With regard to sexual identity and heterosexual engagement, what became clear to me as our interviews progressed was that adolescent boys’ voices reflect conflicts and contradictions in their construction of masculinity.

All of the 32 boys who began this research project with me and went off for two weeks with their disposable cameras came back with photos of girls to put in their albums. In the individual as well as group interviews, they spent a lot of time talking about their relationships with girls. They said that it was important for a boy to have a girlfriend, but expectations in terms of these relationships differed from one boy to another. Many said they expected to have sex with multiple girlfriends as sexual relations were seen as a key marker of successful township masculinity. This prioritising of sex with multiple girlfriends was rejected by some boys, however, which indicated to me that not all boys are interested in having sex with (multiple) girls. An alternative masculinity, one that promotes ‘faithfulness’ in relationships with girls and challenges popular misogynistic views of girls as sex objects appears, as elsewhere, to be emerging in a township environment too. These boys said they believed that girls should be treated with respect and dignity. There is some way to go, but it is this view that we need to promote in the mainstream.

It has to be said that this view was not the popular consensus among the majority of the boys I interviewed, but what was indisputable was that girls were a central topic of discussion for all the boys. Having multiple sexual partners came up regularly. It was described as a key marker of being a sex-jaro (slang term for boys who like to have sex with many different girls).

Martin, who was one of the boys who most enjoyed the phototaking part of the project and took it very seriously, said the following about sex-jaro boys. ‘This guy,’ he said, pointing to a photo he had taken at school,