Ah, Wilderness

Sex is usually conducted in the dark, and even when it isn't, most couples would be stunned to learn that some one was watching. But in effect, the participants in the most intimate of human rites have learned in recent years that they may be the most studied, if not physically observed, of all mankind. The fact that the voyeur declares himself a scientist and wears a grave expression is not wholly reassuring.

Wearing his own grave expression, Social Critic Vance Packard (The Hidden Persuaders, The Status Seekers, The Waste Makers) reports on the sexual revolution in his new book, The Sexual Wilderness (McKay; $6.95).

Packard surveyed the sex practices of 2,200 junior and senior students in colleges and universities in the U.S., England, Norway, Canada, Germany and Italy. Most significant of his findings is that in the past 20 years the percentage of 21-year-old unmarried U.S. college girls who have had sexual intercourse has risen nearly 60%. In the 1940s, Kinsey reported that about 27% of college-educated females had surrendered their virginity before marriage. Packard's study now puts the figure at 43%. Of particular interest to male exchange students is Packard's international sampling. Sixty-three percent of the English university girls questioned said that they were experienced, if not seasoned. Next came the German girls, with 60%; the Norwegians, 54%; the Canadians, 35%. Last were the Italian coeds, 90% of whom reported they were still innocent.

Drama of the Decades. Packard's prevailing theme invokes one of Newton's more familiar laws. "The primary drama of recent decades," he says, "is that women have been acting and men have been reacting." Mostly, he finds, women have been acting up. To underscore his point, Packard offers a regional breakdown of the percentage of premarital experience among American women: 57% in the East, 48% in the West, 32% in the South, 25% in the Midwest. The geographic conclusion is obvious: traditional behavior dies hard in the South and Midwest, while liberation is more readily embraced in the sophisticated East and the fun-in-the-sun West.

Packard's explanation of his statistics offers little more than an acknowledgment of what many social scientists have been saying for years. The rise in premarital relations, he feels, is due largely to an undermining of woman's traditional role. Not only does the teenage girl find the rules at home increasingly relaxed, but 19% more American women attend college than did in 1940. And today's centers of higher education are geared to provide them with independence of thought, to say nothing of an opportunity and urge to exercise that independence.

This state of affairs, Packard notes with alarm, has had a deleterious if not disastrous effect on the American male. Citing a 1967 American Medical Association journal's psychiatric report claiming that sexual roles are "being reversed," Packard says that "many young males not only feel their adequacy threatened, but are confused as to what the modern world expects of them." He found support for this analysis at an Eastern women's college, where a girl revealed that "most of the men I have dated in the past year have made overtures at going all the way but are not disappointed if you refuse."

Oddly enough, Packard, who has made his life's work the shattering of middle-class shibboleths, seeks a solution to the problem in an almost belligerently bourgeois codification of behavior. It is his version of situation ethics. Three elements should be present, he says, before society bestows its approval on premarital sex: 1) "That a deep friendship based upon substantial acquaintance exists between the man and the girl," 2) "That both are out of high school; and if college is planned, that they have completed the first year of college if they are still teen-agers," and 3) "That they hope to marry, and their best friends know of the hope."

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