Parents' Constructions of Teen Sexuality: Sex Panics, Contradictory Discourses, and Social Inequality

Abstract

Teen sexuality occupies a highly ambivalent and contradictory place in U.S. society. Teenagers are deemed too young to know about sex, but too sexually driven to be trusted with information. Teen sexual activity is portrayed as fraught with danger, yet sexuality is a pervasive aspect of the American cultural landscape and considered key to identity and fulfillment. Drawing on in-depth interviews with forty-seven parents of teenagers, this article explores how parents navigate these contradictory discourses in making sense of teen sexuality. The findings show that parents do not think of their own teenagers as sexually desiring subjects, even as they construct adolescents in general as highly sexual and sexually predatory, with gender, racial, and class signifiers woven through their descriptions. I argue that parents' binary thinking—constructing their teen children as asexual but other teens as hypersexual—represents more than simply an effort to maintain a notion of their teens as sexually innocent: it reveals deep anxieties about their teenagers' future life chances and underscores the prominent role sexuality plays in reproducing social inequality.