Yes!!!! The big day is approaching!

I admit it. For the past six months I have been a positive tease on this blog.

I have been hinting - more than broadly - that I have been involved in a big sexuality project, which I haven't been at liberty to talk about. Now, I can spill the beans.

You may remember, or have heard of, the seminal book Joy of Sex, written by Dr Alex Comfort in 1972. It's been a huge success, selling 8 million copies worldwide, but sadly Alex died in 2000, though his son Nick did a great job of updating in 2002.

Since then, the publishers have been searching for a female sexologist to "reinvent" the book for the twenty-first century. In 2006 they chose me - and for the past two years I've been working on the project. Now, it's all come to fruition - the UK launch date is September 8th, with a US launch in 2009.

I'm very proud of the New Joy of Sex. All of it has been revised and brought up to date. About half of it has been completely rewritten. There are forty three new sections covering everything from the clitoris through to internet sexuality. And there's a total reorientation of approach - from the mores of 1972 through to the new hedonism (and the new puritanism) of 2008.

As you can imagine, I am getting very excited - not just for myself, but because this is such an important book. What I realised in (re)writing it is that Alex Comfort was one of the first people to emphasise not only the joy but also the power of sex; we tend these days to treat the whole thing as a game, but it's an extremely potent force in life. The New Joy of Sex book, hopefully, makes that statement.

So...for the next few weeks, watch out for regular updates on this blog - of what's happening with Joy of Sex, the launch, and all the interesting work that seems to be coming in on the back of it.

Watch this space...

Shades of Salem?

I was surprised when I heard - via an American friend - that a rise in teen pregnancy rates in a small East coast US town had hit Time Magazine. Hardly the stuff that front page covers are made of, I would have thought. This story, however, hinged on the claim that there the girls had agreed to get pregnant en masse.

Now that was interesting. I was intrigued when I read the Time feature - and so, apparently, was every news desk in the world. Within hours, Google had several hundred thousand hits on the story and the reader postings on each of those individual stories were numbering in the millions.

The facts are these. Having had a pregnancy rate of about 4 per year up to 2007, over the past year 17 of the female students of Gloucester High fall pregnant. Then, when interviewed by Time magazine, the school principal reports that the girls have a 'pact' with each other to aim for motherhood, and that the repeated queuing for pregnancy tests - and the high-fives on getting positive results - are part of a planned project. All of a sudden it's mayhem. The school officials are unavailable for comment. The town officials call an emergency meeting excluding the Principal. Gloucester's mayor is quoted as denying a "blood-oath bond".

Excuse me? Blood oath bond? Secret pact? I'm not suggesting it's great that 17 girls are currently having to face the challenges of motherhood far too early in their young lives. I'm not claiming we should approve if they did all dare each other to get pregnant. And I'm not saying that we - and all countries with a high teenage pregnancy rate - shouldn't be doing our best to lower that rate (ironically, Gloucester officials recently opposed attempts by local sexual health projects to issue contraceptives to school students).

But it does seem to me - whether or not the story is true - to be a huge overreaction, an overreaction by a society that seems threatened by any hint that young girls might decide to take their lives into their own hands. The principal's original term 'pact', the mayor's term 'blood-oath bond' and more worryingly, the willingness of the press to pick up and run with those loaded terms seem to me to be out of all proportion to the original 17 pregnancies. Shades of Midwich Cuckoos, Villa of the Damned. and the Salem witch trials - which actually happened only 10 miles from Gloucester.

Let's not get threatened by this. Let's not turn natural disapproval into a witchhunt. Let's not see this as any more than it is - a troupe of insecure, immature teens who want to love and be loved and - instinctively knowing that motherhood is a wonderful thing - decide to go for it.

When He Can't Get It Up...

I've done a lot of work around sexual problems - in fact, in May I will be speaking at the Primary Care Sexual Dysfunction conference. One of my particular areas of expertise is erectile difficulty, and I find this particularly rewarding work because so often, the problem's easily cured. Here are some guidelines for both sufferer and their partners.

To him:

1: Relax. Often one occurrence of ED scares the life out of a sufferer - and then performance anxiety kicks in and there's no way forward. If ED has happened after a one-off occurrence, then take the pressure off by concentrating on foreplay for a few weeks. Once you aren't under stress, the problem often resolves itself.

2: If it doesn't resolve itself, don't delay getting help. The average man with ED waits years before consulting a doctor, but that's unwise, if only because ED can be a marker of medical problems such as heart disease or diabetes. See your GP right away; he's seen it all before and won't be embarrassed.

3: Be hopeful. Often it takes only a few minutes' consultation to get a diagnosis and effective treatment. Current medications - yes, the little blue pill and its brothers - can be the answer of choice and if not, then more exploration can often come up with alternative solutions.

To her:

1: Don't add more pressure by blaming yourself or the relationship. ED is rarely caused by partnership problems or infidelity that isn't already clear. Sure, if you are rowing daily then his ED may be a sign that you need to sort things out. But ED in a good relationship is almost always a sign that medical intervention's needed.

2: Offer support not challenge. A man who can't get it up is feeling bad about himself to start with. If you wobble, or do him down, this won't help. Instead explain - he may not know - that most ED is down to a physical problem which can be easily sorted.

3: Suggest he get help. You can give your partner permission and encouragement to go to the doctor, when he may be hesitating. You can also suggest he logs on to SortED in 10 for extra guidance.

Age shall not wither....

At last statistics have proved what I've known professionally for decades and am increasingly coming to know on a personal level... sexual desire does not fade with age. The myth that sex stops at 40, or with the twentieth wrinkle, whichever comes sooner, is just that - a myth.

A survey published in the New England Journal of Medicine, and covered in almost all the national newspapers today with varying degrees of seriousness, shows that older people still want, need and love sex - and most of them, despite the occasional erectile or lubricative glitch, are still getting it. The majority of those under 74 are making love regularly and happily.

The flipside - for sadly, there is a flipside - is that they may well be making love unsafely. For after all, these nasty STDs don't affect anyone but the young, do they? (Of course they do, one of the biggest rises in infection occurs among the older cohort, who think that anyone they sleep with has been celibate or at least faithful for the past several decades. Dream on.)

But safe sex warnings apart, I'm delighted that at last those of us in our middle years are finally being appreciated for who we are. We are not ony warm blooded and passionate, - but also knowledgeable about our own bodies, about how to turn a partner on, about how to make sex not only loving but also lustful. What's not to like?

Eat your heart out, Corrie!

As well as covering "drugs, sex and rock and roll" for the mass media, I'm also heavily involved in the more academic side of things - most particularly sexual health. Yesterday, for example, I attended the quarterly meeting of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health, a cute little mag that belies its rather ponderous name to give coverage of a range of topics from menstruation to the menopause by way of contraception, sexually transmitted diseases and cervical cancer - anything to do with women's and men's bits, basically.

Of course it's a serious journal - the list of contributors always reads like a Who's Who of key world figures in sexual health. But what always amazes me during our meetings is the fact that in addition it's so much about real life, real stories of patients who have had to make difficult choices, real concerns of health professionals who have had to face difficult challenges. Granted, unless you have a medical interest in the topic, you won't keep a copy on your bedside table; but beneath the long Latin words and the carefully correlated statistics, there lie so many human stories - stories that frankly, I find much more interesting and inspiring than any TV soap.