Fumbling with sex

Press, 8 January 1983, Page 14

Fumbling with sex

Talking Sex. By Miriam Stoppard. Hutchinson, 1982. 127 pp. $17.50. Virginities. By Robert Muller. Hutchinson, 1982. 248 pp. $25.50. (Reviewed by Ken Strongman) Hutchinson is breaking into the sex market, although coyly. Dr Miriam Stoppard's “Talking Sex” is sub-titled “A book about growing up." It is written simply and directly for teenagers, the author setting out to tell them all they want to know about sex. It could be the most appropriate use ever of a bedside manner. If there are any of today’s teenagers whose apparent sophistication hides doubts and worries, they could find comfort in these pages. Not only is the book accurate and helpful, but it also dispells myths, firmly and irrevocably. Having read it, no-one will continue' to believe that pregnancy can result from kissing or blindness from masturbation. The awkwardness with "Talking Sex” is who will buy it? With abundant opportunity to spend limited resources on the real thing, what teenager would spend $17.50 on a book about it? The alternative is that their parents buy it for them. But then one wonders if teenagers would want to receive such a book from their parents. The introduction is also off-putting, suggesting that the book will “be a friend” to the reader. This is likely to get up more noses than it will help to blow. These criticisms are a pity since it is a good book with admirable aims. Perhaps it will help, if only the parents read it.

By comparison, Robert Muller's “Virginities” gives a far livelier, but more idiosyncratic view of sex in the young. It

is the diary of a young man living and working in London'in 1943 and desperate to lose his virginity. It is delightfully evocative of the place and time, and of that stage in life. The young diarist wakes every day with optimism and verve, his only worries coming from the occasional ill-placed spot which causes his fevered brain to reflect on any unclean lavatory seats in his recent past. He dodges doodle bugs, sees every available film, reads Dostoevsky, Huxley and film magazines, buys secondhand symphonic ’ 78s and conducts them at home. And he fantasises right royally about every woman with whom he has the slightest social intercourse. The fantasies rarely spill over into reality and when they do, his furtive fumbles end in impotent frustration. Like many young bloods out to prove their manhood, this one loses interest in any female the moment that she becomes available to him. He wants only those whom he has placed on pedestals, safely out of reach. “Virginities” is amusing although not belly-laugh-worthy; it is poignant without being mawkish; and it is sensitive without being tenderminded. It is a charming look at the hopes, worries, fears, frustrations and general agonies of adolescence. Where “Talking Sex” tells us of sex in adolescence as it might be, “Virginities" tells us about sex in adolescence as it often is. I suspect that if the diarist had read Miriam Stoppard’s book, he would still have suffered the same difficulties. Certain things have to be experienced

rather than read about and there is always the chance that reading about it will make one go blind.