What condom negotiation can teach us about adolescence itself

In the film Mean Girls, the teacher Coach Carr stands in a sports hall, in front of a black board with the words SAFE SEX on it. He faces rows of seats full of teenage girls, and he tells them firmly: 'Don't have sex. Because you will get pregnant. And die.'

It's a comedy, of course, but not far off the approach that many educators have typically taken to sex education. Most adults, women in particular, will remember as a teenager receiving some version of the message that sex is dangerous. Today, the topic has almost entirely disappeared from the public discourse about adolescence – with the focus much more on the potential harms of social media. If we do hear about teenage sex, it's more likely to be in a digital context: such as concerns about sexting or when, if ever, schools should educate young people about porn. And yet behind closed doors, teenagers are still meeting up IRL, and they're still having sex.

Not all of them, of course: asexual teenagers don't want to; others aren't interested in it until later; others do want it but can't find a willing partner. But for others, it remains one of the most fundamental adolescent behaviours. As the psychologist Kathryn Paige Harden says, 'From an evolutionary perspective, sex is the point of adolescence.' This means it provides us with an important window into understanding adolescents more broadly – and in particular, why a lot of behaviour that looks reckless and foolish on the face of it disguises a far more nuanced truth.

Undeniably, having sex as a teenager is a risky thing to do, especially if you are a girl having heterosexual sex. Coach Carr's threat of death might be pretty remote, but there is the risk of unwanted pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections, the risk of violence and coercion, and the social risk of being shamed or judged by family or peers. Research shows that, the younger a girl is when she first has sex, the greater the risks and the greater the likelihood of regret.

Because of these risks, many parents, teachers, health professionals and lawmakers understandably view adolescent sex as a problem. In some societies, such as the US, it is often stigmatised as immoral, as inherently deviant – a 'sickness best prevented', in the words of sociologist Amy Schalet. Here, of course, we run into a problem. The teenagers themselves – some of them at least – really want to have sex. I recently wrote a book about adolescence, during which I interviewed many adults about their teenage years, and I was struck by how powerful their memories were about sex.

Sometimes, the cliché of the horny teenager is true. Teenagers tend to be high in 'sensation-seeking' – the tendency to do things that give us novel, intense and complex feelings – and they can feel sexual and romantic attraction very intensely, so sometimes they want sex because of this physical desire. But there are other motivations too. Teenagers are drawn to 'pseudomature' behaviours, because doing adult things gives them social status, and sex is about as adult as it gets. Tied to this, teenagers often have sex because their friends are having sex: just like smoking and drinking, sex is a risk behaviour that 'spreads' among friends, partly because no one wants to feel left out. 

Sex education

It's no big surprise, then, that adults telling teenagers to not have sex just doesn't work. The once-popular 'abstinence-only' approach to sex education teaches young people that they should only have sex once they are married, and states that any sex before then is dangerous, immoral, and to be avoided at all costs. Sounds simple enough, but it doesn't work: you cannot win against a biological imperative, and teenagers who are taught abstinence-only still have sex. 

Teenagers who are taught about sex in this way are no less likely to end up pregnant or with an STI than teenagers who receive no sex education at all. In fact, teenagers who receive abstinence-only sex education are significantly more likely to become pregnant than their counterparts who have 'comprehensive' sex education programmes, where they are taught to have sex safely rather than not have sex at all. An abstinence-only approach is therefore counterproductive: it denies adolescents the information about contraception and healthy sex practices that would actually reduce the risk of bad outcomes when they inevitably end up having sex.

In light of this, many educators settled on the comprehensive approach, reasoning that if teenagers are going to have sex anyway, we can at least tell them how to minimise risk. At the heart of this safe-sex approach to education lies a key instruction: use a condom (this is more often promoted among teenagers than the contraceptive pill). Condoms are, in theory, an excellent solution to the 'problem' of teenage sex. They can't prevent coercion or social consequences, but they at least reduce the risk of STIs and pregnancy. They're cheap, widely available and easy to use. But nothing in adolescence is straightforward. The simple instruction to 'use a condom' belies the complicated truth about a difficult social interaction, and tells us a lot more about adolescence than we might expect.

The negotiation process

Enter the world of 'condom negotiation'. Sometimes, neither teenager will suggest using a condom, and that can be down to naivety or to one of the reasons that adults give for not using them: that the physical sensation or emotional connection is not the same, or that it breaks the flow of what people think should be a smooth trajectory towards penetrative sex. But what is really interesting – and what offers the most clues about social challenges in adolescence more generally – is what happens when one teenager wants to use protection and the other one doesn't. This is condom negotiation, and yes, there's been academic research about this.

Condom negotiation involves both verbal and non-verbal communication – it is a 'set of behaviours, not a singular act'. Research has shown that, when an adolescent (or adult) wants their partner to use a condom, they engage in at least one of a multitude of negotiation strategies. They might try emotional coercion (e.g. saying they will be angry or upset if their partner doesn't comply); presenting risk information (e.g. reminding their partner about the risk of pregnancy or STIs); deception (such as citing pregnancy prevention concerns when the primary concern is STI prevention); seduction (using sexual arousal to encourage condom use); promising rewards if a partner complies; and withholding sex if they don't. As you might imagine, employing any of these as a teenager, especially in the face of a reluctant partner, will require considerable levels of self-confidence and assertion.

