Clearly, professional promiscuity is not disappearing. But Lancereaux's idea that VD could be controlled if we were to "meet the evil at its source, that is, in the houses of prostitution" must have been as much of an oversimplification in his time as it is today. Nor is amateur promiscuity a new phenomenon, as many alarmists would have us believe. There would be no difficulty in establishing this point for the upper and lower classes, if only from the poetry of all periods; and nobody doubts that it has always existed among middle class men, who have made use of female prostitutes or lower class amateurs. The question then remains, has there been an emergence or a marked increase in promiscuity among middle class women? Again the question might be narrowed further. The seemingly greater promiscuous sexual activity of suburban housewives today is probably, like the apparent increase in homosexual practices, a matter of visibility rather than of any significantly increased activity. But has there not been a significant increase of promiscuous sex among younger middle class women, especially teen age girls? But our times have seen the emergence of this group of girls and young women into school and college and the business and professional world, where they are appearing in unprecedented numbers in increasingly open competition and cooperation with boys and men. Feminism is demolishing the old double standard, and freedom for women has come to mean, in part, freedom for the premarital sexual experimentation that has always been considered normal in men. Men in their turn are finding what appear to be new possibilities for experimentation with women of their own social class. The ready availability of new means of contraception, and of abortion as well as knowledge of the increased ease of treating VD, are thought to have removed the last barriers to young female sexual freedom.

But the question\is in fact a good deal more complicated than this restricted matter of middle class teen age female sexual activity. Young people all over the world, people born since the end of the second World War, have found themselves in a world beset with extraordinary new problems. The problems are not peculiar to any country, and although they are more acute in some places than in others, it is unlikely that any corner of the earth remains untouched by them. The two major components of these new problems are the enormous technological advances made in the period and the persistent strife between the two major economic systems, capitalism and communism. Each is, of course, in part a product of the other. The consequences include unprecedented affluence (side by side with persistent widespread poverty), an accelerating rate of population growth (and the still greater rate of contacts, as Dr. Guthe said), widespread pollution of the environment and ecological damage, advancing militarization and continuous warfare, and other great problems of our day. Today's youth, faced with staggering new problems, hardly needs the further supplement from its elders of an alleged "permissiveness" to move it into turmoil beyond anything those elders could ever have experienced.

A change in the pattern of sexual behavior and in common attitudes toward sex is illustrated by a pair of two page advertisements by a single drug manufacturer, which appeared in a professional magazine at the beginning and at the end of 1969. They advertised the same product -- a single dose penicillin preparation for treatment of syphilis. The theme of both is, doctor, you had better use a single dose treatment; she (the patient) may not be back. A picture covers one full page of each set. The earlier picture shows a full face, over a turtleneck, with a half burned cigarette dangling from the lips, dark glasses reflecting a kiss in one glass and in the other a night life scene of bar and marquee showing a movie "for adults." No caption is needed. The later picture has the advertiser learned something? Shows a pretty, nicely dressed teen age girl with an expression matching the caption, "She's stunned, incredulous, and mortified."