practices which sustain gender order. Conceptualising gender not as a property of individuals but as an integral part of the social order implies an extensive focus on gender relations. The constraining power of gender is sustained by cultural practices which maintain the social subordination of women, by the hierarchical organisation of femininity and masculinity, and by controlling the role of the body in social relations. Connell’s conceptualisation is particularly useful in research which uses a gender lens and which aims to acknowledge both the agency of the subject and structure.

Finally, drawing on post-structuralist theories, specifically the work of Judith Butler (Reference Butler1988), I understand gender identity in its performative and relational dimensions not as a stable entity but as a continuous process which connects the subject to the social order. Butler’s theory of gender performativity posits that gender is performed through discourse, which includes social interaction. The fact that gender is a performance, according to Butler, means that the results of our performance can be unpredictable: we could change the social understanding of gender and open a breach in assumptions on the gender matrix. Thinking about this in the context of the current study means that I employ a performative concept of gender and thereby analyse how femininity is produced through discussing their own and other girls’ bodily practices in online experiences.

Unspeakable bodies

In this final section, I will first identify and discuss a widespread gender discourse among girls which, in condemning female friends and schoolmates who show their bodies on Facebook in what girls consider ‘sexy’ clothing and ‘sexually explicit’ poses, legitimates a model of femininity based on modesty, while at the same time sanctioning the public display of girls’ bodies and sexuality. Second, the analysis will show how sexual regulation among girls works through this discourse by naturalising the heterosexual gaze and reproducing a double standard.

Silvia is 19 years old and attends a language-study high school located in a peripheral neighbourhood. She is very active on social media, and, in addition to an FB account, she also uses Instagram and Twitter. Speaking about Facebook, Silvia expresses discomfort in relation to the circulation of pictures depicting girls in sensual or provocative poses:

The negative judgement that Silvia and others frequently expressed about images of young women who appear in ‘sexy’, ‘provocative’ or ‘half-naked’ poses – as they described them – suggests their desire to distance themselves from models of femininity that they consider degrading in the online context. Like Silvia, other girls I interviewed felt the same need to express their position on this topic, revealing what I read as the difficulties they face as young women in representing themselves in their everyday lives online and offline, entailing an intense negotiation of the public meaning associated with their bodies and sexualities. Another example comes from Carlotta, a 16-year-old attending a vocational school. As the quotation shows, Carlotta does not like pictures in which girls display themselves in sexy poses:

By identifying what they do not like in what their female friends post on Facebook, girls simultaneously defined and constructed a more ‘legitimate’ model of femininity, which is based more on chastity norms that reproduce a division between good and bad girls. Also, Ringrose et al. (Reference Ringrose, Harvey, Gill and Livingstone2013), studying the moral values boys and girls express through practices of sexting, have shown that digital networks are spaces in which images are produced, judged and evaluated through various codes defined by class, race or gender. By discussing the types of cleavage shown by female peers on FB, for example, girls define some bodies as both tasteless and sexually shameless. For some of the girls who participated in my research, aspects of girls’ bodies are passively coded to produce what is considered a correct and acceptable performance of femininity.

The examples above show that in organising their digital practices, in and through Facebook, girls are aware of, and at the same time reproduce, the specific gender culture that they navigate. In order to maintain control over their social position, they have to confront the gender norms governing the relationships between peers in this specific online space. In the words of Butler, I argue that girls have to constantly negotiate a subject position in order to make themselves intelligible, recognisable.

Some girls established a direct link between their peers’ disclosure of their body in sexy poses and the ways in which popularity works on FB. Linda is 15 years old, and attends a science high school. In her words, the idea of a less vulgar representation of bodies online and less public expression of sexuality on Facebook represents a way of responding to the logic of popularity acquired through Facebook ‘likes’:

Linda’s circular reasoning demonstrates how bodily experiences on Facebook can be deeply lived for the girls. For Linda and other girls, choosing what clothes to wear in their Facebook photos is a crucial issue in Facebook/digital everyday experience. As expressed by Linda and Silvia, this is profoundly shaped by the gendered dynamics that permeate girls’ digital social relationships with their female peers.

