27 Mar 09 INTRODUCTION

Sexuality is a vast subject covering many fields of study. Genitality, with which it is usually confused, is only a small part of it, yet sex books and sex education tend to concentrate on this aspect of it.

This is understandable because the anatomical differences between the sexes, and especially the genital differences, are the subject of endless fascination and interest from childhood onwards. In our western culture we put so many prohibitions on interest in our genitals and genitality that there is a danger of becoming absorbed with the topic to the exclusion of the more important aspects of sexuality in our relationships and lives.

Men and women are highly complex physical, emotional and psychological beings and to ignore the love, the feelings and the relationships that go hand in hand with genitality is like driving a car with only one wheel. The result is the same — a dangerous imbalance. For many people the sexual aspects of their lives are less fulfilling than they should or could be and they end up passing on their hang-ups, wrong perceptions and misunderstandings about sex and sexuality to their children.

As a culture we try to overcome our natural interest in but unnatural emphasis on the genitals by talking a lot about love and most readers would agree that if men and women could love each other perfectly the world would be a very different place. In a sense if we can love another human being perfectly we are half-way towards loving everyone and the world needs love more than ever before. The sort we need is not the vague love that teenagers feel for all mankind but rather a mature, practical and real love for another real human being.

Real love is in short supply and many people, because of their upbringing, do not love themselves enough to be able to love another person. Yet others are so obsessed with themselves that they are unable to allow another person to intrude in any significant way. Men and women in all kinds of relationships often feel they do not love each other very much and some even hate each other. Some men dislike all women and some women, all men. What a terrible state of affairs to have got ourselves into in a so-called Christian society that should be based on love.

Unfortunately, the man-woman relationship has many enemies. To the extent that the state or religions demand that their interests be given prior consideration and that the man-woman relationship itself should be governed by them, they intrude on and may even damage the relationship. Both, of course, do so ‘accidentally’ under the guise of trying to further the relationship.

In fact, for a supposedly caring society based on Judaeo-Christian morals, we seem to be doing rather badly in this area. Premarital pregnancies and sexually-transmitted diseases are on the increase in spite of efforts to curb them; over a third of marriages end in divorce; one in eight children live in one-parent families; most parents have problems in dealing with their teenagers’ emerging sexuality; and depression, the most widespread psychological illness of our society, is not only commoner than ever but often has a psychosexual basis. There is certainly no room for complacency. But what can the average family hope to do to redress the balance?

Obviously a way to change things is to shield our children from the negative cultural influences that we suffered, but this is not easy because we as parents are steeped in them.

Is to look at love and sex from the cradle to the grave and, with the benefit of knowledge of both family and psychosexual medicine, weave a picture of interlinking complexity that shows how a child grows up to become a sexual person. We then follow this person through life and look at other major milestones along the way. The subject is enormous and we have drawn on research from all over the world to add to our own clinical experience. After all, no one person can have seen it all and, in the final analysis, everyone is different.

In this completely revised edition, we have brought all the facts and figures up to date and have taken the AIDS epidemic into account. Because we have had to be brief on very important subjects we have tried to concentrate on what families most want to know and have tried to be as practical as possible. After all, unless you have had a wide experience of teenagers and talked to them about their intimate fears, problems, loves, hates and aspirations you can’t really know how your own child fits into the picture of ‘normality’. Many parents end up feeling hopelessly confused, especially in our fast-changing world.

Being a parent is probably more difficult today than ever before because the conflicts within society are so great, and the last thing that most parents need is yet another sex manual to tell them and their family how to behave genitally. Clinical experience repeatedly confirms that although genital sex can help cement a relationship in troubled times, sex nearly always looks after itself in a good relationship. Many people with so-called sex problems have personality or interrelationship problems deep down – the sex problem is simply the obvious symptom of which they complain.

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