Even more so because there are just as many negotiation strategies to avoid condom use. To push back against a request to use condoms, some adolescents (usually boys) may attempt to reduce the perceived risk (e.g. by telling the partner they have been recently tested and don't have an STI), which may or may not involve lying. They might use seduction (this time to distract their partner from the negotiation); draw on arguments relating to the quality of the relationship ('Don't you trust me?'); cite a lack of physical sensationwhen using a condom, or withhold sex altogether. Note here that some adolescents (usually girls) will threaten to withhold sex if the couple doesn't use protection; others (usually boys) will withhold sex if they are asked to use protection. In the worst- case scenarios, some teenagers – almost always boys – will use threats and physical force to resolve the negotiation, forcing their partner to have unprotected sex.

All this is to say that the apparent simplicity of the instruction 'use a condom' belies an often very complex social interaction. To quote psychologist Lynne Hillier and colleagues, condom promotion strategies aimed at young people are 'based on an assumption of rational decision-making in sexual encounters and obscure the non-rational nature of arousal and desire, and the unequal power relations that exist between young men and women engaging in sex'. Add to this the fact that this is teenagers we're talking about, who care very deeply about what they peers think about them and what they should do to follow social norms and avoid social ridicule. In short, we should probably be more surprised that so many adolescents do use condoms rather than surprised that so many do not. 

Yet when a condom isn't used, and the most feared outcome of a teenage pregnancy happens, it is inevitably teenage girls who bear the consequences. Teenage mothers are one of the most derided groups in society, and yet all they have done is what so many others have done at some point in their lives, not least in the context of sex: made an unwise decision in a heated, complicated social situation. For my book, I interviewed a woman who had a baby when she was 14, and it struck me: she was just one of the ones who got unlucky. I think we should keep teaching teenagers about safe sex, of course, but I think we should also be a lot more compassionate towards the ones who sometimes make a mistake.

A better way

In fact, we should be a lot more thoughtful altogether when it comes to teaching teenagers about sex. When teenagers are taught that sex is 'a sickness best prevented', or at best a risk to be mitigated, another message gets lost: that sex is an essential source of meaning and pleasure. Teenage girls, in particular, receive a great deal of risk-orientated, judgement-laden information about sex, but very little guidance about how to actually explore or advocate for their own often intense sexual wants and needs – a problem that psychologist Deborah Tolman has described as adolescent girls' 'dilemmas of desire'. This dilemma persists even when girls have solo sex: when asked about their attitude towards masturbation, it is more common for girls than boys to report feelings of shame, disgust or inner conflict about this behaviour. In one study, when adults were asked what they wished they had been taught about sex when they were younger, one woman said: 'I wish I was told it's normal to want to have sex.'

There might be a better way, in the form of the so-called 'sex-positivity movement', which is well established in some European countries such as the Netherlands and has a small but growing number of advocates in the UK and USA. This approach regards consensual sexual activities as potentially positive and healthy, regardless of marital status, gender or sexual orientation, and this includes teenagers as well as adults.

Supporting a sex-positive approach doesn't mean thinking that all teenage sex is a good thing. For starters, it is universally agreed among academics and policymakers that anyone under 15 is always too young to safely and consensually have sex. But even for older teenagers, in this framework, it may still be that abstinence is the preferred and best choice for an individual adolescent at any one time (or indeed for all their adolescent years).

There are plenty of teenagers who, for myriad reasons, do not want to have sex. This is captured within a sex-positive framework, because a fundamental part of it is about respecting what an individual needs and wants. 

The sex-positivity movement is also not about trivialising risk: promoting safe sex is integral to the whole approach. It's more that, while supporters of the movement view risk management as an essential foundation for adolescent sex, they also believe that healthy sexuality is about more than avoiding unwanted consequences. The approach recognises sex as a normal and healthy part of adolescent development, and its three key priorities are pleasure, consent and agency – and advocates argue that we should teach teenagers about these concepts too. Especially now, when pornography is so widely available online, it is more important than ever that teenagers receive helpful messages about sex in the real world.

As the argument about social media and smartphones continues to rage, we must not forget this most primal, natural adolescent behaviour, or how complicated it is to navigate. Adolescent sex is a risk behaviour, but it's so much more than that: the interviews for my book showed that it's an assertion of independence, an expression of love, an exploration, a release. From the distant side-lines of the sex ed classroom, adults can and should tell teenagers about condoms and other safety precautions, ideally in the context of a sex-positivity framework, but they should also see it as an experience that, for some teenagers, will inevitably go wrong. And when it does, we should recognise the adolescent fallibility that has touched all of us in different forms, and give the individuals involved the compassion and understanding they deserve. As Mean Girls celebrates its 20-year anniversary, I hope teenagers today can be taught something more realistic, and more helpful, about sex.

• Lucy Foulkes is an academic psychologist at the University of Oxford. Coming of Age: How Adolescence Shapes Us is published on 4 July 2024.