Girls associate certain kinds of clothes with a particular idea of what it is to be a girl/person on Facebook. In girls’ narratives, a blouse unbuttoned to show the breasts’ cleavage, or a miniskirt that is too short, are part of a repertoire of images characterising girls who strategically use nudity to become popular by obtaining the highest number of ‘likes’ from their peer network. They see it as vulgar because it follows a commercial logic. This association with vulgarity is connected with a certain way of performing girlhood that is judged critically because it is done with the purpose of gaining visibility through popularity. Some girls consider the choice to display breasts or cleavage an excessive and rude display of femininity. They also criticise Facebook itself for enabling this type of interaction. Furthermore, as Linda’s words show, the effects of interactions on FB extend beyond online space and have consequences even in girls’ lives offline. Which photos to share, which parts of the body to make public and how to present oneself online are all central elements in the process of constructing one’s individual subjectivities both online and offline. This is clearly shown in Linda’s statement that ‘I don’t think I am that kind of person’, which other girls I interviewed often expressed in similar terms.

Like Linda, by showing aversion to ‘vulgar’ femininity, girls attempt to protect themselves from the risks entailed in their association. Indeed, if girls fail to perform the standard established by their friends’ community on Facebook, they risk ending up being insulted by both girls and boys. Through ‘likes’ or negative comments, the peer group operates to enforce this specific gender order and prevent any kind of transgression. As expressed through the words of Claudia, a 17-year-old girl:

Harsh criticisms of girls who show their bodies in sexy poses reproduce a hegemonic discourse that considers girls’ display of their bodies in public as synonymous with their sexual availability. The girls’ narratives highlight a shift in which the public discussion/criticism about the objectification of girls’ bodies through hypersexualisation is translated into sexual availability. According to the gender codes on FB, the act of revealing one’s own body is tantamount to self-devaluation. However, as I contend, by condemning girls who pursue popularity by displaying their body in sexy poses, one fails to interrogate the power relations that structure the context within which this equation becomes possible and that benefit from it.

Girls seek to meet an ambivalent demand, that of being attractive but not inappropriately sexual. The signifier of sexual regulation used to discipline girls’ sexual expression through the repertoire of ‘reputation’ is ‘slut’. This word was avoided by Claudia in her interview but explicitly used by other girls, such as Letizia, a 15-year-old girl attending a science high school:

In girls’ studies, slut-shaming describes the dynamics of sexual regulation through which girls’ reputations are subjected to public scrutiny and the ways in which this becomes a form of discipline through the enforcement of specific, gendered codes of sexual conduct (Ringrose Reference Ringrose2013). In relationships with both female and male peers, the ‘whore stigma’ (Pheterson Reference Pheterson1993) works as a normative device which reinforces the imperative that requires girls to refrain from signalling their sexual availability. Indeed, some of the girls I interviewed used the word ‘slut’ to blame other young women for what they consider to be inappropriately sexy displays of their bodies. This mechanism is apparent in Claudia’s words below where she blames girls for provoking male peers’ insults:

Through this idea that a modest form of femininity is more suitable in online peer culture, girls’ narratives foreground a process in which girls who are the victims of verbal abuse end up being blamed for their situation in constructing their visual self online. Consistent with the analysis of the contemporary postfeminist context, girls are made to feel the only ones responsible for the consequences of their behaviour online. Here, peers’ eyes, both male and female, function as disciplinary devices that monitor girls’ sexual displays and sustain a self-monitoring process in the postfeminist context (Gill Reference Gill2003; Bartky Reference Bartky1997).

Furthermore, the interviewees express a definition of female sexuality based on a code rooted in the deep differentiation of gendered expectations. Here women are expected to play the role of regulating male sexual desire, whose drive is considered ‘natural’. The complementary role associated with girls’ sexuality reinforces the double standard and serves to naturalise the heterosexual order in peer culture. The figure of the ‘slut’, and the stigma it is associated with, serves as a means of regulating female sexuality within a heteronormative system. As the interviews confirm, this discourse is central to building relationships among young women which reproduce a heteronormative standard, as another part of the interview with Claudia shows:

Through their discourses, girls take on an expression of the female body based on a male point of view, a code that defines the rigid boundaries of good and bad girl. Statements like Claudia’s comments that ‘you know how boys are’ and ‘it is also girls who provoke them’ justify male sexuality as aggressive and female sexuality as subordinated or complementary to it. The first is guided by instinct while the second must be expressed carefully. In this discourse, it is clear that the sexual double standard continues to operate.

In sum, the representations discussed during the interviews reported above evoke a hypersexualised and objectified model of femininity from which the girls distance themselves in various ways. Furthermore, it is quite significant that the opinions expressed about these photos often become judgements about the girls who share them online. The findings show that, in most cases, the girls involved in this research criticise ‘other’ girls for embodying on Facebook a certain model of femininity (sexy and undressed) rather than turning their critical gaze on the heterosexual and objectifying gender imaginary that these images reproduce.