Sexuality In and Out of School

Abstract

It was exciting to be asked to review a book such as this, which promises boldly on its back cover to examine how 'masculine and feminine identities are formed', how 'girls are increasingly adopting strategies of resistance', and how programmes of sex education can better respond to 'the AIDS crisis at a time when premarital sexual behaviour has become the norm'. And who better to perform such an analysis than Sue Lees, whose earlier work (Losing Out, 1986) established the centrality of 'sexual reputation' as a set of social and linguistic strategies whereby men effectively control women, in school and beyond? It came as a major disappointment, therefore, to find that Sugar and Spice. sexuality and adolescent girls did not live up to expectations-methodologically, substantively, or in its implications for policy and practice. So far as can be discerned, the principal findings derive from an analysis of individual interviews and group discussions involving 100 fifteen to sixteen year old girls at three London schools, and thirty boys. The interviews themselves were carried out sometime in the 1980s by the author, a researcher Celia Cowie, and a male colleague Dave Phillips. Even though the respondents are described as 'ordinary girls and boys' (p. 5), there are reasons to doubt their ordinariness, in some respects at least. Two of the selected schools, for example, had women headteachers (a fact which Lee herself describes as unusual for the time [p. 8]), and all appeared to be in the process of implementing fairly sophisticated equal opportunities programmes. Whilst this is commendable within the context of efforts to remedy social justice, it raises important questions about the external validity of the data collected. Such problems are exacerbated by issues affecting the internal validity of the study. Remarkably little information is provided on the form and structure of the interviews themselves, save that they explored five main topics-what girls and boys said about school, friendship for girls and boys, their families, sexuality, and their expectations for the future. In fact, there is good reason to believe that there may have been reactivity present in the discussions which took place. Several respondents, for example, were reported as commenting on the clothes that Lees wore, and it is admitted that the researcher's own 'conscious partiality' informed the interviews themselves (p. 12). It is unfortunate therefore that the book lacks an adequate account of the circumstances and