Risking a relation: sex education and adolescent development

This paper considers how issues of adolescent development might be brought into conversation with dilemmas in sex education. Here, sex education is larger than information, affirmation or prohibition. In its address to the most intimate aspects of life—love, loss, vulnerability, power, friendship, aggression—sex education is necessarily entangled in the adolescent's efforts to construct a self, find love outside the family, enjoy one's newly adult body; in short, various relationships that might cautiously be called developmental. Drawing on the work of psychoanalysts Winnicott and Sandler, I argue that, to imagine adolescents as sexual subjects, we need to have a theory of adolescent sexuality, how it differs from and is similar to adult sexuality; and, furthermore, we need to have a patience and curiosity about the ways adult sexuality is inhabited by the memories, fantasies and experiences of adolescence. That is, how can sex education make room for a theory of adolescent development without casting the adolescent in the risky role of not yet adult?