Thanks Jacqui.

A further thought. There's been a lot of talk on here about the fact that in 'earlier' times, pre-school-based-sex-education and pre-the-current-amount-of-sex-obsession-in-the-media-and-popular-youth-culture, children and young teens were often not as aware of such things as they are now and that this was a good thing.

I'd fully agree that prepubescent girls in lipstick and bikinis is not something I am comfortable with and if I ever have a daughter I hope to make a stand against pester power should she want to dress that way. BUT from puberty onwards I don't think that sexual curiosity is ANYTHING new.

This being a folk music site, you don't have to look very far to find old & traditional songs on the subject of young people getting experimental. At various points in the past, society and in particular the church have frowned on sex out of wedlock, stigmatised any children born that way, and made (or tried to make) people (and especially young people) believe that wanting sex is sinful, dirty & wrong. To a certain extent that probably worked in reducing the number of people who did it, but a lot of the time it just means that it happened in secret, so looking back now we might think it didn't happen when in fact we just had no record of it. Plus it undoubtedly made quite a lot of people miserable as they struggled to balance what they felt and what society wanted of them. I struggle to believe that a 13 yr old dad and 15 yr old mum have never happened before. Probably quite often. But the whole thing was more likely then to be kept hidden, not smeared all over the daily papers.

I'm not saying that the world we live in today is perfect or that we shouldn't bother to try and change things for the better. But let's not kid ourselves that what we had before was perfect either.