ideas about free sex on idyllic pacific islands go back to Margaret Mead. Her reputation as an anthropologist was founded on her book, Coming of Age in Samoa, published in 1928 and based largely on her interviews with two young Samoan women, Fa'apua'a Fa'amu and Fofoa. At the time of her visit to Samoa, Mead, a graduate student, was only 23 years old, scarcely older than the interviewed "girls" whom she called her "merry companions." Embarrassed and offended by Mead's constant questions about sex, a taboo topic in Samoa, the two decided to play on Mead what they thought would be a harmless joke. They had no inkling that Mead was an anthropologist who would go home and write a book about what they told her. To them she was just a young, naive, meddlesome tourist.

The two merry companions told Mead everything she wanted to hear. Yes, adolescents had complete sexual freedom, moving stress-free from childhood to adultery. Samoans were a happy, free-love people. Poor Mead bought it all. And not only did she accept the wild stories of the young women, but so too did the general public and the anthropological community. Mead's book was not only a best seller, fuelling a sexual rebellion among young people, but it was widely adopted as a university text in anthropology.

When in 1983 Australian anthropologist Derek Freeman exposed the story in Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, he was vilified by his colleagues and American Anthropological Association members formally denounced his book as "unscientific."

Unfortunately for Freeman's critics Fa'apua'a Fa'amu remained alive and in a 1991 interview the elderly grandmother confirmed everything that Freeman had said. "Samoan girls," she confessed, "are terrific liars when it comes to joking. But Margaret accepted our trumped-up stories as though they were true. Yes, we just fibbed and fibbed to her."