Before her death in 1990 Linda Singer made a number of observations regarding the nature of power, control and regulation in relation to sexuality. Comparing the social context of the 1980s with the 1960s she noted specific changes in the history of sexuality. This includes a shift from sexual revolution and a ‘politics of ecstasy’ to sexual epidemic and a ‘recessionary erotic economy’ (1993: 116). For Singer the former can be characterised by ‘a revolutionary transformation of sexual theory, practice, and politics that would make sex better, or make better sex’ (1993: 113). These transformations included a deprivileging of ‘heterosexism...

This chapter analyses the social effects of sex education for adolescents. Focusing on the period post-1986, the chapter examines the impact of AIDS education, and in particular safer sex education in the classroom. The main point of concern is the framing of sexual knowledge of the condom in public secondary high schools. By comparing and contrasting the provision of sex education in the US, UK and Australia the chapter draws attention to the differences and similarities in present and past histories of sex education. In so doing the chapter seeks to highlight how the regulation of adolescent sexuality in the...

What are the consequences of getting adolescents to speak about the condom and their sexual experiences in the public arena? What impact has sex research had in producing knowledge of adolescent sexuality? In answering these questions this chapter seeks to provide a history of sex research on the condom. The object of my analysis is government-funded sex research on adolescence. Focusing on HIV/AIDS research conducted within university departments throughout the 1990s, I address the role social scientists have played in constructing knowledge about the condom and sexuality post AIDS. The aim of the chapter is to question the research methods...

Sex research and sex education in the context of AIDS have extended beyond the classroom. In response to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s the Australian and British governments funded national public health television campaigns. The aim of these advertising campaigns was to promote AIDS awareness and safer sex practice to the general heterosexual population. Since then there has been a proliferation of safer sex representations in the mass media. These mainstream AIDS representations have been studied and analysed in order to assess their effect on individual awareness and behaviour change, particularly for adolescents. What lies at the heart of...

In the previous chapters I discussed the impact of the mass media, school-based sex education and the social sciences in producing knowledge of the condom and (hetero) sexuality. In this chapter I consider the impact of social and cultural theory in the context of AIDS. I do so in relation to theories of pornography from the 1980s and 1990s. Addressing accounts of eroticised images of safer sex, this chapter aims to make explicit that, while there is much debate as to the effects of cultural representations and their relationship to identity construction, many cultural commentators share a number of theoretical...

The previous chapter showed how theories of porn have inadvertently naturalised the male body and heterosexuality as primary and authentic. This chapter shows how in the context of AIDS sociologists and social theorists have similarly produced a naturalisation of the male body and male heterosexuality in their interpretation of the condom in the context of AIDS.

Since the early 1990s a major concern in empirical studies and analyses of heterosex has been and continues to be why heterosexual men do not wear condoms. In the social sciences, and in particular the disciplines of sociology and psychology, heterosexual men’s perceived reluctance...

In November 2003 Marcus Dwayne Dixon, a high school football star, was convicted in Georgia, US, of aggravated child molestation and statutory rape. Dixon was initially charged with raping a classmate, Kristie Brown, in a portable trailer on school property. Brown, who was fifteen at the time of the incident, claimed that she had not consented to intercourse. The fifteen-year-old claimed that the defendant ‘tracked her down in a classroom trailer that she was cleaning as part of her duties in an after-school job, asked if she was a virgin, grabbed her arms, unbuttoned her pants and raped her on...

I began with a speculative question of how to address the history of the condom. How to make sense of safer sex discourse? In addressing this question I have argued that what is at stake is not whether it makes sense to refer to the condom in the context of AIDS as making visible or indeed invisible certain sexualities. RatherObject Mattershas shown how the condom concerns the production and regulation of heterosexuality.

My analysis of empirical data in Chapters 5 and 6 showed how the intelligibility of sexed bodies, gender identity and heterosexuality is not compromised or even...