“They See Sex as Something That’s Reproductive and Not as Something People Do for Fun”: Shortcomings in Adolescent Girls’ Sexual Socialization from Adults

Theorists suggest that adolescent girls’ sexual socialization can influence sexual risk reduction and positive sexuality development, although adolescent girls’ positive sexuality development is understudied. In this study, we applied a sex-positive framework to explore sexual socialization experiences among a sample of adolescent girls of color recruited from community-based organizations that serve youth with heightened needs ( n = 50; Mage = 15.62, range = 12–19; 58% Black/African American; 76% heterosexual; 58% sexually active). Specifically, we examined girls’ reports of messages about sexuality they have received from their teachers, parents, health care providers, and society at large. Participants completed brief, semi-structured qualitative interviews. Inductive thematic analysis was used to analyze the data. Overall, the adolescent girls described how they navigate primarily sex-negative sexual socialization messages from adults to develop positive sexual selves. Within this narrative, we found five themes: (a) Adults deliver one-sided communication that adolescent sex is inappropriate and risky; (b) Gendered messages restrict adolescent girls’ sexuality; (c) Naive adults can’t be trusted; (d) Exclusion of same-gender sexual experiences endangers adolescents who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and with other nonheterosexual orientations (LGBQ+); and (e) Messages about sexual protection can help but may still restrict adolescent girls’ sexual choices. Implications for adolescent girls’ positive sexuality development are discussed.

Sexual Choice in Males of the Triatoma brasiliensis Complex: A Matter of Maintenance of the Species or Genetic Variability?

Background: Members of the Triatoma brasiliensis complex can produce experimental and natural hybrids. Crossing experiments performed in the laboratory, with several combinations between species of that complex, revealed a gradient of reproductive affinities among them. However, little is known about the reproductive males’ choices when they have the possibility of copulating with females of different species, including interspecific and conspecific females, at the same time. In this unprecedented experiment, the sexual choices of the T. brasiliensis complex and Triatoma infestans males were observed. Methods: Virgin males and females of T. b. brasiliensis, T. sherlocki, and T. infestans, and females of T. juazeirensis were used. The experiment was developed in an arena in which one male, one conspecific female, and two non-conspecific females were observed for 15 minutes. The following variables of mating behavior were observed: the male’s choice for a female; displacement time (the time it took the male to move from its stall until it reached the female); the copula itself (number of attempts and its occurrence); and the type of rejection of copula by the female. Results: Males of T. sherlocki were faster in finding the females (conspecific and non-conspecific) than T. b. brasiliensis and T. infestans. Males of T. b. brasiliensis and T. sherlocki were able to copulate with conspecific females and other female species: T. infestans and T. b. brasiliensis/T. juazeirensis, respectively. While T. infestans copulated with conspecific females, and T. juazeirensis and T. b. brasiliensis females. Conclusion: The results suggest that the choice for the copula is not always towards conspecific females. In fact, the males of the three different species tested were able to copulate with their conspecific females and also with other female species, which may induce the formation of hybrids and greater genetic diversity. These findings pose new challenges to the understanding of the reproductive behavior and the evolutionary aspects of the Triatominae. Therefore, in areas of sympatry, if no ecological barriers exist, there is the possibility of natural hybridization, which might reflect in the epidemiological risks since the species studied occur in endemic areas for the Chagas disease.

Opposition to Short-Term Mating Predicts Anti-Atheist Prejudice

Which people are most likely to harbor prejudice toward atheists? Recent research suggests that perceptions of (non)religious individuals tend to track lifestyle (i.e., family and sexual) choices. We draw on this work, proposing that anti-atheist prejudice stems, in part, from the conflict that arises among competing mating strategies. Across four studies (N = 1,855), we confirmed that anti-atheist prejudice is related to stereotypes about atheists’ mating strategies (Pilot Study); we further found that people who favor committed mating strategies express greater levels of anti-atheist prejudice, even controlling for their beliefs about cooperation (Study 1a) and religiosity (Study 1b). Finally, this effect holds even when using a semi-implicit measure of prejudice, again controlling for religiosity (Study 2). These results suggest that mating strategies provide one source of individual differences in prejudice toward atheists, consistent with the notion that this prejudice may reflect perceived differences in lifestyle rather than just abstract theological disagreements or ingroup bias.

