This article describes male adolescents' affective history and reasons for initiating or postponing sexual activity, using interviews with 184 males ages 15 to 19 and residing in the city of São Paulo, Brazil, in 2002. Factors for sexual debut included physical attraction, curiosity, and the desire to lose their virginity, suggesting a profile similar to the male social role. Most of the virgin adolescent males justified their choice based on issues of a romantic order, such as not having found the right person or because they preferred to remain virgin until marrying. The results showed a dual social pattern, valuing the feeling of love and deliverance to the loved one, simultaneously with the pressing physical and instinctive desire for sex. Traditional patterns of masculinity, like the dissociation between sex and love, appear to be transposed to sexual debut, revealing a diversity in the ways of experiencing sexuality during adolescence, related in turn to the sexual and reproductive health of men and their partners.
Sexual and Reproductive Health; Teen Health; Men's Health
