Sexuality and Youth Work Practice

Abstract

Making sense of our sexuality, sexual desires, behaviours and identities is a difficult process riddled with contradictions and explanatory cul de sacs. Sexuality is an intensely personal affair, but it is equally political. Sexual politics is still neither widely discussed not generally understood and perhaps the vast majority of people prefer the ostrich attitude of ‘what we do in bed is our own affair’. This is an inadequate and unacceptable response for at least three reasons. First, simply because it is untrue. The state has assumed an interest through its legislative powers in what we do, with whom and under what circumstances. Second, such a response reduces sexuality to physical sexual activity, an obsessive if not exclusive concern with genitalia and orgasm. Third, it is really saying let us not talk about it’: an unthinking acceptance of the prevailing essentialist perspective which holds that sex(uality) is natural and therefore we do what we have to do. This simplistic view ignores the social constructions of sexuality and leaves unexamined the range of possibilities and limitations of choice.