Heterosexercising women’s sexual pleasure in Finnish sex manuals

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which heterosexual women’s sexual pleasure becomes a subject of exercise in Finnish sex manuals published between 2005 and 2015. Our research focuses on the production of the heterosexual mindscape, and how women are encouraged to engage in exercise and adopt a heterosexual state of mind in order to increase their sexual pleasure. Our analysis demonstrates how power constitutes, through sex manuals, paradoxical subject positions for heterosexual women. These manuals take into account both gender and sexual equality for the sake of women’s greater sexual enjoyment, but at the same time they continue to maintain gendered power imbalances and sexism. Throughout the article, we use the term ‘heterosexercise’ as an analytical tool to examine this complexity and to understand the production of heterosexuality as a state of mind.