Free Year Zero by Ian Buruma

considerably during the German occupation, and rose further immediately after the war. The press published scare stories about more than 10,000 women who were supposedly infected with diseases without even realizing it. There were similar scares in France.
    In southern Italy, the moral panic, equating the danger of VD with national humiliation, found a typically histrionic expression in a famous book by Curzio Malaparte titled
The Skin
. Malaparte was a fabulist, something he never denied, and was more than a little bit sympathetic to the fascists, but he had a gift for expressing a popular mood, even if details were made up for effect. The Allied invasion is compared in his book to a plague, in which “the limbs remained seemingly intact,” but “the soul festered and rotted.” During the German occupation, Malaparte explains, “only prostitutes” had relations with the occupiers. But now, under the Americans and British, “as a result of this loathsome plague, which first corrupted the feminine sense of honor and dignity,” shame has infected every Italian home. Why? Because such was “the baneful power of the contagion that self-prostitution had become a praiseworthy act, almost a proof of patriotism, and all, men and women, far from blushing at the thought of it, seemed to glory in their own and the universal degradation.” 62
    This was probably an exaggeration. But many people, apart from the author, may have felt it that way. Sleeping with the foreign soldier was the same as prostitution. If it was voluntary, so much the worse.
    GIs in France were shown a documentary film titled
Good Girls Have VD Too
. One of the humiliations suffered by women in occupied cities, in Amsterdam no less than in Tokyo, was to be regularly rounded up at random for VD checks. No doubt the scarcity of medical facilities in the postwar chaos, the bad hygienic conditions, and the relative inexperience of many young men and women, often raised in socially conservative or puritanical societies, compounded the medical problems. But Malaparte, in his overwrought manner, put his finger on the sorest spot: women, for a variety of reasons, were doing as they liked.
    Not everyone disapproved. Some progressively minded people, such as the Dutch gynecologist and sexual reformer Wim Storm, saw merit in fraternization: a breakthrough for female emancipation and a welcome end to such outdated notions as male privilege and wives’ submission to their husbands. Women seeking happiness in the “khaki arms” of Canadians, “getting to know a new language, the jitterbug, and love,” well, “all these women know exactly what they want.” To claim that they are prostituting themselves for a bar of chocolate or a few cigarettes “is a terrible insult.” 63 The best solution to the VD problem was to hand out more condoms to women and promote sex education among the young.
    But the likes of Storm were a minority, and they would lose the argument, at least for the time being. The voices for moral regeneration, for rebuilding society on a traditional moral basis, were stronger in an atmosphere of moral panic. This was true in the Netherlands, where even a liberal newspaper such as
Het Parool
, founded by the anti-Nazi resistance, fired an editor for printing an article in favor of handing out contraceptives to women: “We see it as our duty to educate our nation’s people towards higher moral norms . . . and resist all forms of dissipation.” 64 It was true also in France, where the provisional government under General de Gaulle was deeply worried that wartime occupation and liberation had undermined public morals, posing a fatal threat to “the French race.” 65 Laws against abortion and adultery in liberated France were as strict as they had been under the Vichy regime, in some cases even stricter.
    The puritanical reaction to what was regarded as moral dissolution