The social construction of sexuality is linked to cultural concepts of masculinity and femininity. Ideas about what constitutes the essence of being masculine or feminine are expressed in sexual norms and ideologies that establish double standards for men and women. In this paper, I use Latin American culture as a means of illustrating this double standard.

In Latin America, particularly in contexts where family and marriage institutions continue to be the main sources of security and status for girls and women, gender culture stresses male sexual initiative, experience and aggression and female resistance and passivity. Cultural ideals define men as having uncontrollable sexual impulses while encouraging women to be sexually unresponsive. Sexual potency and experience are equated with maleness and a woman may challenge masculinity by exposing a man’s sexual weakness.

Society rejects non-procreative sexual activity in young women, and sexually experienced women who do not have a visible partner. These ideas are particularly influential during the stages of life in which identities are constructed and sexual life begins. These double standards define very different sexual pathways for boys and girls.

In Latin America, premarital sex is encouraged for males, who are expected to gain experience prior to marriage, while girls are not. Boys are more likely than girls ever to have had intercourse at a given age. On average, boys have their first sexual encounter earlier (except in traditional contexts where girls enter arranged marriages). On average, boys have several sexual partners before getting married and several years elapse between the beginning of their sex lives and their first marital union.

Although approximately a third of boys report having begun their sex lives with a steady girlfriend, most do so with a friend, an occasional partner, a stranger or a sex worker. The multiple partners reported between the beginning of their sex lives and their first marital union may be simultaneous or consecutive and form part of stable or occasional relationships. On average, boys are more likely than girls to admit having had a sexually transmitted disease and to declare adolescent homosexual experimentation. Boys often report being subjected to peer pressure to be sexually experienced, yet do not like to be committed to women who have had sexual experience.

Conversely, girls report having begun their sexual relations at a later age, with the exception of a significant majority who began them early as a result of abuse or coercion. An overwhelming majority of girls state that they began their sex lives in a committed relationship with a steady boyfriend and that their reason for engaging in sexual intercourse was love and the desire to strengthen the relationship. On average, women report having had a much smaller number of sexual partners that men and when they admit to having had more than one partner, their relations have been consecutive, rather than simultaneous. Other differences include the fact that a significant proportion of girls declare that they were pressured by their partners to have sex and that they were taught to learn how to resist pressure to have sex.

Girls feel they have to pay disproportionate social and emotional costs if they get pregnant and if they are abandoned by their sexual partners or if they change partners. Most girls express fears of being socially stigmatized as promiscuous if people know that they have had sexual experience or more than one partner.

Moreover, girls report more often than boys being raped or subjected to milder forms of coerced sex, as well as being sexually exploited or involved in various types of paid sex.

The way girls begin their sex life, the type of partner and kind of relationship in which this happens and the duration and consequences of sexual partnership defines girls’ life trajectories in ways that boys do not experience.

The ideals of masculine and feminine behavior behind these double standards affect the rights of boys and girls to understand and enjoy their own sexuality, to avoid unwanted sexual acts, to prevent unwanted pregnancy and to avoid contracting sexually transmitted diseases.

Knowing and talking about sexuality is equivalent to having had experience, which is why girls must avoid this socially. Boys, in turn, often report alcohol use in their first sexual experiences and occasional relations.

For boys, a girl’s knowledge and use of contraceptives imply sexual licentiousness and female sexual desire. A girl who uses contraceptives plans to have sex, is not in love and does not give herself spontaneously. What she seeks by having sexual relations is sexual satisfaction. If she is afraid of getting pregnant, it means she is not thinking about marriage but about occasional relations. A woman’s use of contraceptives creates confusion about the type of woman she is. Boys are unsure as to whether or not she is sexually experienced, or whether she is cheating on her partner.

Girls, in turn, are worried about becoming sterile if they use contraceptives before having proved their femininity through motherhood. They also fear that their partners will desert them if they use contraceptives out of the belief that they are either sexually experienced or unfaithful.

The use of contraceptives is not feasible for a significant majority of girls who suffer sexual coercion or abuse. The use of condoms is even more highly stigmatized socially. Both men and women associate it with promiscuity, distrust, dirtiness and commercial sex. Not even sex workers use condoms with their emotional partners, for fear of being abandoned. For a girl, using a condom is tantamount to behaving like a prostitute, while for a boy, using it in a stable relationship is equivalent to treating his girlfriend like a prostitute.

As a result of these shared social norms, a significant number of girls become pregnant before they are married. In certain Latin American countries, the majority of these pregnancies hasten a marital union, while some few end in children born out of wedlock. In other countries, the majority of these pregnancies are terminated by unsafe abortions. Although far less information is available on the contagion of STD among adolescents, the ages of those that contract and subsequently die of AIDS suggest that most of these diseases are transmitted during adolescence.

The strategies and actions designed to redress the power imbalances between boys and girls and the sexual double standards that affect both must avoid excessive emphasis on young people’s individual responsibilities and instead devise ways of reorganizing social and institutional inequalities. Promoting young people as social subjects is a complex process that requires encouraging autonomy in addition to providing information. Education must be oriented towards values that stress democracy in intimacy, foster reciprocity and mutual pleasure in sexual encounters and reveal the fears, anxieties and inequalities behind double standards. However, it should also be understood that these double standards are linked to the unequal resources and opportunities available to men and women in the various spheres of society that permeate even the educational and reproductive health services for young people. These services must focus more on the needs of different types of young people, both those who study and those who do not, and bear in mind the divergent sexual pathways for boys and girls, They must also be flexible, in order to understand the changing needs of young people, within a context of growing economic restrictions.