ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how negotiations of sex are supported by friends. It argues that friendship intimacies include sexual intimacy, as per many participants’ experiences of sex with friends. Participants situate sex with friends as both safe and risky, depending on context, timing, and the type of friendships involved. The chapter also considers young people’s discourses of intimacy and friendship against sexual health promotion resources. Health promotion’s neglected discussion of friendship as a mode of social support underscores friendship’s disturbance to institutional agendas and norms, as well as to formal health knowledge. Participants mostly sourced sexual information from their friends, whereas sexual health information was primarily sought online. The digital communication technologies have introduced new practices of intimacy provides rationale for rethinking the importance of intimacy in young people’s sex and relationship practices. Evidently, intimacy can both accommodate and eclipse sexual pleasure, and friendship can offer space where sexual experimentation is viable and feels safe.
