This paper offers an analysis of the health education textbook as a governmental mechanism for translating official curriculum hopes. This is discussed with particular reference to the ‘subliminal messages’ inherent within school based textbooks and the imperatives that often inform their development and use. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which dominant knowledges about gender and (hetero)sexuality are (re)produced within textbooks, specifically that the male continues to be represented, both sexually and socially, as agentic and active, and the female as passive and receptive. Finally, the authors recommend that the textbook be deployed within the health education classroom as a text for analysis, rather than as transparent evidence of the real, and that doing so would enable the construction of a more critical health[y] subject.