God bless America and all who fornicate in her
America may be a conservative place in many respects – but in fact we owe our modern sense of sexual freedom to great American pioneers, from Alfred Kinsey to Annie Sprinkle…
Anne Sexton, 27 Jan 2009
All hail Barack Obama, Commander-in-Chief, and the hottest politician since JFK. Thank God the Bush era is ended and hopefully now we can all get back to loving America and Americans again.
America is a strange place, because America isn’t a country – it’s a concept. The United States is a motley collection of states, laws, people and beliefs that are staggering in their diversity. While the last eight years has seen the primacy of some of the worst excesses of dark side of the USA – warmongering, rampant consumerism and insular foreign policy – America has always been a place where dissent has flourished.
While some Americans preach abstinence, believe in the Rapture and their God-giving right to hunt moose, American scientists, social commentators, researchers, feminists, academics, journalists, and even the pornographers haven’t so much transformed as created the modern world.
We can thank Yankee ingenuity and the American can-do attitude for the modern sexually liberal society. Although a number of factors influenced the sexual revolution it would never have happened with two important things – the birth control pill and counter-culture movements including the late 20th Century resurgence of feminism. Yessiree: an American invention and a largely American social movement respectively.
Men have always enjoyed a certain amount of sexual freedom, while women’s sexuality was long curtailed by religion, social convention and the fear of pregnancy. The sexual revolution changed all that. There are thousands of people who influenced the shifting sexual landscape, but since I am a woman I’d like to use this issue to thank some of those Americans whose contributions made it possible for women to have the kind of interesting and varied sex lives we tend to take for granted nowadays.
Alfred Kinsey (1894 – 1956)
Alfred Kinsey was on track for a career as one of America’s most prominent young scientists, but all that changed when he began teaching a marriage course at Indiana University in 1938. Kinsey, dismayed with the widespread ignorance of sexual matters, began collecting case histories of sexual behaviour. The result of this research, the Kinsey Reports – Sexual Behavior In The Human Male in 1948 and Sexual Behavior In The Human Female published in 1953 – caused widespread shock and outrage. Both, however, were bestsellers.
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