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Romantic and intimate relationships are crucial for the socio-emotional development of young adults. However, the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting ‘lockdown’ restrictions imposed by the UK government limited opportunities for in-person relationships in England during 2020-21. This paper discusses young adults’ experiences of their relationships during lockdown, based on findings from 36 qualitative interviews conducted during 2021-22. The data suggests that relationships were shaped by socially and contextually contingent processes of meaning making and experience. Lockdown served as a defining condition, which constrained and reshaped these processes. The findings emphasise the importance of understanding relationships as entailing dynamic interactions between individual subjectivity, interpersonal experiences, and social norms. Identifying the evolving contextual conditions in which these processes occur is vital. While this study specifically examined the impact of lockdown, its implications extend beyond through shedding light on how young adults navigate social conditions and make choices for themselves and their relationships.

ABSTRACTThis paper draws upon research conducted in a co-educational independent boarding school in England to explore the role of pornography in students’ school-based sexual cultures. Drawing upon Mechling’s conceptualization of boarding schools as ‘total institutions’, I explore how pornography acted as both ‘play’ and ‘ritual’ through which participants asserted agency and control while producing a gendered social order surrounding sex and sexuality. Participants who spoke about pornography drew upon dominant understandings of masculine and feminine (hetero)sexuality when positioning themselves and one another regarding pornography. They tended to construct viewing pornography as a ‘typical’ and ‘normal’ part of masculine (hetero)sexuality but as antithetical to feminine (hetero)sexuality. Some of the boys expressed ambivalence and uncertainty about pornography, but this was often grounded in taken-for-granted gendered constructs about sexual performance and accomplishment. Socially approved expressions of agency and control within the research environment were, therefore, both reflective and constitutive of a gendered and heteronormative social order. I suggest that sex education should attend to the role that pornography plays as a cultural resource through which young people construct, express and designate gendered sexual subjectivities and social roles.

Educational interventions on youth sexting often focus on individual sexters or would-be sexters, and are driven by the aim of encouraging young people to abstain from producing and sharing personal sexual images. This approach has been criticised for failing to engage with the complex sociocultural context to youth sexting. Drawing upon qualitative group and one-to-one interviews with 41 young people aged 14 to 18 living in a county in south-east England, I explore young people’s perceptions and practices surrounding sexting. By taking a grounded theory approach to the research, I reveal how young people’s shaming of digitally mediated sexual self-expression shaped and was shaped by a denial of rights to bodily and sexual autonomy and integrity. This denial of rights underpinned harmful sexting practices, including violations of privacy and consent, victim blaming, and bullying. I conclude that responses to youth sexting should attend to this broader youth cultural context, emphasise the roles and responsibilities of bystanders, and encourage a collectivist digital sexual ethics based upon rights to one’s body and freedom from harm (Albury, New Media and Society19(5):713–725, 2017; Dobson and Ringrose, Sex Education16(1):8–21, 2015).