Why do They not Come in for Diagnosis and Treatment of Venereal Diseas in the First Place?

Why does she (or he) run away? Why do they not come in for diagnosis and treatment in the first place? Why all the elaborate detective work of the blitz, the searching out of patients and contacts, the cajolery, the specially trained investigators? The questions almost seem to answer themselves, and a good deal of the answer is so obvious that we needn't waste time on it. VD is shameful, and no matter how much we try to make it less so or avoid the fact that it is so, the penalties associated with its presence remain; and retribution looms larger than any benefit to be hoped for in what amounts to confession. Again, we are told that ignorance is rampant: sick people would go for treatment if they knew they were sick, or if they suspected what it was they had. But to the degree that ignorance makes up a significant part of the problem, it is itself a reflection of the shame. Nice People don't talk about the whole subject, or if they do, it is with mincing and blushing or with a phony solicitude, under which finger shaking is more plainly visible than the Nice People can imagine.

Dr. Parran ,urged us to deal with VD as a problem of disease, not as punishment for sin, and his principle is supposed to be the basis of modem practice. Yet we have not been able to give his principle force in the more than thirty years since he stated it.

Nevertheless the situation is changing under our eyes. For centuries we have made each sex hide parts of its anatomy from the other, with consequences we are only beginning to think about now that the curtain is being raised. Nudity has become commonplace today, not only in the theater but in the daily life of tens or hundreds of thousands of young people as well. More and more young men and women witness the enormous rock music festivals in the open air that have been a feature of recent years simply take off their clothes and mingle with one another as though they were back in Eden. Older people are either appalled or fascinated (or both); their own morbid curiosity matches or exceeds their impulse to put the practice down by force. A United States presidential commission (appointed by President Johnson) issued a detailed study indicating that pornography doesn't harm adults, based on several sociological studies and quickly confirmed by others. But this majority observation was countered vociferously by that of an outraged minority; and on October 25, 1970, the commission's report was rejected (I think one might fairly say "denounced") by President Nixon, who said he had "evaluated" it but did not say he had read it. The notion that nudity and even a display of sexual activity, normal or otherwise, can have any effect other than to bring damnation down upon us at once or that it might have no significant effect at all is to millions of staid citizens utterly outside the pale of belief and beyond endurance.

Denmark and Sweden, evidently more than other places, are currently making serious efforts to break down taboos against nudity and ("Sexual display. Although many horrified observers seem to have decided firmly what the outcome of these efforts will be too early as yet to decide whether the result will be an increase or a decrease in prostitution and VD, or whether there will be no effect on either; there are many indications that the immediate effect has been boredom. But these great national experiments on the effects of open pornography will be worth watching; and Denmark's reputation for accurate VD statistics will make its example especially informative.

Whatever we may eventually find to be the relationship between nudity, sexual display, prostitution, and venereal disease, it ought to be clear that the use of force will not alter the first two or correct the others. The VD problem is a problem of disease, as Dr. Parran said, and we must find a way to get at it as we do with other diseases. We can hardly hope for success in this undertaking until we have divorced the VD problem from the traces of original sin which still cling to our approach to it.