YOUTH AND SEX
CURRENT LITERATURE
By Dorothy Dunbar Bromley and Florence Haxton Britten
The authors have approached their problem with " high and truly scientific- standards and ideals," but they maaage to drive this uneasy tandem through 270 pages of good reading matter. The scope of the book (Harpers, ios. 6d.) is the incidence and kind of sexual practice and ethics among under- graduates of both sexes in several American Universities. Six thousand questionnaires were issued, and 1,300 returned, more from women than from men. One gains the impression that the authors are tough, and that their facts are near the mark, however obtained, and particularly so from interviews. The small numbers do not yield statistics, but the authors could have made fuller and better use of quotations from actual replies. Instead they give us yet another set of " types " and write up the material in a readable extempore style which occasionally lapses into unhappy generalisations. The hygienic but curiously non-cultural modern American attitude to sex- " sex is no longer news "—does not prevent the picture of undergraduate sex-life from being one rather sad than comic.
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