More sex please, we're British: The sexualisation of contemporary national popular culture

Contemporary society is witnessing an increase in sexualised images in the media sphere that currently dominate the popular cultural market place. The cause of sexualised British popular culture has occurred due to a paradigmatic capitalist restructuring resulting in a cultural shift. This shift is manifest in the proclivity of sexualised images within all realms of the media, from print to the internet. The abundance of which is forced into an already over-saturated commodity market and in order for capitalist consumer trends to not buckle under the weight of a double dip recession, have come to rely most heavily on the “sex sells” remit. Thus, the sexualisation of the media in its delivery and content requires interrogation and renegotiation in order to establish what this process is doing and how its effects are impacting on constructions of gender. The rise in sexually visible popular cultural material is arguably due to an increased capitalisation of the sexual entertainment industry from the downgrading of sexually explicit printed material to the proliferation of sexual entertainment venues, deregulation of the media and the consumer-based accessibility of the internet on new media technologies. To that end, the communication model of delivery and reception of media strands such as the printed press, televisual texts, digital televisual structures and internet advertising imagery will be investigated, as opposed to only examining media reception and impact. It is vital to identify the amoral, patriarchal delivery of media systems to determine tropes that pertain to engineering and manufacturing consent in terms of online consumer profiling and how the media operates within the physical and virtual space of consumer life