This paper explores the geographical constitution of the „dirty weekend? and teenage girls? sexuality by interrogating the cultural habitus of the seaside resort. It reidentifies the littoral pleasure zone as an active agent in sexual learning and disrupts taken-forgranted inscriptions of the seaside as an inert backdrop against which only traditional family holidays or hedonistic youthful activities take place. In the cultural imaginary of Britain, the seaside assumes centre-place as a site of normativity. At the same time, it indexes the social and spatial limits of disorder and connects coastal towns with diverse moral panics. While this place-image binary resists other interpretations, closure can be challenged by recognizing the seaside as a cultural text which is to hold open the possibility of further re-readings and re-writings. In alignment with this broadening, two liminal sexual/textual topographies are narrated which cohere around the heterosexual carnivalesque of Brighton and the local experiences of adolescent girls in Margate. Issues are raised about the ways in which the specificity of place inflects sexual learning and how geographical insights can contribute to sex/sexuality education.
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