America, along with most other "civilized" nations of the world, has a long, rich and bountiful history of turning people off sexually. Indeed, our earliest ancestors, when not stealing land from brown people, busied themselves discouraging boners and encouraging chronic vaginal dryness. Though there has been a large attempt to revise the very real American history of sexual hesitancy, the documents of the puritans speak for themselves. Jason Dikes, Adjunct Associate Professor of History at Austin Community College, maps this out beautifully in Massachusetts Sex Ways, "Their (the puritans) criminal codes made adultery a capital crime, and at least three people were actually hanged for it in the Puritan colonies." Remember that the next time some Christian apologist tries to lecture you on how much more civilized and polite than puritans were than modern folk. "When cases of adultery occurred, it was not uncommon for entire communities to band together and punish the transgressors. In the town of Ipswich, Massachusetts, for example, a married woman named Sarah Roe had an affair with a neighbor named Joseph Leigh while her mariner-husband was away at sea...no fewer than thirty-five Ipswich neighbors went to court against them and gave testimony that communicated a deep sense of moral outrage...the erring couple were found guilty of “unlawful familiarity” and severely punished. Joseph Leigh was ordered to be heavily whipped and fined five pounds, and Sarah Roe was sent to the House of Correction for a month, with orders that she was to appear in Ipswich meetinghouse on lecture day bearing a sign, “For My baudish Carriage,” written in “fair capital letters.” In this case as in so many others, the moral code of Puritan Massachusetts was not imposed by a small elite upon an unwilling people; it rose from customs and beliefs that were broadly shared throughout the Puritan colonies." Yet again, we see this idea of a few bad apple spoiling the whole bunch being incorrect and misleading. Religion's hatred of sexual experimentation seems a whole lot less threatening when it is just a few spoil sports, but that is rarely ever the case. What happens far more often is that the vast majority of society goes on a rabid hunt for sexual purity every time it feels the need to do so. Such is the case with today's witch hunters, whether it be the ones in Texas who are currently investigating the parents of transgender children, or the ones in California currently jailing women for being on drugs while pregnant. This is all an expression of America's deep discomfort with all that is sexual. Even today, the common stereotype of those who view pornographic images or who express themselves sexually is that they are somehow less moral than those who do not. Of course no one takes the time to explore these topics further, but simply adopts the popular puritanical opinion on the matter. The problem is that mounting evidence is disproving that are any real ills associated with pornography in particular. Conservatives have claimed that pornography decreases a man interest in family life, for example, but several studies have shown that to be a lie. Pornography has been demonstrated to actually make men more intimate with their partners and seems to make family life more desirable for men as well. Sex crimes also decrease when porn is made readily available. This has been attributed to a kind of cooling effect that porn has on human desire, causing one to experience the pleasure of a specific taboo act without actually having to engage in it. Rape and pedophilia have seen dramatic drops in frequency since the 1970s, for example. As you know, the sexual revolution occurred in the sixties. The takeaway here is not that porn cures everything, but that it seems to make sexual desire less of a problem, and more of a personality trait. But your noisy pastors will never accept this because it is contrary to their religious upbringing.