Open AccessGood Vibrations: Charting the Dominant and Emergent Discursive Regimes of Sex Toys
Author(s) -
George Rossolatos
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
the qualitative report
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.335
H-Index - 35
ISSN - 2160-3715
DOI - 10.46743/2160-3715/2016.2566
Subject(s) - ethos , human sexuality , sociology , scripting language , consumption (sociology) , ethnography , orgasm , product (mathematics) , gender studies , psychology , aesthetics , social psychology , social science , anthropology , linguistics , geometry , mathematics , computer science , operating system , philosophy
Sex toys promote a new consumptive ethos whose significance may be adequately outlined by attending to the institutional implications of this product category’s consumption. By drawing on Foucault’s theory of sexuality and the technologies of the self that materialize with the aid of discursive formations about sexuality, as well as on relevant sociological and ethnographic insights, I undertake a qualitative content analysis on a corpus of 100 sex toys’ product reviews from popular magazines and web sites in order to identify how the discourse about sex toys is articulated in terms of three dominant categories of sexual scripts (Simon & Gagnon, 2007), viz. cultural scenarios, interpersonal scripts and intrapsychic scripts. By opening up the discussion to broader cultural issues, I outline how the consumption experience of sex toys, as articulated in the reviews’ discursive formations, facilitates the emergence of new consumer trends, particularly with reference to orgasm-on-the-go and no-touch-orgasm, while redefining existent ones.