Paradoxical Pleasures: Female Submission in Popular and Erotic Fiction

By placing these books in a broader cultural frame however, Anna Watz exposes how female submission has been disseminated as a consumer product. Navigating the minefield of women’s pleasure in popular culture, she frames the female masochist in relation to the backlash against feminism and the resurgence of sexism in post-feminist culture. Watz also describes how renewed debates about sex and sexuality have tended towards ‘sex negative’ and ‘sex positive’ attitudes, and the impact that neo-liberalism and consumerism in the 2010s, along with feminism’s recent popular revival has had on them.