Advice columns in teenage magazines provide space for young women to both write and
read about representations of issues that teenage girls may grapple with in their
everyday lives. Issues related to sexuality appear frequently in these pages. This
article examines letters about sexual health issues written to the advice columns of
Girlfriend, an Australasian teen magazine. Using a Foucauldian
poststructuralist analysis, the article asks how sexual health problems are being
constructed by writers and the magazine doctor, and how young women’s
sexual subjectivities are being drawn through their positioning in the various
discourses mobilized in the texts. Analyses suggest glimmerings of plurality in
sexual subjectivities, dominance of the ‘coital imperative’ in
constructions of sexuality, and emphasis on discourses of risk and danger versus pleasure.
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