31st October

Happy Halloween everyone my brain is having a Bad Fucking Time.

Ok so the good news:

• Tutorial with Emma actually went very well! I was stressing about being behind and also about my area for research not making any fucking sense but we looked at my contextual review mmind map/plan thingy and it apparently all makes sense. Thank god
• Also a lot of useful discussion about queer theory and positionality and establishing myself as coming at this research from a queer perspective and that informing how I define things and such
• Emma had some good ideas for how I could go about primary research - maybe hold screenings and have focus groups discussing them (like the Dallas study Croteau and Hoynes talked about)
• Overall off to a good start - most important thing is making decisions about what's important and what the boundaries of my research will be. There should be a workshop with Willem in a few weeks about refining the research question so I'm hoping to have made some progress with that by then
• Also got some good advice on the annotated bibliography and what it should include - basically need to explain why a certain source is important
• And Emma likes my currently ugly website! Big day for the research journal!
• We had the peer review session with Dayna in the afternoon, who was lovely and had some good advice: basically focus on research for now and don't worry too much about writing the actual contextual review until you have more of an idea of y'know. what the existing literature is. Also a reminder to bear in mind that you are not going to be able to get into every single question and facet of the research and that's ok

Meanwhile. The bad news:

• Had a fucking awful horrible brain moment about presenting my project during the peer review session. Like I managed to present without crying but it was a close thing xoxo
• Also freaked out about my laptop being used for the teams call LOL apparently that's some kind of symptom I didn't realise I had
• Insert a bunch of thoughts I should probably save for when the counsellors stop ghosting me here

3rd November

We're so back! (mostly) A lot has happened this week outside of the tutorial and the event that will henceforth be known as The Incident, so let's break this down into sections shall we

Part 1: Beginning the actual aspec depictions research in serious AKA indulging my true passion in life

Oh what's that? You all assumed I chose to research this subject because I care about depictions of asexuality and aromanticism? Haha! I tricked you all! I actually decided to research this as a way to indulge my true greatest passion: late 90s - early 2010s TV of extremely dubious quality!

So anyway this week I watched a bunch of episodes of the 2014 sitcom Sirens that deal with asexuality. Transcripts here!

As far as I can tell, Sirens, a sitcom about paramedics and EMTs in Chicago, was actually one of the first American TV shows ever to deal with asexuality, only preceded by the 2010 comedy Huge, which I am currently engaged in a fucking battle for my life trying to find anywhere to watch it. But that's another story.

Anyway, Sirens introduces asexuality through the asexual character Voodoo, and in particular an ongoing storyline about her relationship with main character Brian, who is not asexual, and how they try to make their relationship work. In terms of how this asexual character is written, it's..... well they tried. In the show's defence it seems genuinely well-intentioned - there was a clear effort being made to educate the audience about a sexual orientation that most people in 2014 probably wouldn't know anything about, and in some ways I was actually pleasantly surprised by the amount of research that was seemingly done and the nuanced understanding of asexuality. They reference the existence of things like asexual message boards and the grey triangle being used as a symbol for asexuality (which has fallen out of popularity in the last decade at least as far as I'm aware but whatever. 2014.), and they acknowledge nuances of asexuality like the fact that some ace people might masturbate even if they have no interest in partnered sex. Considering how little-known asexuality was in 2014, I must say that it did manage to exceed my (low) expectations at times.

HOWEVER. The problems. The main issue I have with the depiction of asexuality here really comes down to this fact that Brian is one of the show's three leads and Voodoo is more of a side character, so this storyline is mostly about him. The Finger, the episode that establishes Voodoo as asexual, is pretty much a basic "Will the boy get the girl?" story, with the added complication that the girl in question is asexual! Now, that's all well and good, but it does mean that it risks reducing asexuality to an obstacle to a relationship, and worse in my mind is the fact that Voodoo doesn't get to express her feelings on the situation an awful lot, and we get more scenes of the three leading men talking about her. These scenes, pretty much uniformly, are quite bad. Firstly, they seem to treat asexuality as a punchline a lot of the time, with a lot of jokes about how weird Voodoo is because she's asexual (MORE ON THAT LATER). Also just generally I can't help but feel like there's a very uncomfortable vibe to a scene where a bunch of men sit around talking about how weird and inhuman this woman is because she won't have sex with one of them, and implying that he's better off without her. Like that feels weird right? I can't be the only one that feels weird to.

