FREE NOT TO LOVE

This is Anne Emery of Going Steady and Sweet Sixteen, pursuing the sexual revolution to a quick dead end and coming up with the same old answers. It's not that Dori's problem isn't timeless enough; while her boyfriend Lenny seems to get all he needs and wants from sex, Doff feels she's missing something and longs for companionship and commitment. Emery hardly has time to describe the problem before she resolves it neatly by making Lennie a shallow cad, worse a guitar playing one who hopes for a show business career and doesn't want to get tied down with a baby (at 17 this seems reasonable to us). Then she sends Dori off to her parents' island summer house to ponder sister Barbara's advice that sex without ""love for keeps"" is bad news -- ""It's the whole mystery of life. . . . What everyone is really looking for is a lasting relationship with someone to love. And if sex keeps that relationship from flowering, then sex has been a mistake. And you always pay for a mistake."" Sure enough Dori meets a nice boy (he likes babies and bagpipes), takes to heart the horrible example of Sharon, who's been left pregnant on the island's commune without a ""commitment"" from her wandering lover, and decides to give up sex for college. It's exactly like Mama always told us, only even she was more subtle about it. And if a teenage girl needs to know more about sex and love than the one word answer -- marriage -- Emery will be the last to tell them.