ABSTRACT
It was a sunny fall day. I was spending another afternoon writing in my windowless library carrel. I had been organizing my thoughts about how youth come to think about, and make sense of, adolescent female sexuality. Interviews with students and their comments from an urban high school health class suggested that both boys and girls organize adolescent female sexuality around the oppositional construct of “good”-girlness/ “nasty”-girlness. My field notes indicate how school practices also upheld this false dichotomy. Until this point I had been writing a self-removed, academic piece about schooling and adolescent female sexuality. However, in the afternoon I decided to take a coffee break and it was during my break that the connections between gender, school-based sexuality education, and violence prevention became very real to me.