When we look at the picture the show paints of asexuality, it's not a highly complimentary one. Especially in The Finger, there are a lot of jokes from Brian's friends and fellow leads Johnny and Hank about how it's "strange", "boring", a "pathology", and Voodoo's asexuality is explicitly linked to her "dark" and overall odd personality. Perhaps the furthest the show goes is when Johnny calls Voodoo "not like other humans" which shortly afterwards gets linked back to her sexuality. "Now Isabel," you might say, "perhaps you're being ungenerous? Perhaps this is merely meant to show how uninformed and sex-obsessed Johnny and Hank are? Perhaps they are the butt of the joke, not Voodoo?" To which I would respond.... maybe? Kinda? It's hard to tell. There's definitely some scenes where the jokes seems to be on Hank and (especially) Johnny for being too sex-obsessed, such as the scene where they and Brian ponder what they'd spend their time doing and thinking about if they never had sex like Voodoo, and while Brian comes up with a long list of things Johnny is genuinely unable to answer. However, most of the time I would say that at best it's not clear whether the joke is on Voodoo or on the guys. Furthermore, the show ends up portraying asexuality as a problem in relationships, as Voodoo and Brian's differences lead to them breaking up. After they break up, Voodoo begins dating a fellow asexual, while Brian starts a romance with a fellow non-asexual. While they try to make their relationship work, the show seems to come down on the side that this sexual difference is insurmountable, which I would consider a very overly simplistic view of things.

The last issue I would like to bring up is that the show seems confused on the distinction between asexuality and aromanticism. Unlike the episode of Sex Education I watched, which at least addresses aromanticism as a possibility, Sirens seems to take it as a given that although Voodoo is asexual she is still interested in dating. However, certain episodes do also seem to imply that her and Brian's relationship is more of a friendship, calling it "platonic". This suggests to me that the writers didn't fully understand the distinction between sexual and romantic attraction, and it perhaps would have benefitted from talking more with ace people.

Anyway all my complaints aside, the joke where Brian is trying to impress Voodoo by researching asexuality and comes up to her and randomly starts saying basic factual information out of nowhere ("Did you know that the symbol of asexuality is the grey triangle?") while Voodoo just looks at him judgementally was quite incredible. I wish it was in a better show.

Oh yeah also I got jumpscared by pre Stranger Things Joe Keery playing a random background character in one episode. That was weird.

On a related note I have decided to start keeping a tally of what shows people bring up unprovoked when I explain my research project to them. This is primarily because I think it's funny, but also I guess this also technically counts as research into which shows have the most cultural impact. The tally currently looks like this:

Part 2: Reading of the week!

This week I continued reading Refusing Compulsory Sexuality, and also read all the relevant essays in Visual and Other Pleasures (plus some that weren't relevant but that intrigued me. I'm a simple guy you reference Oedipus or really any Greek myth and I'll come running

Highlights from the Mulvey essays:

