everywhere. We turn the most ordinary products into sex objects in order to sell them. We use sex to sell scent and sex to sell no-scent. We use sex to sell most other things from underpants, to shoes, to cigarettes. Television is saturated with sex, be it Oprah Winfrey and Phil Donahue talking to leather clad transvestites or talking about sex changes and masturbation, or soap operas dishing out prime time titillation based on abortion and incest.

Popular music is so heavily based on sex that singers compete to see who can push furthest toward the traditional taboos of sadism and bestiality.

Yet we question why our children engage in sex and some of us think that abstention is a serious solution to the AIDS crisis. Do we really think that it is logical to expect that young people will resist sex when their whole world is drenched in the glorification of sex? We often hear the phrase "peer pressure'' used as a cause of young people experimenting in everything from sex to drugs to pack racing. But what about adult pressure? It is not young people's peers who create a sex-drenched world. It is highly paid advertising executives in New York and London and money mad models like Markey Mark. Their peers do not sing to young people of sex and sadism but highly earning stars from Madonna to Shabby Ranks do. It is doubtful that teenagers teach each other much about transvestites and sex changes but Oprah Winfrey and Phil Donahue parade out topics and people like that often, and always in the hushed and understanding tones of voice which add an air of mystery.

If the limits on parade before our young people are the extremes of sexual perversion, why do we wonder when they see nothing wrong with simple sex? The broadcast examples they see are so extreme that surely ordinary sex seems acceptable, even mundane. It certainly would not appear to be a major step or anything unusual or dangerous. That being the case, do we have a right to wonder why young people partake? They have been taught sex. They have been badgered by sex. Overwhelmed by sex. Shown sex. There is only one thing left to do.

But the fact is that sex today is dangerous. Statistics on venereal diseases and pregnancy indicate that young people are not taking care. They are told to abstain but their role models at home and abroad demonstrate that they do not abstain. To catch VD and to get pregnant they are engaging in unprotected sex.

Given the way the adult world functions and the prevalence of adultery and fornication in Bermuda, the fact that they engage in sex should not surprise us. Unprotected sex should alarm us because our young people can die of AIDS just as easily as anyone else and somehow they think they are not vulnerable.

That's the reality and it is not the fault of young people but of the adults who created the ways of the world they live in. Those adults produced a world obsessed by sex and now want to deprive young people of the safety they need to survive sex.