The present article analyses expectations and experiences related to the first sexual relation, considering it as an event framed within a process of erotic, corporeal and practical learning that temporally exceeds its boundaries. The article is based on individual interviews with 44 teenagers (22 male and 22 female) from 15 to 19 years of age, who are members of the middle class and live in Trelew, a city of one hundred thousand inhabitants in the Argentinean Patagonia. Expected roles for girls and boys regarding their first sexual relation are both opposed and complementary and two typical scenes of sexual initiation are revealed by our informants' stories, one gradualistic and one spontaneous.
Sexuality; Teenagers; First Sexual Relation