• The introduction mentions how "The Women's Movement transformed sexual exploitation and the oppression of female body into a political issue and site of struggle" - this provides the main context for Mulvey's writing and in particular her interest in "politics of the eroticised images of the female body" (p.xv). Obviously this is a genral feminist point but is also deeply relevant to the intersection of misogyny and compulsory sexuality - and as Emma pointed out, queer theory really evolved out of feminist theory like the kind Mulvey was writing!
• Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema is the It Girl of Mulvey's writing, the one people can't stop referencing and the one she keeps returning to in her later writing.
• One of the most important points of this essay is that fictional depictions of women in film generally lack agency, which reflects the general view of women in "patriarchal culture" - there is a "symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer, not maker, of meaning" (p.15)
• "The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact" (p.19)
• One point I found interesting was the idea that female characters in film are "an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film" - basically the idea that men are the default and women are special and exciting! (p.19)
• Quotes director Budd Boetticher (though with no actual reference I can use to find this quote Laura why would you do this to me) as saying (about women in film) "What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance." (p.20) Which is a fucking bleak quote but let's be honest we can all probably think of at least five female characters off the top of our heads that this quote could apply to (my brain immediately went to Winifred "Fred" Burkle from the early 2000s tv show of extremely dubious quality Angel, which is in itself truly a shining example of proving Mulvey right in many respects) - it really seems like women in fiction are a lot of the time only important if the actual important characters (the men) have feelings for them. Which now that I'm typing it out it feels like there's some kind of connection to be made there with how Voodoo is portrayed in Sirens. Hm. Much to think about.
• Also crucially, the woman is an "erotic object" for both the male characters in the film and the men in the audience - meanwhile male character is the "active one" who has the role of "advancing the story" (p.20)
• Or to put it another way: "woman as icon" vs "active male figure (the ego ideal of the identification process)" - audience is encouraged to identify with male character looking at female character (p.21)
• What this means is audience are looking at female character in two ways: "direct scopophilic contact with the female form displayed for his enjoyment (connoting male fantasy)" - so that's just looking as an audience member - but also identifying with the male character "and through him gaining control and possession of the woman within the diegesis". Mulvey uses the films Only Angels Have Wings and To Have and Have Not as clear examples. The main female characters in these films start out "as object of the combined gaze of the spectator and all the male protagonists in the female" but as the film goes on they "[fall] in love with the main male protagonist and [become] his property" (p.21). They become less sexualised but the men in the audience can still "indirectly possess" them through identifying with the male hero. (p.22)
• Mulvey also argues this is inherent to cinema as we know it - "Going far beyond highlighting a woman's to-be-looked-at-ness, cinema builds the way she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself. Playing on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing), cinematic codes create a gaze, a world and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire" (p.26)
• All in all, I can't pretend like I don't find this essay a bit inscrutable at times, but after a lot of work to figure out what the heck Mulvey is saying half the time, I can totally see why it was so groundbreaking, and it was absolutely a necessary read if I want to factor gender into my analysis (which at this point I think it's quite obvious I do).
• Obviously, I also had to check out Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' where Mulvey expands on some of her ideas from the previous essay, and especially the issue of the audience
• She addresses the issue of why she used "the male third person singular to stand in for the spectator" - essentially her main interest was how the spectator is 'masculinised' and encouraged to take on a male perspective (p.31) - "The 'grammar' of the story places the reader, listener, or spectator with the hero. The woman spectator in the cinema can make use of an age-old cultural tradition adapting her to this convention, which eases a transition out of her own sex into another" (p.34)
• Returns to the men = active, women = passive distinction - "The erotic function of the woman is represented by the passive, the waiting" (p.35) - uses Andromeda from Greek mythology and the general damsel in distress trope as an example" (p.35)
• Also some interesting discussion of the 'marriage' stage in folktales (based on Propp's analysis) - marriage represents "social integration" and "makes a crucial contribution to narrative closure" - now perhaps I am overthinking this but this does seem to reflect the idea of marriage as a necessary part of becoming an adult and a member of society (p.35). Also it made me think about the Oklahoma revival again, which I think engages with this trope and aspect of its source material very effectively. The tie between marriage and "social integration" (or perhaps community acceptance) is explicit here, but it is shown as horrifying instead of uncomplicatedly positive.
• On the flipside of this, "rejection of marriage" is often used to represent "a nostalgic celebration of phallic, narcissistic omnipotence" (p.36) - a WHOLE lot to unpack here!! Firstly the idea that rejecting marriage is exclusively a masculine trait, which adds up with how female characters are, according to Mulvey, primarily there for male characters to possess (the audience to possess by association), also the idea rejecting marriage as narcissistic and nostalgic - we associate singleness with youth and immaturity but also selfishness! I'm sure that's not something that would ever be used against aromantic people at all....
