Teenage girls negotiating femininity in the context of sexually explicit materials

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we draw from elements of a study that sought to examine how teenage South African girls, both white and black African, articulate their relationship with online sexually explicit materials (SEM). The study contributes to the literature by resisting the dominant discursive practices underlined by the construction of sexuality as an exclusive realm of danger for teenage girls. Challenging this static version of femininity, we focus on the ways in which teenage girls, aged between 13 and 18 years old in two elite private schools, use online SEM to expand their sexual knowledge and engage in pleasurable forms of sexuality. By drawing on individual interviews, focus group discussions and open-ended visual elicitation research methods, we show how girls embrace online SEM in ways that expand the definition of femininity beyond fearing sexuality whilst demonstrating the entanglement with gender inequalities. Girls’ relationship with online SEM, whilst tenuous, disrupts normative assumptions around femininity. However, an ambiguous relationship with online SEM is evident as their challenges to dominant femininity are mediated by concerns about respect and innocence, as well as by persistent evidence of male power within online SEM. Implications for school-based sexuality education concludes the paper.

KEYWORDS:

• Teenage girls
• online sexually explicit materials
• femininity
• gender inequalities
• South Africa

Acknowledgments

This work was based on research supported by the South African Research Chairs’ Initiative of the Department of Science and Technology and National Research Foundation of South Africa (Grant No 98407).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Pseudonyms for all school names have been used.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche South African Research Chairs Initiative of the Department of Science and Technology and National Research Foundation of South Africa: [Grant Number 98407].