The sexual possibility is placed upon the agenda of the adolescent by both the concerns of relevant adults and the expectations of significant peers (Miller and Simon 1980). In contemporary society, not all adolescents will be sexually active, but very few will be inattentive. An initial effort at consolidation of a sexual subject during adolescence is virtually mandated by a social order that treats the management of the sexual as if it were a direct barometer of current collective moral and mental health. Early in adolescence, many for whom internal sexualization has barely begun will still engage in various sexual postures because they are valorized in current coinages of social competence, particularly with age-specific competencies regarding the issues of gender and morality.
The complexity of motivations to engage in sexual behavior reminds us that the desire for sex is rarely, if ever, in the exclusive control of “sexual desire”. This fact points directly to one of the major confusions in the development of theories of sexuality, theories that have traditionally been held responsible for accounting for what sexuality may influence but cannot control. In part, this confusion has been a legacy of an over-sampling of clinically based “research” that sustains images of an imperial sexuality, images that rarely correspond to the experiences of larger segments of populations for whom the sexual may have far less salience.
For a small proportion of men and relatively larger proportion of women the route to the development of a sexual identity and the capacity to experience and desire sexual excitement may take totally different paths as a function of the idiosyncrasies of individual development (Stoller 1985b). Many females may experience the eroticizing of desire much later in the developmental process than is typical for males and, as a consequence, it may occur within the context of a different ecology of the self. For some individuals the sexual will always remain a mystery (“Have I missed something?”), for some it will be most of the poetry or mystery they will ever know, for some a passing or occasionally recurring fever, and for relatively few the dominant obsession of their lives. This possibility may shed some light on a significant number of individuals who exhibit little or only minimal sexual desires, outcomes that need not be pre-emptively dismissed by an unreflective recourse to the language of dysfunction, repression or sublimation.
A costly misconception, particularly noteworthy in Freud (1905), is the idea that it is the biological transformation that occasions the transformation at the level of social expectation and social attributions. Puberty as a biological transformation occasions much of this heightened sense of the sexual. The imagery of an innate hormonal time-release mechanism tends to dominate explanation of a marked increase in sexual preoccupations. However, this association describes the relationship between a disorderly biological transformation and what has been termed “social puberty”, the point at which individuals are recognized as having reached some minimal sexual maturity. The application of social puberty will precede biological puberty for some individuals; for others it may lag behind.
It is understandably comforting to find the origins of gender role capacities and commitments in something as stable and universal as hormonal chemistry; such biological explanations provide both a legitimizing of the normal and a normalizing of the legitimate. However, regularities in the sexual behavior of most adolescents will reflect meanings implicit in social puberty far more consistently than any meanings attributable to the biological process.
It is by being socially defined as an adolescent that she or he is assumed to have become a self-motivated sexual actor, even if she or he is not aware of that. Adolescence, then, becomes an occasion for negotiation and experimentation involving an expanding portfolio of desires, desires that often contest with each other for access to representation in the scripting of sexual behavior. Though most adolescents have already experienced the need to negotiate between conflicting and ambiguous expectations, the sexual, with all of its confusing applications, of ten occasions a new order of negotiation, one vastly more diffuse in its implications, if only because of the intensity of emotion that is evoked by its presence. Experiments in the management of sexual possibilities may have a more lasting effect in shaping the individual’s still uncertain sexual and general future than any specific sexual event. Some, like Laufer (1976), view such experiments as occasioning the crystallization of a final sexual identity. I suspect that they might better be viewed as constituting initial efforts at consolidation of a sexual identity, an identity that forecasts subsequent sexual possibilities in only the most general way.
Adolescence for many may be the point at which the individuals, for the first time, experience themselves as sexual subjects who, more than experiencing excitement for the sexual, can experience sexual excitement. In part, this is what accords masturbation (or the construction of fantasies with explicit sexual implications) its significance. Masturbation occasions a series of experimental “trials” where desires, behaviors, and scripted versions of contextual contingencies can be tested for reciprocal compatibilities (Kaplan 1988; Laufer 1976; Hillman 1975; Gagnon and Simon 1973). The circumstances that legitimate both feelings and behaviors must be “scripted” within the domain of the self, a self that must sustain an illusion of self-plausibility while sustaining a minimally accommodative relationship to ongoing social life. This entails a dialectic that goes far beyond the relative simplicities of a pleasure principle vying with the requirements of the reality principle.
Adolescence, too often described exclusively in terms of its significance for subsequent adult behavior, is experienced by the adolescent not merely as a transitional development, but as a response to a living present with its own compelling agenda of immediate issues. Representations associated with sexual excitement do not magically appear; they must evolve out of successive experiences not unlike the trial and error patterns that accompany the most diffuse ranges of social learning where there is little by way of formal instruction. What can be included within an operative sexual script, what must be included, what can be excluded, what must be excluded, and what can be included only when carefully disguised—all these issues must be examined. While this process of definition and redefinition extends across the life span, for most people substantial responses are critically formulated during adolescence.