• Importantly even in stories about rejection of marriage it's usually men who are able to do this, while "marriage and family" is "the sphere represented by woman", so female characters are completely inextricable from the concept of marriage! (p.36)
• "The function 'marriage' sublimates the erotic into a final, closing, social ritual. This ritual is, of course, sex-specific, and the main rationale for any female presence in this strand of the genre" (p.37) (function = narrative function, genre in this case = the western)
• Even in films that subvert the usual tropes, like Duel in the Sun (sidenote but Mulvey has successfully convinced me to watch this film), "the symbolic equation, woman = sexuality, still persists", there's just more focus on the female character now and the story is able "to be actually, overtly, about sexuality" (p.37)
• The essay Images of Women, Images of Sexuality was less relevant than I expected (it mainly focuses on one specific director's films so a lot of it doesn't really apply more broadly) but there are some decent points building on what Mulvey previously discussed
• "Magazines provide the know-how, techniques and expertise; sealing the association of woman and sexuality in the minds of women themselves." (p.57) - Mulvey seems to be particularly interested in these later essays in how this association came about!
• An anecdote that is probably false but might be fun to reference: "The apocryphal Jesuit dictionary containing the entry 'Woman: see Sin'" (p.59)
• Finally she ends this essay with a series of questions that I think apply just as well to my research as to Mulvey's: "How can we effect a conscious and political interaction between the cultural forms of representation on the one hand and economic and social relations on the other? How does one affect the other? Should one show what is, what should be, or the dreams that escape from what is and what should be? All these questions pose the issue of the relations between appearance in the real (for instance, the mask of femininity produced by society) and fantasy within the psyche (for instance, the phantasm of femininity projected by men) and how those relations are caught in the image." (p.64) I believe many of these questions are just as relevant to depictions of aspec people as they are to depictions of women!
• Had a look at Film, Feminism and the Avant-Garde, which was again mostly not that relevant, but some parts stuck out to me! Mulvey somewhat rhetorically asks "What would women's cultural practice be like? What would art and literature within an ideology that did not oppress women be like?" (p.116) - These are questions that run throughout her writing, and it reminded me strongly of Tanizaki's questions about what it would be like if Japan had "their own science" instead of copying Western countries. Another reminder of how powerfully social construction influences everything
• She also briefly talks about earlier feminist film criticism - "At this point [...] the main demand was to replace one female role-model by another, stronger and more independent. Or to find images of women that were realistic and relevant to women's real-life experience" (p.119) - contrasts with later concerns with the "sexist nature of the industry itself" (p.120) and her concerns with the film form itself
• I did also read The Oedipus Myth which was not relevant to my research project At All but I wanted to check it out for what I like to call "video essay about Angel the Series and women in tragedy" reasons. Stay tuned video coming probably in like 2033 at this rate
• Finally! A brief look at Thoughts on the Young Modern Woman of the 1920s and Feminist Film Theory! Begins by re-summarising Mulvey's argument in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema - "that Hollywood produced a film aesthetic that was essentially ordered by a regime of desire that translated into a gendered voyeurism" (p.213)
• Rest of the essay discusses cultural changes in the 1920s and how film at the time reflected them - "Young women were actually achieving new levels of social and sexual liberation, that found some reflection on the screen" (p.216)
• From the 'Flapper Jane' article from September 1925: "It's just honesty. Women have come down off the pedestal lately. They are tired of this mysterious-feminine-charm stuff [...] They think a bachelor girl can and should do everything a bachelor man does" (p.216)
• Interesting point about how Hollywood responded to this 'new woman' by representing women from immigrant communities that were seen as more 'traditional'
• From Diane Negra's Off-White Hollywood - "Hollywood colonized Irish femininity for representational purposes that supported certain cultural goals. Not hte least of these goals was the attempt to check the emerging power of the 'New Woman'" (p.216)
• Also we come back to the construction of the woman = sexuality equation - "Young women took advantage of expanding credit in the late 1920s to keep up with new fashions: bobbed hair, short skirts, high hells, lipstick and powder. All these fashion signs emphasise and construct femininity as sexually connotative in appearance" (p.219)
• "The flapper iconography, however liberating in itself, projected a homogenously white image of the very racially mixed population of the United States. The success of the young modern woman as a sign of liberated sexuality, and the new discourses articulated around her image, was achieved through repressions that supported social and economic equalities." (p.221)
• "A denunciation of Hollywood for sexism has to give way to the wider question: Why it was that images and discourse of sexuality had such particular significance for Hollywood cinema? [...] Rather than depending exclusively on psychoanalytic theory, these questions transform the debate about women and Hollywood cinema, leading directly into the realm of American social economic and cultural history and the signification of gender within it" (p.230)

