FULL PDF
Abstract
This special issue has grown out of a small British Academy-funded project in the United Kingdom that ran from 2008 to 2010 and aimed to examine ways of developing research on young people’s sexual cultures. Our backgrounds are in the area of media and cultural studies, and our own work focuses on a range of aspects of sexual culture; in particular, the production, characteristics, use and regulation of sexually explicit media texts and other sexual artefacts (see, for example, Smith 2007a, 2007b, 2010; Attwood 2009, 2010; Attwood and Smith 2010). We were interested in exploring ways of building on earlier work on young people, sex and relationships (for example, Holland et al. 1998) and more recent research (for example, Buckingham and Bragg 2004) that develops this focus in the context of a contemporary media-saturated and technology-focused culture. We knew that some youth, health and educational agencies were expressing concern around aspects of young people’s sexual cultures, based on health issues such as high rates of sexually transmitted diseases, as well as a perceived increase in young people’s engagement with sexually explicit media such as pornography. Sex education and media literacy have increasingly been presented as important factors in the way young people develop sexual knowledge and form mature sexual identities. In recent years, academic work and governmental policies have increasingly highlighted both as crucial for the development of personal, social and health education, for cultural citizenship and for effective participation in society. Reports that young people were being ‘sexualized’ by culture were big news in a range of policy reports (American Psychological Association 2007; Australian Senate 2008; Papadopoulos 2010), books (Levy 2005; Paul 2005; Durham 2008; Oppliger 2008; Tankard Reist 2009) and in the press (see, for example, Cox 2009; Aitkenhead 2010). Yet these contained nothing in the way of convincing evidence or plausible accounts of the shifting sexual cultures of young people and seemed to be underpinned by views of sex and culture as inherently dangerous and of young people as easily corruptible and harmed. We were also aware that research that has engaged with young people and taken the study of culture seriously has come to quite different conclusions; for example, as Buckingham and Bragg (2004) show, young people engage actively and critically with the media and with ideas about sex.
View more >>