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diverse and increasing range of sexual economies and practices represented in the mainstream media. This is especially true of contemporary Western societies, and the United States and United Kingdom in particular have become increasingly hypersexual. Postmillennial Britain has been described by Natasha Walter as not only “a new culture of shags and threesomes, orgies and stranger fucks,” but more importantly a hypersexual culture that “seems to be replacing the culture in which sex was associated with the flowering of intimacy” (Walter 101). Constructions of intimacy have dramatically changed over the last decade, in addition to attitudes to female sexuality in popular culture, the latter especially since the ascent of postfeminism as a cultural condition. Female desire is now invariably read in the context of female empowerment and through the critical vernacular of postfeminism, a much contested and nebulous term in itself. Sarah Gamble’s definition of postfeminism as “women dressing like bimbos, yet claiming male privileges and attitudes” (Gamble 43) demonstrates the extent of some feminists’ skepticism towards the validity of the term as representing a movement that strives for equality between the sexes. Gamble astutely observes that the neologism is often barricaded in inverted commas, suggesting that not only are many critics wary of associating the term with definite and resolute feminist values, they also remain unsure of the extent to which the term represents a “con trick engineered by the media or a valid movement” (43).
Indeed, the difficulty in locating postfeminism as a valid movement is largely due to two determining factors. First, there is an absence of unity regarding feminist values and sensibilities in the multitude of media and contexts in which postfeminist thought is expressed. This is largely because it is “skewed in favour of liberal humanism” and embraces a “flexible ideology which can be adapted to suit individual needs and desires” (Gamble 44). Secondly, and perhaps most important of all, many feminists who align themselves to more traditional forms of feminism reject postfeminism by identifying it as a betrayal of a history of feminist struggle. Social theorists Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff are particularly concerned with the manner in which postfeminist sensibilities