Better Than Roses On Your Piano

Now why didn't this news story appear while I still had my youth: "Young women are taking the lead in dismantling sexual taboos," says a new study by a pair of San Diego State U. professors. Young women have outpaced young men in earlier ages of first sexual intercourse and positive attitudes toward premarital sex (which is more surprising than it seems; if the study is to be believed, 60 percent of young men disapproved of prenuptial sex in 1943, against a measly 21 percent today). And suck on this factoid:

The study also found that acceptance of oral sex had shown a strong increase.

Between 1969 and 1993, men engaging in oral sex grew from 48 percent to 72 percent, while women climbed from 42 percent to 71 percent.

"In previous generations, oral sex was considered disgusting," said [co-author Jean] Twenge, a psychology professor. "Now young people see it as another way of being sexual. It's also part of the general trend of sexual behavior moving away from marriage and reproduction and toward pleasure."

Neither the article nor an abstract of the study makes it clear what we're defining as "young women." Nor is it clear whom all those young men in old '69 were having oral sex with, unless it was each other.

Not everybody, of course, is happy. Says one Jane Jimenez:

Do any of these Yahoo reporters bother to read their own news reports? Are any of these reporters parents with sons and daughters? Are any of these reporters suffering from infertility, herpes outbreaks, or cervical cancer? Would these be the examples of "pleasure" linked to rampant sex?

At Salon, the ominously named Christine Smallwood gives a thumbs-up review to Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture.

How do you cure a nymphomaniac? Some truly disturbing treatments from Carol Groneman's Nymphomania: A History.

Think male terror of the unleashed "female libido" is a strictly modern phenomenon? Dig The Bacchae, by Euripides—the original girls-gone-wild production.

Who was the last American man to suffer from the virgin/whore complex? I say Frank Sinatra, who would go crying to the long-suffering, long-dumped Nancy Sr. whenever the foul-mouthed, nasty-doin' Ava made a monkey out of him.