Teens encounter a barrage of messages about sexuality in popular culture—messages that shape their identities and schooling experiences in profound ways. Meanwhile, teen sexuality, pregnancy, and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) increasingly arouse public panic. To date, however, schools do little to help teens make sense of their sexualities. In this article, I argue that schooling will grow increasingly irrelevant and ineffective if educators fail to address teen sexuality and popular culture. My argument is twofold. First, I suggest that sex education in particular must attend to popular culture. Second, I contend that we can no longer confine efforts to address teen sexuality and popular culture to sex education; rather, we must extend such efforts across a wide range of classroom and schooling contexts. Doing so is important for accomplishing three educational goals: (1) to make a wide range of curriculum (e.g., literacy, social studies, sex education) more relevant and culturally responsive to diverse youth; (2) to develop critical multicultural curriculum that interrogates social inequities, and (3) to indirectly create conditions that would reduce teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and HIV/AIDS. To make this argument, I draw from my 9-month ethnographic study of ESPERANZA, a progressive peer-driven sex education program. In contrast, I then analyze how two popular films deal with issues of sexuality in different ways. I conclude with a discussion of how the insights from these popular texts might inform research and practice in critical multicultural curriculum and in educational efforts to help youth address sexuality.
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