Impersonal Sex Talk: Knowing Girls

Abstract

In contrast to the two working-class groups the topic of sex only plays a minor role in the talk of the four white private-school/upper-middle-class girls who took part in my study. In only 3 per cent of their self-recorded talk do Roberta, Nicky, Jane and Elizabeth address subjects related to sex and sexuality. The corresponding figure for Pat and her friends is 23 per cent and for Ardiana and her friendship group 6 per cent. Moreover, the limited sex talk of Roberta and her friends is strikingly impersonal; differently from the other two groups, the girls’ own sexual experiences, anxieties or desires are largely left untouched. In the introduction to Part II of this book I considered some preliminary explanations for these differences in the sex talk of the three groups, including the girls’ relationship with me as well as their actual sexual experience. Indeed, quantitative data on female sexuality from 148 young British women interviewed by Holland (1993: 8) suggests that middle-class girls experience a later onset of first sexual activity, with ‘the average age of first sex[ual intercourse] being 14.5 years [for working-class girls] as opposed to 16.3 for middle-class girls’. This difference in the onset of actual sexual activity of their peers (which levels out shortly afterwards) may therefore shed some light on why the sex talk in Roberta’s group is both limited and impersonal, whereas that of Pat’s same age group is not only extensive but also characterised by personal self-disclosure.