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The second half of this century has seen a pronounced escalation in the already well established sexualisation of developed capitalist societies at all structural levels, from day-to-day interactions and relationships to long-term market planning and state policy formation (Armytage et al. 1984; Gebhard 1984). Of course ‘sexuality has always been of central concern to human beings’ (Brake 1982:13) because of its associations with procreativity, its credited though usually unspecified ‘mysteries’ and apparently unsocialised animality, but never before has this concern been in explicit and coded terms, so widely and incessantly discussed, so prominently marketed and consumed, so repeatedly the site of contests over ‘permissiveness’, ‘liberation’, the pursuit or infringement of rights and freedoms.

If this ‘sanctification of the sexual as “sexuality” indeed is one of the major characteristics of our culture’ (Heath 1982:147), it surely is not one that is so in isolation, discretely segregated from other social, political and economic structures and associated cultures. Many of the critiques which stress that sexuality has ‘become our sole mode of transcendence… our only touchstone of authenticity’ (White 1980) perpetuate traditional dominant ideologies of the sexual as individual, personal, private, definitively divorced from material structures and power relations. Yet, as merely passing references to the civil, political and social rights of various sexual minorities, and the marketing of sexual imagery and commodities make clear, this is manifestly not the case. There has been a sexualisation of late twentieth-century first world capitalist cultures but, behind the distracting verdicts of experts who claim via labels such as the Sexual Fix (Heath 1982) and Sex Religion (Greer 1984) that sexuality is a private escape from the alienation of the public material world, it is clear that in many and various guises, it is formally and customarily institutionalised and incorporated within the latter.

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