Highlights from Refusing Compulsory Sexuality (so far):

• There is an interesting discussion of research in chapter 1, specifically in the context of the lack of interest in asexuality among sex researchers (sorry sidenote but imagine your job title being sex researcher. That sounds incredible). Brown speaks with Candice N. Hargons, author of a study on Black asexual experiences. As she puts it "Because a lot of research is 'me-search', it reflects that there are few sex scientists who are both Black and asexual'" - interesting point about lack of visibility, but also I'm just quite enamoured by the phrase 'me-search' (p.19)
• Another interesting piece of data: "A 2019 Sky Data poll on asexuality found that 53 percent of respondents expressed initial confidence in their knowledge of and ability to define asexuality, but 75 percent of these respondents went on to demonstrate a lack of knowledge about the definition of asexuality and little understanding of asexual people's experiences with sexual desire" (p.20)
• Some great discussion of intersection of prejudice against asexual people and other prejudices, particularly "misogyny and racism - like the misogynistic idea that women owe men sex for being 'nice guys' or the racist myth that Black people are inherently hypersexual"- Brown's analysis attributes many of these harmful ideas for to an overarching ideology: that sex "is a property and a 'right' owed, especially for those in power to use as they please" (p.22)
• References an interesting 2012 study into prejudice against asexual people - stereotypes they identified people believing include that ace people are "cold and emotionless", "unrestrained", "impulsive", and "less sophisticated". Now, it might seem like these don't make much sense - it seems contradictory to say someone is both cold and emotionless AND impulsive - but hey when have stereotypes ever made sense. Once again, I've ended up thinking about Sirens - while it's not entirely stereotypical, I feel like they do often fall into the trap of portraying Voodoo as being 'cold' (p.24)
• There's a similar study referenced called the ATA (Attitudes Towards Asexuals) study - worth checking out both of these!(p.26)
• Oh yeah speaking of things that are relevant to Sirens, check out what Brown includes as one of the "categories of microaggressions": Why, it's "assumption of sexual pathology or abnormality"! God I'm pretty sure Sirens used the exact words "sexual pathology". Guys what were you trying to do there, because I don't think it came across very well (p.28)
• Another attitude to asexuality the book discusses is infantilization, which Brown describes as "a self-righteous sense of superiority [...] over someone seen as inferior - assumed to be less mature, more naive, and less worthy of respect" (p.43). They argue that there is an "association of asexuals with childishness and immaturity" (p.44). This is of course inherently intertwined with the idea of sex as a necessary part of maturing
• Interesting quote from a study on virginity stigma: "While virginity prior to marriage has been historically valued, changing sociosexual scripts in the United States have made premarital sexual activity the norm for young adults... Studies show that being a sexual 'late bloomer' may result in negative interpersonal consequences" (p.45) (Also I do want to emphasise the "prior to marriage" part - even in times when virginity was highly prized, there was still absolutely an expectation of sex later
• "Sex, particularly cisheterosexual sex with the potential for procreation, continues to be regarded as a rite of passage and a marker of maturity. According to dominant cultural beliefs, following this socially established chronology is more than a simple rite of passage but a prerequisite for true adulthood under cisheteropatriarchy" (p.45) - connects to the concept of heterotemporality, developed by.... someone. I need to fact check who wrote about heterotemporality because I've definitely seen it mentioned places but never tried to find the original source
• A similar concept Brown brings up is chrononormativity - concept developed by Elizabeth Freman: "the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity [by which] people are bound to one another, engrouped, made to feel coherently collective, through particular orchestrations of time" (p.45)
