ABSTRACT
Introduction There are few sex education programmes which embrace the idea that positive experiences of sexual desire and pleasure are integral to young people’s sexual health and well-being. More generally, as Aggleton and Campbell (2000) notes, sex education equates young people’s sexual health with the absence of sexually transmitted infections and the avoidance of unintended pregnancies. This observation is supported by a tradition of feminist research that identifies the way in which much sex education denies that young people are sexual subjects (Jackson, 1978; Wolpe, 1987; Lenskyj, 1990; Lees, 1994). Fine’s work has made an important contribution here in documenting a ‘missing discourse of desire’, that positively acknowledges and incorporates young women’s sexual desire within sex education (Fine, 1988). While it has been established that positive and empowering discourses of desire and pleasure are ‘missing’ from sex education, arguments about why their inclusion is important are less well articulated (Gagnon and Simon, 1973). Subsequently, this chapter explores the benefits of including these discourses within sexuality education for young women and men’s sexual health and well-being.1 [. . .]
This chapter does not detail the finer points of how a discourse of erotics might be worked into sexuality curricula. How this might occur is largely dependent on contextual factors such as policy governing the teaching of sexuality, teacher training and class composition (age, ethnicity, etc). Discourses are ‘an interrelated ‘system of statements which cohere around common meanings and values [that] are a product of social factors, of power and practices, rather than an individual’s set of ideas’ (Hollway, cited in Gavey, 1992, p. 327). Their social complexity and production within a particular historical moment and geographical space mean that what constitutes a discourse of erotics will vary across programmes. Instead, this chapter highlights some potential benefits of opening up discursive space within our communications with young people about sexual pleasure and desire. This does not mean that young people have to, or will necessarily seize upon these spaces, but that they are no longer denied them because they are ‘missing’ from some sex education programmes.
