In the May issue of Cosmopolitan appeared the following letter:

There's no one I can talk to about this. I've been having a serious relationship with this wonderful guy for about three months. He says he loves me and wants to sleep with me. I'm fifteen and, although I love him very much, I don't want to rush into anything because I'm not on the pill and I can't talk to my parents about this. Don't tell me to wait till I'm sixteen because I don't want to lose him and I'm not at all interested in boys of my own age.

While it would be fatuous to suppose that such a letter is a reliable indication of the plight of the average fifteen-year-old girl in Britain in 1985, or even of the average fifteen-year-old reader of Cosmo, there are some aspects of this cry for help that seem genuinely typical. It