Identity vs Role Confusion for Adolescent Girls and Boys

Examining Race and Sexuality

Appreciating the perspectives of Lamb and Peterson (2012) on sexual empowerment of adolescent girls and Tatum (1997) on race and adolescence, I have to step back a bit and raise some questions about this focus in the first place, as it seems unclear. Adolescence is a time when young people struggle to form their identities and know their place in the world, their role, their relation to others. I do not really think that sexual empowerment is a concept that is going find much definition at this stage in anyone’s life. Sex and sexuality are still such misunderstood concepts that even the researchers themselves admit that they deliberately adopt a position of ambiguity regarding how sexual empowerment is to be understood through the feminist lens.

Yet in an attempt to bring out some answers to the question of adolescent girls’ sexual empowerment they engage in a kind of point/counterpoint approach, hopeful of refining some thoughts on the matter. The problem nonetheless remains: if they as researchers struggle to make sense of these concepts through the feminist lens, why is it fathomable that adolescents would make any more meaning of them at their young age when they are walking between innocence and experience for the first time? The approach of Lamb and Peterson is interesting, but ultimately misguided; focus should be on why society places so much emphasis on these concepts in the first place rather than on the experiences of a fictionalized 13-year-old girl exposed to sexualized media. Ultimately the two authors agree that sexual education is needed—but what exactly is to be taught?

The same problem is basically inherent in Tatum’s article regarding race and adolescence. Again, the subject is adolescents, but what can one really peg down about adolescents when it comes to race and identity? This age group is one that has barely begun to understand its own identity on an individual level let alone interact with concepts laden with meaning and bias that even researchers themselves struggle to untangle and make sense of. It does not quite seem fair to the adolescent age group to iron these concepts onto their experiences or to use them to try to make sense of what is going on in their lives. Black adolescents sit with black adolescents and that is what they do, and maybe that should simply be accepted rather than scrutinized through the lens of race and racism. Sexuality is inherently tied to birthing new life, and maybe that should be accepted rather than viewed through the lens of feminism and power. The application of sociologically-derived concepts that are theoretically rooted in the groundwork of cultural Marxism seem slanted and biased in the first place. Yet these same approaches try to remove some kind of bias from analysis of their subject. It is almost all like too much wishful thinking.