Puberty, Sexuality and the Self by Karin Martin

Author:Karin Martin [Martin, Karin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781134953844
Google: GQPFDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-12-07T03:44:23+00:00

These feelings of unsureness make sense given girls’ low expectations of sex. This psychodynamic disparity in agency and sexual subjectivity, laid upon the cultural inequalities between the genders, gives boys a greater capacity to push for what they want, and leaves girls less able to articulate what they want for themselves and less able to claim it forcefully (or to articulate what they don’t want and forcefully refuse it). I do not suggest girls are without any agency or without any sexual subjectivity. Rather, within the interactions with her boyfriend, within the “We talked it over,” a girl finds it particularly hard to hold her own against a boy’s assuredness and convincing reasons. This is especially true when a girl finds herself in ideal love with this boy. It is important not to underestimate the role and power of ideal love in adolescent girls’ lives. As much as sex is not about passion and lust for teen girls, it is about ideal love and fear of losing one’s ideal love, if one refuses sex. As we have seen above, many girls make this connection, saying “He’ll break up with you if you say no.”

There are exceptions to this pattern. Some boys do not want to have sex (yet), and certainly did not pressure girls to. In my sample they tend to be younger, Catholic boys, or boys who wanted to be in love first (which correlates with being younger). Jim, a working-class boy, told me a story about fears of guilt and pregnancy.

I’d just say not to have sex. Being Catholic that’s basically the only opinion I hear. But…I don’t know. I wouldn’t really feel comfortable buying a condom anyways, and I wouldn’t have sex without a condom ’cause I’d feel guilty, and I’d help out with a kid, and so I just wouldn’t have sex at all.

Similarly, Brent, a middle-class boy, also was not in a hurry to have sex not because of fear or guilt but because he felt he was too young and “not ready.” He was one of the only boys who used the term “ready.”

I’m definitely not ready to have sex yet…I’m not in control of my social life or academic life, and I’m not ready to start dealing with myself in that way. I’ll be ready once I find somebody I love. I’m not gonna do it before that because, because my friends some of them have already done it and they feel real shitty about it if they did it with some random person just to try it or something.

Other teens in my sample also had decided to postpone sex. Some rationally thought about the decision, about their feelings, about themselves and their partners and decided not to have sex. These teens were few. (See Chapter Six.) More often the teens who decided not to have sex as teens (at least not up until the point at which I interviewed them) did so because of “morals,” religion, and AIDS. For these teens the

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