This article examines the ways in which heterosexual women’s sexual
pleasure becomes a subject of exercise in Finnish sex manuals published
between 2005 and 2015. Our research focuses on the production of the
heterosexual mindscape, and how women are encouraged to engage in
exercise and adopt a heterosexual state of mind in order to increase
their sexual pleasure. Our analysis demonstrates how power constitutes,
through sex manuals, paradoxical subject positions for heterosexual
women. These manuals take into account both gender and sexual equality
for the sake of women’s greater sexual enjoyment, but at the same time
they continue to maintain gendered power imbalances and sexism.
Throughout the article, we use the term ‘heterosexercise’ as an
analytical tool to examine this complexity and to understand the
production of heterosexuality as a state of mind.