Sexual Practices and Relationships Among Young People

Abstract

This chapter explores the fraught issue of young people’s sexualities: their desires, relationships, and sexual practices. Does society inappropriately de-sexualize or oversexualize young people? How can we think about sexual consent when agency is determined by age, independence, and rationality? What are the ethics of young people engaging in sexual behaviors with each other, or with an older person? The most common response to adolescent sexual activity and experience—a restrictive, reductionist, and risk-based approach—has done little to nothing to provide an ethical foundation for sustainable or just sexual relationships. Instead, we recognize that adolescent sexual subjectivity—sexual self-understanding along with access to and ability to engage in sexual decision making—can be ethically creative and playful in ways that subvert and challenge adult-centric, socially oppressive forms of sexuality. We propose “orgasmic failure” as a new adolescent sexual ethic that focuses on living particular values, rather than rules-based sexual ethics, frustrates goal-oriented approaches to sexuality, and opens up various pleasurable, non-normative sexual expressions.