Risking a relation: sex education and adolescent development

Abstract

This paper considers how issues of adolescent development might be brought into conversation with dilemmas in sex education. Here, sex education is larger than information, affirmation or prohibition. In its address to the most intimate aspects of life—love, loss, vulnerability, power, friendship, aggression—sex education is necessarily entangled in the adolescent's efforts to construct a self, find love outside the family, enjoy one's newly adult body; in short, various relationships that might cautiously be called developmental. Drawing on the work of psychoanalysts Winnicott and Sandler, I argue that, to imagine adolescents as sexual subjects, we need to have a theory of adolescent sexuality, how it differs from and is similar to adult sexuality; and, furthermore, we need to have a patience and curiosity about the ways adult sexuality is inhabited by the memories, fantasies and experiences of adolescence. That is, how can sex education make room for a theory of adolescent development without casting the adolescent in the risky role of not yet adult?

Notes

1. In the past decade, a sexual subculture has sprung up around the relationship between HIV infection and unprotected sex. There are ‘bug chasers,’ men who have sex with HIV‐positive men in the hopes of becoming infected, and ‘gift givers,’ HIV‐positive men who agree to have unprotected sex with HIV‐negative men. While these identities may be recent, the practices are not. See Walt Odets' (1995) study of HIV‐negative men for a careful consideration of the dilemma of feeling left out and forgotten.

2. Delinquency is implicated in discussions of adolescent sexual risk‐taking. As Adams (1997) reminds us, delinquency has always been tied to sexual transgression when the label is applied to girls. She writes:

• Girls who were labeled delinquent [in post World War II North America] were not just violating the expectations that were attached to their gender, they were also threatening notions of the adolescent as not yet sexually mature, notions of sex as something to be experienced only by adults. (Adams, 1997, p. 66)