This article considers gender differentiation in cultural consumption, outings and cultural practices through individual cultural trajectories as young people grow up, from the end of primary school through to the end of high school. The worlds of girls and boys show differences, contrasts and convergences in the timing of access to cultural objects. This is because their positions in the various social settings - family, school, peer groups - differ: girls benefit from a logic of reinforcement while boys prefer a logic of substitution. The performance of differentiation suggests that gender is not a 'difference within difference'?, but a major factor of the relationship to culture, although socially situated.