This article offers a reading of a recent Australian teacher-student sex scandal in order to interrogate the relationship between gendered subjectivity and cultural codes of gender. The questions of whether gender ought to make a difference to how we understand instances of so-called “intergenerational sex” and whether cultural codes accurately reflect sexual subjectivity are posed. It is argued that while cultural codes are not external or equivalent to subjectivity, this does not mean that they are not expressive of elements of subjectivity. The article concludes with the suggestion that the failure to attend to the nexus of the social and the psychical not only serves to strengthen a very recent and particular set of historical, political, and ideological forces but also risks creating foundations for misreadings of the history of male adolescent subjectivities.
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