Gwynne, Joel

The objective of this study was therefore to encourage pre-service students to position cinema in the classroom as a form of social learning in order to help adolescent girls speak about what constitutes love, desire, meaningful relationships and informed sexual decisionmaking. In terms of the socio-political background, the study therefore supports MOE’s existing ideological framework for sexuality education, which aims to enable young people to “acquire social and emotional skills of self-awareness”; “manage their thoughts, feelings and behaviours”; and to demonstrate “effective communication, problem-solving and decisionmaking skills” (MOE Sexuality Education Programme 2017).

Thanks for Sharing (2012) and Don Jon (2013), share similarities in their representation of the lives of unmarried men who are all approaching midlife, and who are all struggling to build meaningful, monogamous, long term attachments with women. In Thanks for Sharing, Adam (Mark Ruffalo) is addicted to brief encounters with numerous partners in contexts devoid of emotional intimacy, while a fellow member of his sex addicts support group, Neil (Josh Gad), struggles with a compulsion to touching strangers in public locations. In counterpoint, Don Jon charts the protagonist’s insatiable consumption of online pornography, since Jon believes that the virtual domain provides a far superior sexual experience than anything, he could find in real life encounters with women. This article is concerned with the relationship between sex addiction and masculinity, and how neoliberalism is imbued in the characters’ embodiment of masculinity regardless of their divergent social backgrounds.