"Dying to be women": explorations and implications of narrative parameters of female youth sexuality in Zimbabwe.

This article considers how socio-cultural ideologies and practices can act as social technologies that help produce specific sexual practices and identities in young women. It identifies young women's libidinal economics as one contributing factor responsible for prescriptive gender roles in Southern Africa, and in this context, Zimbabwe. Understanding the contexts and structures of socio-sexual ideologies circulating among young women as part of their formal and informal sexual education might help address the root cause and understand the core conditions that exacerbate young women's sexual vulnerability Therefore youth-related programming may need to develop ways of assisting young people to develop intellectual, social and psychological skills in order for them to take full advantage of their youth. In revising prerequisites of womanhood and adulthood, there is need for a critical pedagogy which incorporates "deviance" as a concept which empowers young women to question and challenge rather than reinstate and reinforce normative pressures and essentialist perspectives of entering adulthood and "doing gender".

Friendship, sexual intimacy and young people's negotiations of sexual health.

This paper examines how young people's friendships influence safer sexual practices. Through a thematic discourse analysis, interviews with Sydney-based young people (aged 18-25 years) and Australian-based sexual health websites for young people are considered. Interview data illustrate how friendships can support young people's sexual experiences, concerns and safeties beyond the practice of 'safe sex' (condom use). This is evident in friends' practices of sex and relationship advice, open dialogue, trust and sharing experiential knowledge, as well as friend-based sex. Meanwhile, friendship discourse from selected Australian sexual health websites fails to engage with the support offered by friendship, or its value to a sexual health agenda. Foucault's account of friendship as a space of self-invention is considered in light of these data, along with his argument that friendship poses a threat to formal systems of knowing and regulating sex. Whether sexual or not, many close friendships are sexually intimate given the knowledge, support and influence these offer to one's sexual practices and relations. This paper argues that greater attention to friendship among sexual health promoters and researchers would improve professional engagements with young people's contemporary sexual cultures, and better inform their attempts to engage young people through social media.

Literturas eróticas comparadas: a partir da moqueca de maridos. Mitos eróticos / Comparative erotic literature

Uma coletânea de contos recentemente publicada em língua francesa evoca de maneira muito agradável as culturas eróticas de seis populaçõesindígenas da Amazônia. Sua apresentação permite observarmos nossa cultura erótica de um ângulo inédito. Os índios da Amazônia atribuem aoerotismo oral uma importância análoga, assim nos parece, à que nós atribuímos ao erotismo sádico por eles negligenciado. Isso transforma toda a cultura (sexual). Assim, os contos mostram as singularidades da nossa própria cultura (sexual) e nossos modos particulares de elaboração, dentre outros, da diferença sexual, da posição fálica e do narcisismo.

A compilation of stories recently published in French reminds us in a very pleasant manner of the erotic cultures present in six Amazon indigenouspopulations. Its presentation allows us to observe our erotic culture from adifferent angle. We postulate that Amazonian Indians attribute oral eroticisma similar importance than the one we offer sadistic eroticism, neglected by their own culture. This transforms all of (sexual) culture. Therefore, these stories show the singularities of our own (sexual) culture, as well as our particular ways of elaborating sexual difference, phallic position and narcissism.