Sex as ritual path to adolescence

If, during infancy, sex is the most radical act at an existential level, then, during adolescence, it also becomes the most radical act in terms of experience. Adolescence, as a vital and social period, can be referred to as a period of ?sexual revindication? in which some guideline changes dominate: the change from a childlike body to that of an adult, transform an infantile identity into an adolescent one, substitute the family nucleus for an external nucleus; sexual desire, like the erotic awakening of the ?other?, will be converted into the vital motor that, with more effort, will organise the world of affections and feelings. Neuro-hormonal differences separate the starting points of the process: girls overtake boys by almost two years. However, as much for boys as for girls, the body is the scene of action, the body as sustenance and as presentation letter of their new budding identity. It?s new-found procreative, physiological capacities, ovarian and testicular maturity, will take significant vital and social differences in our cultural context: legitimization of pleasure and sexual desire as an active process will be much more lineal for adolescent boys and much less explicit in adolescent girls. Sexuality, the way of living life as a man or a woman, becomes for adolescents, the most apparent change of their lives. This reality marks the objectives of competence in sexual education in adolescence.