U.K. Teen Sex is U.S.A.'s Fault

Greetings America. Sex is in the news again. Of course it is. This is 2002 and sex is everywhere: in newspapers and magazines, on television and advertising hoardings.

The latest government statistics here confirm that more people are having more sex more promiscuously and at a much earlier age than ever before. Here in Britain, among those aged 16 to 44, nearly one in three men and one in five women had a new partner in the last year, and half of them had sex within one month of meeting. The average number of partners over the last five years was four for men and two for women. One in 12 men and one in 28 women had more than ten partners in five years. What's more, in Britain today, a quarter of all girls and a third of all boys have sex under the age of sixteen (our legal age of consent) and the average age of first sexual intercourse is sixteen for both sexes.

Britain has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in Europe. That's why our government has just decided to make contraception freely available in schools to children as young as eleven.

And who is to blame for all this? You are, America.

That's right, it's all YOUR fault. According to Dr. Colin Wilson, consultant psychiatrist and Britain's leading sex therapist, in the 1930s, sex outside marriage was rare. The Second World War changed everything because the fear of impending death encouraged people to have sex at the first opportunity lest it turn out to be the last opportunity. And that's when you Yanks turned up our shores, over-sexed, over-paid and over here. You helped save us from the Nazis and introduced our girls to the delights of the Amertican way of love. Dr Wilson says the War sowed the seeds of the sexual revolution. And the advent of the contraceptive Pill in the 1960s turned it into a whirlwind. Now, apparently, there's no stopping us. But what I want to know is: has all this sex made any of us any happier? Definitely not, according to Dr Wilson. He says, “Our standards and expectations of sex have got higher. But because we're mere mortals and not sex gods, sadly we can't meet those expectations, so most of us today are profoundly dissatisfied with our sex lives.”

Oh dear.