Self-disclosing Sex Talk: Self-determined Girls

Abstract

My interest in comparing the’ sex talk’ of the three friendship groups in my study first arose when I became aware that Pat and her white/mixed British working-class friends had dedicated almost a quarter of their total talking time to sex and sexuality-related topics. Working-class girls’ sexuality has frequently been problematised; it is associated with stereotypes about ‘hypersexual “bad” (poor, of colour) girls’, as Tolman (2005) observes in relation to young urban women in the US, and with teenage pregnancy and a ‘discourse of welfare scroungers’ as Walkerdine et al. (2001: 188–9) note in Britain. Public discourses which position working-class sexuality as deviant are certainly not new. Indeed, Weeks (1981: 19–20) in Skeggs (1997: 42) speaks of ‘an obsessive concern with the sexuality of the working-class’ in Britain since the end of the eighteenth century, arguing that this allowed for a shift of focus from class conflict to morality. The historic and continuing dominance of classed (and racialised) discourses of (respectable) female sexuality are summed up by Skeggs (1997: 122) in the following quotation about nineteenth-century Britain. ‘White middle-class women […] were able to locate themselves within a pure and proper femininity, precisely because Black and White working-class women were designed and designated as unpure, dangerous and sexual […]’.