ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 draws together the findings from previous chapters and discusses options for disentangling the complex dilemmas that confront teenagers in their desires and the futures they dream of. Inattention to teenage affective worlds and the ‘missing discourse of teenage desire’ in South Africa is troubling. Teenagers navigate sexuality under adverse conditions, with potentially adverse outcomes for their sexual health and well-being. Bringing love, desire and sexual pleasure together within the broader social context is crucial and is a major gap in policy and interventions regarding teenage sexual health education. Unravelling the paradox of love requires attention to local cultures and contextual realities shaping teenagers’ understandings of sexuality. Caring, compassionate adults and policy are central to changing the status quo. The chapter summarises five salient points under the themes of desiring love, material love, pure (virginal) love, forced love and fearing love. It discusses the urgent need to address teenage sexualities in ways that encompass pleasure and danger, love and pain, desire and anxiety, and to address unequal relations of power, gendered ideologies and cultural values emphasising female chastity. Failure to develop policy recognising teenagers’ lived sexual experiences will compound the neglect and injustices they face, making their hopes and aspirations ever harder to realise.