• Really interesting point referenced from Julian Carter: basically the ideao of (heterosexual) sex and marriage as rites of passage only emerged in the 19th/20th century, basically because it was a way to "establish whiteness as superior (p.46) to all other races through white heterosexuality" (p.47) - things like queerness and nonmonogamy were more normalised in other cultures, so this was a way to undermine those cultures - BY GOD IT'S ALL CONNECTED
• "As long as the dominant belief is that sexual relationships are markers of maturity and adulthood, many asexuals will fail to meet that standard" (p.48)
• A related concept is singlism - prejudice against single people (p.48)
• DePaulo and Morris are referenced for their research into attitudes towards single people and their writing on the concept of "compulsory coupling" - they identify some main points of this "singlist ideology": that everyone wants to (and eventually does) marry), that "a sexual partnership is the one truly important peer relationship", and that people in such partnerships are "better people - more valuable, worthy, and important" (p.48)
• One last note on race from this chapter: "The Black asexual must exist as a distinct impossibility according to the Racial Contract, the agreed-on misinterpretation of the world that continually (re)produces Blackness and the Black body as hypersexual, as both delectable and undesirable, as both repellant and consumable. Black asexuals, in our impossible existence, are up against multiple overlapping narratives: the blanket hypersexuality imposed on Black bodies, the simultaneous adultification and sexualization of Black youth, the infantizilation of asexuality and Blackness in tandem, and the pressure to conform to white cisheteropatriarchal chrononormative ideals while never being able to meet standards of whiteness, which is continually defined against Blackness." (p.53)
• Back on the sexism side of things: "the idea that sex is necessary to fuel men's productivity and that it is women's responsibility to provide this fuel, drawing a direct connection between rate of sexual activity and economic outcomes" (p.57)
• Brown discusses the phenomenon of articles about the so-called "sex recession" - basically the idea that people are having less sex than they used to. As one article states: "in the space of a generation, sex has gone from something most high-school students have experienced to something most haven't" (p.57)
• Brown criticises these articles for being "alarmist" (p.58) I was also.... shall we say "unimpressed" by these articles. Or to put it another way, this was the point in the book where I blacked out from rage mildly. To quote my own messages from my group chat while in my rage blackout below:
• 
• Or, to put it in a more reasonable and coherent way: "The rhetoric that accompanies it continues the work of connecting sex to maturity and true adulthood: 'The drop in sex rates and marriage rates are clearly related. Fewer people making adult connections simply leads to a decline in both, and you don't need to be an economic genius to know that fewer marriages and children weaken economic demand overall'" (p.59, quoting America's Sex Recession Could Lead to an Economic Depression by Jake Novak)
• If you couldn't tell from the previous Novak quote, a lot of this "sex recession" discussion ends up falling into pronatalism: "The policy or practice, particularly on the government level, of encouraging the birth of children without concern for the quality of life or health of those children and the people who birth them" - Brown calls this "a sibling of compulsory sexuality" (p.62) - basicallly there's an idea that it's a moral obligation to have children for the sake of society, the economy etc.
• It was at this point that I blacked out from rage again. Messages sent to the group chat in my rage blackout below:
• 
• "Again and again we see the conflation of sex, marriage, and reproduction with true adulthood, and the criteria for that adulthood is tied to reproduction and the patriarchal nuclear family" (p.63)
• An expansion on the point about race from earlier in the book: Roderick Ferguson argues that "nonheteronormative, nonnuclear family structures and kinship connections" were more common in Black families, so the nuclear family structure was essentially used as a weapon against Black people - "evidence of their instability, dysfunction, savagery, and primitivity" (p.64)
• "Those who deprioritize or divest from sex - and often marriage and reproduction along with it - regardless of the reasons why, become a threat to the established systems that rely and thrive on the exploitation of and extraction of labor from our bodies, including sexual and reproductive labor" (p.67)

