What confessing sex desires on media can do, depending on where you live

Dr. Yow-Jiun Wang, Associate Professor of Taiwanese Literature at National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, and specialist in media and cultural studies, was a guest speaker at SOAS in July, talking about her work as part of the Centre of Taiwan Studies Summer School.

About twenty years ago, Taiwan’s first local tabloid newspaper ran something unusual: a page where ordinary women could write in and confess their sexual desires. It became a safe space, one that let readers disclose and affirms feelings they might otherwise have kept private.

The timing mattered. This was when sex-positive feminism has taken root in Taiwan. Aimed squarely at younger readers, the page sparked a wave of dialogue between pro-sex feminism and the women writing in.

What do sex confessions in media actually do?

Their words didn’t simply echo existing feminist ideas, they reshaped them, grounding them in the texture of everyday life. That’s the subject of an earlier research article of mine and it points to a broader question: What do media confessions actually do?

At the most basic level, confessions help people make sense of their own experience.

At the most basic level, confessions help people make sense of their own experience. Putting hidden feelings into words, into a public, mediated form, makes the unspoken visible.

And because words never exist in a historical vacuum, personal stories always carry past cultural meanings and social ideology along with them. When a confession page actively solicited positive accounts of female sexuality, what came back wasn’t just individual testimony. It was pro-sex feminism, echoing through hundreds of ordinary voices.

But confessions aren’t automatically powerful. Whatever influence they have depends entirely on context.

One size doesn't fit all

In a society already opening up to progressive ideas, as Taiwan was, sex confessions can embolden women to speak more freely about themselves. But flip the context, and the effect flips too.

In a more conservative climate, confessions might make female sexuality visible without doing much to unsettle the moral order behind it. 

In a more conservative climate, where women still have to frame their own sexual pleasure apologetically, confessions might make female sexuality visible without doing much to unsettle the moral order behind it. Visibility alone, in other words, can’t bring about a fundamental change.

The medium matters just as much as the moment. Social media has now become the place where people narrate their daily lives and that complicates the whole dynamics. 

The social media effect

A newspaper confession spoke to a defined community of readers. A social media confession doesn’t, it goes wherever the algorithm sends it, if made public. Readership becomes indeterminate and decentralised. 

The person confessing can still picture an audience in their head, but actually being recognised or understood by that audience will be far less certain. This makes what media confessions actually accomplish more varied and much less predictable.

Sex confessions are more than personal disclosures. They are shaped by the sexual discourses, social contexts and media forms surrounding them.

Sex confessions are more than personal disclosures. They are shaped by the sexual discourses, social contexts and media forms surrounding them. And in turn, they can reshape those very things - gender norms, cultural atmospheres, media landscapes. 

They don’t guarantee any shift in power, but they are unmistakably part of cultural history. A record of how sexual desire got talked about at a given moment and, perhaps, a quiet redrawing of the line between what can and cannot be said out loud.