Non-normative Sexuality Studies

Sexual non-normativity in the early-21st-century social sciences not only describes the cultural, social, and political needs, interests, experiences, and struggles of nonheterosexual desires and representations, but it also includes an array of identity formations. What does it mean to be “non-normative”? Ideally speaking, this connotation structures around a political claiming, a subversive metaphor that does not adhere to the standard gender(ed) expressions. That said, these gender traits challenge the cultural norms, or the dominant languages as historically coined within the medical dictionary. In order to address this, the politics further renders a non-foundationalist approach to gender, as making an attempt to de-objectify any sort of typification of classification. In addition, the diversity and fluidity of it aims to install de-pathologization of identity category, and further, to pacify the rigid gender traits that could potentially make gender more discrete. Thus, its very fluidity establishes an unsettling position of gender and sexual choices, as further to establish anti-imperial, non-hegemonic claim in the US-centric gender positions and theorizations. In lines to this argument, non-normative sexuality studies are an attempt to collate interdisciplinary and non–Euro-American modes of texts, theories, and approaches from the domains of culture, desire, beauty, aging, legalities, medicine, and health, complemented with several dimensions of these disciplines to create a bibliographical space addressing the several bodies, identities, and experiences of these representations. Furthermore, it maps the various changes in the lives, personal experiences, forms of discrimination faced in the past or present, needs, interests, and perspectives of these individuals in varied geopolitics, contexts, and cultures—modeling approaches that might be seen as alternatives to the dominant queer studies. My heartfelt thanks to Professor Raewyn Connell for introducing me to the Oxford Bibliographies series, Ms. Neha Pande as my research assistant who enabled me to complete this important piece of work, and Ms. Jennifer Pierce from Oxford University Press.

Defining Girlhood in India

At what age do girls gain the maturity to make sexual choices? This question provokes especially vexed debates in India, where early marriage is a widespread practice. India has served as a focal problem site in NGO campaigns and intergovernmental conferences setting age standards for sexual maturity. Over the last century, the country shifted the legal age of marriage from twelve, among the lowest in the world, to eighteen, at the high end of the global spectrum. Ashwini Tambe illuminates the ideas that shaped such shifts: how the concept of adolescence as a sheltered phase led to delaying both marriage and legal adulthood; how the imperative of population control influenced laws on marriage age; and how imperial moral hierarchies between nations provoked defensive postures within India. Tambe's transnational feminist approach to legal history shows how intergovernmental debates influenced Indian laws and how expert discourses in India changed UN terminology about girls. Ultimately, the well-meaning focus on child marriage became tethered less to the well-being of girls themselves and more to parents' interests, population control targets, and the preservation of national reputation.

Tropical Exceptions

The book’s first chapter delves into the geopolitics of knowledge production about human puberty, asking, “At what age do girls gain the maturity to make sexual choices?” The chapter explores how the earliest efforts in the 1920s at the League of Nations to harmonize a common international age of sexual consent were undercut by ideas of climatic differences in the age of puberty for girls. These purported differences, which rested on a legacy of race science, functioned as code for racial difference in the League of Nations setting. The second section of the chapter demonstrates how the importance of climate in race science rose and fell at various points. Even if dominant understandings of race in the 1920s did not center upon climate, variations in temperature were treated in some fields, such as geography, obstetrics, and gynecology, as an acceptable explanation for the timing of menarche. This history illustrates the uneven commerce among natural science, practitioner knowledge, and folk conceptions. Ultimately, this chapter explains how scientific understandings about girls’ puberty at the beginning of the twentieth century embedded racial hierarchies between peoples and nations.

Governing Adolescent Reproduction in the ‘Developing World’: Biopower and Governmentality in Plan’s ‘Because I’m a Girl’ Campaign

In this article, I analyse the discursive construction of adolescent pregnancy and childbearing as a development ‘problem’ in Plan’s ‘Because I’m a Girl’ campaign. I draw on existing scholarship that configures teenage pregnancy prevention campaigns in the ‘developed’ world as a site of biopolitics that seeks to maximise the well-being of the population by governing adolescent girls’ reproductive and sexual behaviours. Identifying Plan’s campaign as part of a larger turn towards adolescent girls in development discourse and policy, I also draw on a growing body of scholarship that examines how campaigns targeting adolescent girls reinforce neo-liberal understandings of ‘development’ as achievable through the empowerment of individuals rather than through structural change. I argue that by discursively constructing adolescent pregnancy and parenthood as risky, Plan’s campaign reinforces reproductive norms of delayed reproduction and sexual debut, according to which adolescent girls in the ‘developing’ world are expected to comply. The campaign’s goal of ‘empowerment’ thus acts as a means of constructing adolescent girls as responsible reproductive decision makers who will break the ‘cycle of poverty’ by making rational reproductive and sexual choices. Thus, although Plan’s ‘Because I’m a Girl’ campaign addressed important issues, including adolescent girls’ right to reproductive autonomy, their focus on empowerment operates as a form of biopower that pursues the project of development through the regulation of girls’ reproduction and sexuality.

Phallocentricism, female penile choices, and the use of sex toys in Ghana

Although the penis forms an important aspect of sexual practices, we know little about how women and men construct the penis in relation to sex and gender in Africa. In this exploratory study from urban Ghana with 34 interviewees, I argue that the changing notions of sex and the penis, in terms of the form they take and in terms of ownership, offer women and men the space to negotiate sexual scripts and to highlight women’s penile preferences. The findings show that while women and men emphasize a biological representation of the penis (due to cultural and religious values), there are nuanced narratives that also acknowledge the social and symbolic importance of the penis to include self-sexual gratification and the use of sex toys. The study contests notions that project female vulnerability vis-a-vis male dominance in matters of sex and that project female sexual choices in Africa.