Review

Advice from an ex-aunt

Straight Talk: how to handle sex
Jane Butterworth
Pan Macmillan, 1993, £3.50

Pan Macmillan have spotted a niche in the market and gone for it. Like Nick Fisher, Jane Butterworth, health editor of Ms London and an ex-agony aunt, has based her book on the stated needs of teenagers as indicated in the letters she received. Young people want to know about sex. Jane Butterworth adopts a reasonable response, emphasising knowledge as the basis for a healthy lifestyle.

The book is comprehensive and pleasantly so, not too patronising, and dotted with quirky and amusing illustrations. Ranging from puberty and its changes, we are taken through sex in its broadest sense, STDs, teenage health, contraception, sexuality, birth and male violence. The index and the list of addresses are particularly useful.

My only qualm is the unnecessary London focus of the addresses, leaving out, for example, Manchester drug, counselling, HIV and gay and lesbian switchboard contacts.

The tenor of the advice is good, placing sex in the context of relationships — with self and others — based on knowledge and attitudes. But this approach is not always consistent. Talking of amyl nitrate (poppers), the advice is: ‘Don’t touch them — they can be dangerous.’ Here the author is short on explanation and avoids the issue of harm minimisation. ‘Just say no’ really isn’t good enough.

As for imprecisions, we are told that one way of catching HIV is ‘…through the illegal use of drugs’. I am surprised these myths are still being peddled. This is compounded a few lines later when teenagers are told it is dangerous to pick up needles or syringes found lying around. Such inaccuracies need not appear in publications of this type, and seriously detract from the reasoned approach of the text. ‘There’s a lot of ignorance about HIV’, says the author on the next page, and we can only agree.

It is reassuring to have Jane Butterworth conclude her Straight Talk with a chapter on sexual abuse, laying the blame firmly with men who are known and trusted by the victim. This is supported by concrete advice and sources of help including Childline and Rape Crisis.

Straight Talk is nothing more than an hors d’oeuvre, but a welcome introduction for teenagers. In the context of sanctimonious and moralising edicts from the Department for Education on sex education, the genre represented by Fisher and Butterworth is to be welcomed.

These books have the potential to speak to young people. If they engage teenagers in a debate around sex, it will rightly undermine John Patten’s antediluvian stance.