The aesthetics of sexual discontent:notes from the London ‘seduction community’

This chapter explores questions of sexual desire and gendered aesthetics through a discussion of research undertaken with and among men who participate in the London ‘seduction community’. Recognising sexual desire as an affective and embodied dynamic that is nevertheless irrevocably social, I consider how the sexual desires of heterosexual men are shaped in and through normative feminine beauty ideals. I argue that the naturalisation of aesthetic labour as part of the cultural code of femininity has implications for the manner in which heterosexual men relate to women’s bodies, both real and imagined.