Presumed Innocent: The Paradox of ‘Coming of Age’ and the Problem of Youth Sexuality

Abstract

The previous chapter examined the effects of a developmental discourse operating within cognitive science, revealing its limitations in explaining the development of reasoning ability in young people. This chapter continues my concern with the way ‘youth’ is conceptualised as a ‘problem’ and the need for greater reflexivity in accounting for the conditions of this conceptualisation. With respect to extreme public concern about the sexualisation of culture and its harmful impact on girls and young women, I argue here that part of the ‘problem’ of youth sexuality is the very function of the concepts of youth that are called on to make sense of it. Specifically, this chapter analyses three films that foreground questions of young female sexuality in order to deconstruct the discourse of ‘coming of age’. This is a different way to approach the problematic nature of young female sexuality than that offered by contemporary debates on the sexualisation of youth, which predominantly focus on the negative impact of media culture on young girls’ development. However, as this is a formative context for discussing female sexuality, I will briefly outline the phenomenon of sexualisation and some of its scholarly explanations in order to further explain and situate my approach.