This special issue has grown out of a small British Academy-funded project in the United
Kingdom that ran from 2008 to 2010 and aimed to examine ways of developing research
on young people’s sexual cultures. Our backgrounds are in the area of media and cultural
studies, and our own work focuses on a range of aspects of sexual culture; in particular, the
production, characteristics, use and regulation of sexually explicit media texts and other
sexual artefacts (see, for example, Smith 2007a, 2007b, 2010; Attwood 2009, 2010;
Attwood and Smith 2010). We were interested in exploring ways of building on earlier
work on young people, sex and relationships (for example, Holland et al. 1998) and more
recent research (for example, Buckingham and Bragg 2004) that develops this focus in the
context of a contemporary media-saturated and technology-focused culture.