Playful Sex Talk: ‘Good Girls’ and ‘Bad Girls’

Abstract

There is a dearth of research exploring young British Asian women’s discursive positioning in relation to sexual identities, experiences, desires and anxieties. Moreover, ethnographic studies of British girls (Griffiths 1995; Hey 1997; Lees 1993) and sociological and psychological explorations of young sexuality (Holland 1993; Holland et al. 1998) tend to provide very limited data on Asian girls’ ‘actual’ sexual experiences. This may partly be due to (what the researchers perceive as) Asian girls’ reluctance to talking about sexual intercourse and to the girls feeling less pressure to find a boyfriend (Lees 1993; Griffiths 1995). Indeed the interview and questionnaire data from the Women’s Risk and AIDS Project (WRAP) in Britain show that whereas 66 per cent of white adolescents aged 16–17 admitted to having had sexual intercourse, only 14 per cent of the comparatively smaller sample of Asian girls in the corresponding age group said that they were sexually active (Holland 1993). Hennink, Diamond and Cooper (1999: 879) also refer to Raleigh et al.’s (1997) findings based on the 1991–95 General Household Survey data which reports that 42 per cent of ‘16–29-year old women from Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds were not in a sexual relationship compared with 22 percent of their white peers’.