Contemporary sexual health initiatives have often promoted condom-use as one of the most important ways to avoid risks associated with young people’s sexual activities, such as unplanned pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. Examining the regulatory work of the discourse of sexual health among young people, in this paper I argue that this dominant discourse has positioned young people as (potential) health patients who have no knowledge about their own (sexual) body, are blinded by raging hormones, and therefore urgently need to be “saved” by sexual health educators through contraceptive knowledge, particularly condom-use. I argue that the positioning of sex, condom, and young people through this discourse has narrowly confined the notion of safer sex into very limited, mechanistic practices; and simultaneously constrained young people’s exercise of sexual agency. Drawing on empirical narratives from Indonesian young people I interviewed during my research, I explore possibilities of resistance towards this discourse in the constitution of young people’s sexual subjectivities. The findings exhibit a range of other contextual and more relevant safer sex practices, which might expand the discursive boundaries in understanding youth sexual health
