Revisiting youthful sexuality: continuities and changes over two decades

Abstract

In this short article we revisit “Deconstructing virginity” published in Sex and Relationship Therapy in 2000. The article was based on data from two largely qualitative studies of young people's sexuality: the Women Risk and AIDS project and subsequent Men, Risk and AIDS project, which were funded in the late-1980s in the light of the threat of HIV and AIDS. They constituted the first UK-based major empirical investigations of young people's heterosexual understandings and practices. Here we place that article in its own time and in the current context of research, practice and culture in relation to young people and sexuality. We comment briefly on how key ideas in “Deconstructing virginity” and these early studies have been developed in subsequent research, considering critical biographical moments as a way of exploring the relationship between the individual and the social and narratives of loss and gain as a medium for negotiating conflict and inequality.