My name is Kate. I am American (a Midwestern farmer’s grand-daughter), born in Holland, Michigan, and christened with a very Dutch name – Katje, pronounced ‘Kat ya’. I was always Kate, until married and with three children in tow, I moved to the Netherlands, and there, I became ‘Katje’. I have spent the last ten out of twelve years in Europe, one mile from the city of Amsterdam, the capital of free expression.

I learned two eye-opening lessons from living abroad. The first is that the manner in which most Americans view the subject of sex and relationships is miles and miles away from how Europeans think about sex and relationships. We lived among Europeans during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and throughout the hearings, all we could hear from all around was the clucking of euro-tongues, and an occasional summation: “My

goodness, you Americans like to make a big deal out of sex.” In Europe, if the head of state can’t handle a wife and a mistress, well, then he is simply not the multi-tasker he should be and might be considered too inept to handle both foreign and domestic affairs.

The fact that Americans think you can tell horny teenagers to abstain, and they will, is the subject of much mockery across the world, “It’s like asking the rain now to rain,” a Dutchman once commented.

Chris Ayres, of the London Times, was assessing the success of America’s abstinence campaign aimed at teenagers. He was pointing out that the Netherlands has approximately 1/7^th the incidence of teenage pregnancies that America has. Said Mr. Ayres, “That’s not, as some liberals like to claim, because the Netherlands has permissive sex education. It’s more likely because sex education is straightforward and uncontroversial: boys and girls learn how to locate the clit in the same class as they learn how to repair a flat bicycle tyre.” I laughed when I read that and saved the article, because I raised my children in Holland. It’s true.

As much as I would like to see America reduce its teenager birth rate and increase its knowledge and comfort level with sex, I’m not about to take on the religious right. So I move on to the second lesson I learned in Europe, which is something I might be able to fix.

The second lesson I learned has to do with American women not being nearly as desirable as they think they are. You maybe did not know this, but American women are not a foreigner’s first choice when it comes to the bride selection process. Not first choice, not second choice, not even fifth.

Once at a dinner table with a dozen or so ex-pats from various European countries, men who had traveled extensively across the world and had plenty of experience with both American and European women, I asked if they could rank in order their choices for wives from a given set of ten countries.

They eagerly embraced the topic and there were many colorful stories, but the results of the survey were that America women came in last, Granted, they may have stacked the deck just to get my goat, but I heard this same theme over and over enough while I lived and worked and traveled in Europe, that I do not base my observations on this one and only conversation.

It seems that Italy, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark and Spain are all countries that have the knack for producing great wives. But that wasn’t the point; the point was that none of the men I queried during that decade in Europe would advise their sons to take an American wife. I am all about fixing this sad condition. American women should be coveted prizes, and certainly don’t deserve to have a worldwide reputation of being testosterone machines with breasts. I believe I can save American women from themselves. No one else is dealing with the issue, so I have taken up the mission to correct both the notion and the fact.

While I was in Europe experiencing a real open attitude towards sex for the first time in my life, back in America, sex was going mainstream. TV has almost no programming without it, little girls are getting sexed up to go to Glamour Shots, and teenagers wouldn’t dream of ‘doing it’ in a car; they get a hotel room for the night of the prom.

Unfortunately, sex being mainstream does not automatically equate to the masses being sexually fulfilled. I will be examining and discussing these and other relationship issues, along with other sexperts who will be joining me on my website www.katjevandijk.com.