Possible further reading:

• Queering the Color Line by Siobhan B. Somerville
• Intergroup Bias toward Group X by Carl MacInnis and Gordon Hodson
• Attitudes toward Asexuals (ATA) Prejudice Scale by Mark Hoffarth, Caroline Drolet, Gordon Hodson, and Carolyn Hafer
• Has Virginity Lost its Virtue? by Amanda Gesselman
• Time Binds by Elizabeth Freeman
• The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America by Julian B. Carter
• Singles in Society and in Science by Bella DePaulo and Wendy Morris
• Aberrations in Black by Roderick Ferguson
• Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex? by Kate Julian
• Possible reasons US adults are not having sex as much as they used to by Jean Twenge
• The Millenial Sex Recession is Bullsh*t by Julie Vadnal
• America's Sex Recession Could Lead to an Economic Depression by Jake Novak

Part 3: Fun with Methodology!

Content analysis is a type of analysis that was mentioned a lot in Media/Society by Croteau and Hoynes and Media and Society by Curran and Hesmondhalgh, particularly in reference to feminist criticism of female stereotypes. This got me thinking that it could be a useful method for analysing depictions of asexuality and aromanticism, so this week I started looking into what it actually is and how to do it. They say the basics are a good place to start, so I'm starting with Research Methods: The Basics by Nicholas Walliman!

• Content analysis is just one approach "to the interpretation of cultural texts", along with semiotics and discourse analysis (p.15) and thematic analysis (p.115)
• It is a type of quantitative analysis, meaning it involves counting the frequency of particular phenomena e.g. frequency of different races in fashion magazines(p.115)
• Performing a content analysis typically involves a coding schedule, coding manual, and tabulation of results. The coding schedule is essentially a list of "units of analysis" for your investigation. (p.116) The book provides this example for a content analysis of how different news items are reported: (p.117)
• Units of analysis can be collected using computer software e.g. NVivo, Atlas.ti, QSR, NUD*IST (p.116)
• The coding manual lists different types of each unit of analysis. (p.118).
• 
• Examples of these units from different case studies are then listed in the tabulation of results. (p.118)
• The main limit of this type of analysis Walliman identifies is that it can't "discover the effects that the publications, programmes, films etc. have on their audience. Other research methods (e.g. questionanaires, interviews etc.) must be used to gain this type of information." (p.117)
• On the other hand, its main strength is its "versatility" - it can be applied to many different types of media for many different purposes (p.172)
• Basic stages of quantitative analysis: (p.171)
• 
• For further reading: Might be worth looking at Analyzing Media Messages by D Riff, S Lacy and F Fico

Part 4: Isabel's Fun Week of Theatre

• First play of the week was Elephant, written by and starring Anoushka Lucas (who came to my attention in her dazzling turn as the Laurey Williams in the Oklahoma! revival). My favourite of the plays I saw, although it was also the least relevant to all the reading I've been doing. That said, racial identity and colonialism (y'know, those things that Angela Chen and Sherronda J Brown discuss a lot in their work) are still key themes of the play, and it was done in a truly captivating way.
• The next day we saw untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play, a very funny and creative parody of the long and storied tradition of bad and sterotypical plays (and films) about Asian characters. I was pretty much inevitably reminded of Angela Chen and Croteau and Hoynes' discussions of Asian stereotypes in media: the stereotype of Asian women as subservient, or being sexualised and exoticised.
• Finally, we watched the AUB production of Spring Awakening, the classic play about adolescent sexuality and sexual represssion. Naturally, this felt very relevant, and I only wish I'd been feeling slightly less theatre-d out by this point and had been able to focus on it a bit more. It certainly paints a picture of a culture where sex is hugely taboo, treated as something too important and too awful to tell young people about. What if we all treated sex with more neutrality. What if.
• One last thing: Knowing my tastes, it was only natural that after watching the play Spring Awakening, I'd also want to check out the soundtrack to the 2006 musical. I've only listened to bits so far, but one thing does stick out to me: the original play Spring Awakening features a scene where the characters of Melchior and Wendla have sex, and it is pretty clearly not consensual on Wendla's part. In the musical, they changed this scene so that Wendla does explicitly consent, but without either of them really understanding what they're doing. I've had portrayals of consent in media on my mind a lot, so this jumped out to me, and not really in a good way. In the play, Melchior's guilt and Wendla's trauma over the rape are hugely important parts of the plot, so why would the musical change this? Did they perhaps fear it would make Melchior too unlikeable? It feels like missing the point - surely the sheer awfulness of this scene is the point, the apotheosis of the repressive culture the play criticises. Much to think about.

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