Teenage girls and boys construct certain dimensions of their sexuality through dialogue with adults, who transmit values and standards to them. This paper analyzes conversations about sexuality between teenagers and their parents, in which medical and moral discursive registers are interlinked. The study was based on 46 individual interviews with boys and girls between 15 and 19 years of age, from middle-level socioeconomic strata who were living in Trelew (a city of 90,000 inhabitants in Patagonia, Argentina) and attending high school. To explain differences in the dynamics of dialogue between the teenage girls and boys, we constructed the notions of parental control over teenage girls' sexuality and material and discursive omnipresence of condoms. These notions show how this dialogue with adults is crossed by unequal gender expectations that are, in turn, reinforced by these adults.
Teenagers; Sexuality; Dialogue with parents