Nevertheless women, in carrying down from ancient times the practice of wearing lip rouge might wince a little if they knew how the custom started. According to Allen Edwardes and R. E. L. Masters, in a book called The Cradle of Erotica, the custom started in ancient Egypt, but not every woman wore it. Only those who were experienced at and adept at the act of fellating men wore lip rouge-as a mark of their experience and skill. Oral sex contact between men and women, or between any two persons, for that matter, wasn't so frowned upon then. And even today it still isn't as tabooed in Egypt, Arabia, Turkey, northeastern Africa and the Middle East as in the Western World. There is probably no more or less of it practiced, but it just isn't as tabooed, therefore there is less neurosis, less guilt, and less mental illness about it than we have been able to achieve at the cost of considerable effort over the centuries.

But on we go with sexual development-the educational aspect of which is a fleeting catch-as-catch-can if there ever was one. From our older associates we learn the four-letter words, the reproductive process, and even about such things as masturbation as we approach puberty. But insofar as adequate and proper sex education is concerned, we learn many "DON'Ts" and very few "DOS" except the old adult prejudices and dire warnings of disaster if we fail to fall in step with the prevalent repression of our sexual drives.

How we can expect a healthy maturity in sexual attitudes and ability to perform when all we do is deny sex to our young adults at the time when their drive and capacity is the greatest is hard to answer, but nevertheless we do just that.

This goes on until the time when a young man and woman marry. From virtually no adequate sex education, and from a constant denying of the sexual urge, the young husband and wife just joined in wedlock are supposed suddenly to be expert at the art.

That's the accepted moral standard. Is it adhered to? Does it work? Is it the best standard for an enlightened society to follow?

The moral standard we are discussing is not adhered to, Going back to the Kinsey studies-for which today we would, by Kinsey's own personal prediction in 1955 have to increase many of the percentages-we find some of the following things (here he is talking about males):

1. Allowing for "cover-up" by the persons interviewed, he found that half of all the males have intercourse with women other than their wives, this taking place while they are married. And 85% of the males had had pre-marital intercourse!

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2.59% had some kind of mouth-genital contact with their wives. 3. 70% had had some relations with prostitutes.

4. 37% had had a homosexual contact after age 15 which led to orgasm.

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5. 92% had masturbated with some significant frequency. Kinsey himself estimated that if the men could answer completely and honestly, 98% of them had engaged in masturbation. Privately he suggested that the only reason the other 2% didn't was because, physically and psychically speaking, they could not. But they probably tried!

Turning to women, Kinsey found:

1. 64% had responded to orgasm by one means or another prior to marriage.

2. About 50% had had pre-marital intercourse (among college graduates this increased to 60%). *

3. 26% had sex with men other than their husbands.

4.43% admitted mouth contact on a man's genitals. This, of course, is a form of sodomy, punishable in 49 of our 50 states today with jail seatences of 6 months up to life imprisonment-even if conducted in private between married partners.

5. 28% more than one woman out of every four interviewed-admitted homosexual experience with other women, and about half of these women âdmitted the experience culminated in an orgasm.

6. Masturbation among women is widespread also. Of women who went to grade school, 28% had done it; among high school graduates, almost 60% had engaged in it, and the figure rose to a little over that for women who had gone to college and taken postgraduate work.

In general, other "crazy results" showed up. For instance 98% of the lower educated men had had pre-marital intercourse, meaning the lowereducated male was less inhibited, and more prone to fling the moral standards to the wind. But among the women, the opposite was true-the lowereducated females adhered to the moral standards more closely-probably through a fear of pregnancy-while the higher-educated woman was much freer in her pre-marital experiences.

Then, in the highest educated persons of both sexes he found the greatest number who tried out the "varieties"-different positions in coitus, masturbation and homosexual contacts; and here also he found the greatest frequency of oral and anal genital contacts among heterosexuals.

Does this leave any doubt that we are a nation of sexual hypocrites? Remember that every statistical excerpt from the Kinsey studies mentioned here-except masturbation in solitude-is actually a report on a sex crime in all our 50 states when the data was obtained (two years ago. Illinois changed its laws so that consenting sex acts between adults in private were no longer illegal). These acts, then, are still crimes in the other 49 states. Remember also that many of the so-called perversions and harmful sex acts are not included statistically in the figures mentioned. We