The present generation of parents and other educators faces a particular problem: having been brought up for the most part with little or no sex instruction, having been protected to some extent by the pressures of social convention, they find themselves faced by a generation of young men and women who talk freely about sex, who say openly that they are not prepared to accept the traditional teaching of the Churches with regard to sexual behaviour and for whom the fear of an illegitimate pregnancy is no longer the deterrent to fornication that it may have been in the past. To make matters even more perplexing, the young men have long hair which used to be thought a symbol of homosexuality and the young women wear mini-skirts which is confusing for a generation of men accustomed to thinking of the exposed female thigh as a non-verbal communication of a specific kind. What are they to do ? Judging by the number of books currently flooding the market, at least part of the answer seems to be ‘read a book about sex’ for, with no statistical evidence, I’d be prepared to guess that it is this generation rather than the one at risk that is doing most of the reading—perhaps the others are too busy with the field work.

The first of these three paperbacks, Sense and Nonsense about Sex, purports to be written for teenagers, and more specifically appears to be directed to Protestant teenagers in youth clubs, but I find it hard to imagine any young man or woman actually reading it.