Millette, Mélanie <br/><br/>
“Come on, it’s not that bad!”: Social support and expertises in exchanges about sexual inexperience among young adults on Reddit 

 -  2023.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 59 
<br/><br/> ‪Platforms like Reddit allow young adults to affiliate and share their experiences. While the period from mid-teens to young adulthood is generally marked by the transition to an active sexual life, some people go through this phase in a different way, perceived as atypical because it deviates from dominant sociosexual norms. This perception stigmatizes sexually inexperienced young adults. Using a theoretical framework in communication studies and developmental sexology, this study examines how sexually inexperienced young adults discuss their experiences on Reddit. The analyses show that informational and emotional types of social support outweigh the others, and that the subcategory of counseling is the most salient. We address these findings in terms of registers of expertise, while experiential expertise dominates within the exchanges. The enunciative logic of testimony abounds and is deployed to make visible the experience on which the expertise is based. We find a negotiation of the dominant norms of obligatory sexuality in the exchanges, while several people explicitly advocate respect for oneself and for the diversity of socio-sexual paths.‪