Letter
Dear Sir
In your Spring issue 1972, you open with an article, ‘What is wrong with sex education?’ by Michael Lloyd-Jones, a primary school teacher and co-author of’ S ex Education: The Erongenous Zone’. In his view, ‘sex education is intended to equip the young with knowledge and understanding of sexuality, so that they may join in its expression without guilt, fear or danger. Too often it amounts to moral propaganda seeking to discourage all forms of sexual activity amongst the unmarried’.
In paragraph 2 of his article, Mr. Lloyd-Jones says ‘The majority of young people are having sexual experiences’. But he quotes no survey, not even Michael Schofield’s published in 1965, yet chides James Bevan for lack of evidence to support his theories. Mr. Lloyd-Jones takes Pauline Perry to task for failing to define ‘frequent’. But nowhere does he define ‘the young’; and ‘sexual experiences’ and ‘sexual experimentation’ need spelling out in every context, if they are not to be comparable with ‘the circumlocutious of the Victorians’ which he condemns.
Nowhere in his article does Mr. Lloyd-Jones distinguish between the sexes, the pre and post-pubertal, the under and over sixteens (legal age for ‘consent’) or those too dull at sixteen to assess the possible consequences of sexual intercourse. He rightly stresses the responsibility of adults to give adequate sexual information, but nowhere does he mention that sexual intercourse has different implications and expectations to the sexes, and that the sexual act carries responsibilities to the partner. Consequences can be physical, i.e. a pregnancy or venereal disease, or emotional. The latter is not mentioned except to brush aside Dr Benjamin Spock’s warning on the ‘tragic cases in medical practice’. I have not read Dr Spock’s ‘A Young Person’s Guide to Life and Love’, but was he thinking in terms of emotional tragedies? One can ‘survive’ physically, but be incapacitated emotionally.
What experience has Mr. LloydJones had with teenagers who have had sexual intercourse, and then been abandoned by their partners ? Those of us who work in the psychiatric field with adolescents, know of many sad youngsters, of both sexes, thrown over by their mates. Many of them experience a physical and emotional ‘bonding’, especially to their first mate; as far as my experience with teenage patients goes, this applies to girls much more than to boys. Boys tend to perceive sexual intercourse as a pleasurable incident, girls tend to regard it as the beginning of an on-going stable relationship, hopefully leading to marriage as security in which to rear children. Thus there appears to be an inborn fundamental difference of expectation between the sexes.
Mr. Lloyd-Jones writes that ‘we should allow them to give physical expression to their feelings’, i.e. their sexual urges. These are strongest in adolescence, and the adolescent, because of his lack of years, ha^s had less opportunity to practise controlling his urges, sexual or otherwise. Control of one’s urges is a yard-stick by which we measure social maturity. Nowhere in this article does Mr. Lloyd-Jones mention any responsibility for the emotional state of the partner; the writing is from the personal pleasure point of view … a getting of satisfaction. Mr. LloydJones would seem to wish to dissociate sexual intercourse from morals. It depends what he means by morals. All sexual experience with another person should surely involve the recognition and acceptance of the-feelings of the partner? Should getting sexual pleasure take priority over giving such pleasure? Whichever way one decides, this is a moral problem, a responsibility to others and for others.
From the medical point of view, the young adolescents (puberty to 16 or 17 years) may know all about contraception and have an adequate knowledge of venereal disease, but they do not use contraceptives even if these are easily available. They retain a magic belief ‘It cannot happen to me’j and this is the stumbling block that I, my fellow psychiatrists and venerologist colleagues, have not been able to overcome in trying to help over the physical aspects of the problem. I hope that Mr. Lloyd-Jones will in a future article, elucidate his views on the emotional consequences of premarital sexual intercourse.
Yours faithfully, S. M. Leese, Consultant in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, St. James’s Hospital, Leeds LS9 7TF
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