Power and Sex: Sex in the city?

I have been inspired by Foucault to add another dimension to my studies of Cambodian adolescent health. Adolescents, particularly female adolescents, are vulnerable to power differentials. I am curious how this tranlates into sexual encounters and the decision making process of whether or not to have sex. I am perplexed though because because I know so little of power and sexuality in my own culture I am not sure where to start in another. My mentors both agree that not addressing power and sex in my thesis would leave a big hole, so I have to find away to address it with what little knowledge I have of Khmer culture.

So what does Foucault think of sex? He believed that sex in the western world " has broken with the tradition of ars erotica and bestowed upon itself a scientia sexualis by adapting the ancient procedure of the confession to the rules of scientific discourse." While S.E.Asia, S. Asia, Rome, and to some extent the Middle East have enjoyed sex as erotica, the Western world got hung up in the belief of sex as a dirty sin. This was no coincidence as after the Enlightenment there was also the rise of the church and the redemption of confessions. The confession has spread its effects far and wide; we confess our crimes, our sins, our thoughts and our desires. Whatever is most difficult to tell we offer up for scrutiny with the greatest precision. We confess in public and in private to parents, educators, doctors, loved ones in pleasure and in pain, things that would be impossible to tell anyone else. The confession can be voluntary or wrung from a person by violence or the threat of it. Sex, albeit hidden we are told, has been the privileged theme of confession from the Christian penance to the present day. We have made sex "scientific" and something to be analyzed. He was very interested in why we even talk about it and for that matter so am I. We talk about it but usually in medical terminology and negatively. In Thailand for example it is something very private but also pleasantly mysterious. Perhaps talking about it would lessen this privileged locus?

While Foucault did not believe in sex being repressed per se, but what is repressed is the act itself. In Victorian times anything pleasurable was repressed including sex. Therefore sex outside of marriage, outside of the bedroom, outside of the purposes for procreation was greatly frowned upon. Subsequently the only outlets for repressive feelings were the shrinks office and prostitution. Then the government got interested in sex and it all went downhill. So how come we can talk about it, but not really talk about it? This is an important issue I want to address with these female adolescents. I want to know where the power lies in discussing sex and the act of having sex. Who has the power? Who/what represses? Discourse is important because, language and knowledge are closely linked to power. Speech and writing are not simply the communication of facts that occurs in a vacuum. As important as what is said is who decides what is said. Foucault develops a complex body of thought out of the old saying that "knowledge is power." Whoever determines what can be talked about also determines what can be known. Whoever determines what can be known effectively determines how we think and who we are. According to Foucault, then, language and knowledge always have a political edge. So is relation to my question, who are those who hold the knowledge about sex in Khmer culture and how do they control it. Since they control the knowledge they also control the power. As they say "knowledge is king"!