They give good reasons why they want to experiment and look askance when told to wait. For marriage? Like all the adults they see around them? Yeah right.Rather than condemning the fact that 86 per cent are indulging in sex, the real problem is that there is still such a high number of teenage mothers, due to poor sex education, ignorance and a lack of clinics where teenagers can seek contraceptive advice without fear. Earlier this year it was revealed that 1996 (the most recent figures available) had seen the highest number of schoolgirl pregnancies for ten years. In a survey conducted for the Birth Control Trust, researchers found that while in 1983, nearly three in ten people believed sex before marriage was always wrong; by 1991, this had fallen to less than one in five.British teenagers are just having a good time. Or Byron: “What men call gallantry and gods adultery/Is much more common where the climate’s sultry.”The English have long been seen as one of the most sexless nations in the world, yet according to the study by the Alan Guttmacher Institute in New York – which analysed data from 53 countries – British teenagers are top of the bonking list Cue howls of outrage “Our world record of shame,” said the Mail But are we really so surprised?British society has changed.
What is proved by this is that we have lost paradise at least once because of bad old predatory behaviour. And just because things have always been like this, is no reason that they always should be. Let us reflect upon the fate of the Ediacarans and resolve that it shall never, ever happen again Blessed are the meek.. CONGRATULATIONS!
Britain leads the world in something! It’s a long time since we’ve been able to say that. But “We should hang our heads in shame,” said the Sun newspaper yesterday, reacting to the news that not only does Britain have the highest rate of unmarried teenage mums but our teenagers are the most sexual active on the globe.
The percentage of unmarried women who are sexually active by the age of 19 is 86 per cent The US manages a measly 75 per cent in second place. The first thought that springs to mind is: can this be true? Are all the old stereotypes out of date? Remember that sneering by famous Latin lovers? “Continental people have sex lives The English have hot water bottles,” said George Mikes. She that survives will be she that gets the best mandibles and the sharpest eyes and uses them.
He that dies out will be he that lies in ooze and expects his food to volunteer for duty It shows the inevitable victory of Yang. Yes indeed, says Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee, and it also indicates the need for Ediacaran nations, like India, to develop their own mouth parts. There are a lot of predators out there.No! say the Yinners (vegetarians, feminists, ecologists and Independent columnists). There would be no wars, no money, and only the most unexerting form of sex.But it didn’t happen. And this is the second part of my meditation; what should we learn from the sad story of the Ediacarans? What, if anything, does it tell us about the nature of things? Sense organs and mouth parts, say the free marketeer or the realpolitiker; it’s a trilobyte eats quilt world. What if (try to get inside this one), right now, the soft-bodied descendants – the evolutionary offspring – of those early peaceful slime-suckers, ran the planet?Pessimists would, I suppose, reply that we’d all look like Vanessa Feltz, talk like Michael Howard, and spend most of the day watching Late Lunch. But – an optimist – I prefer to think that we would have become like beautiful rococo sofas, intelligent curtains, sentient champagne glasses, all of us growing to enormous, height, incorporating the most complex and satisfying patterns on our dulcet exteriors, living in pleasant sludge most of the year, and going – slowly – to the mountains for our holidays.
In recent years some historians (notably Niall Ferguson of Oxford University) have dabbled in alternative histories. You know the kind of stuff, what if King Charles I hadn’t been a brainless autocrat but a regular kind of a responsive monarch, might we have avoided Cromwell, the Civil War, regicide and a descent into vulgar democracy? These questions are fascinating, and invariably show how all the great left-wing events in history were accidents, while all the right-wing ones were an inevitable consequence of the way Man really is.Even so, such speculations are as nothing when compared to the really great historical imponderable, what if we hadn’t eaten the Ediacardians? What if we’d left them alone. One wonders what aspects of our deep psyches are affected by our terrible and exploitative treatment of our parallel life form. It is possible that much of our inner feelings of guilt and responsibility originate in the day that one trilobyte turned to one millipede and said, “All gone!” Perhaps it might help us to come to terms with our guilt, were we to apologise to Ediacarans for activities in the Cambrian era.Other questions are raised too. Our ancestors then started in on each other.Everything goes somewhere. One by one the quilts, mugs and mattresses were hoovered up by our great grandpas and mas.