Americans Are Weird About Sex
The Spirit of Puritanism Haunts Its Libido
I was talking to a girl born and raised in Italy who was briefly vacationing in America. She talked about what relationships tend to look like in Italy.
“You wake up. You have sex. You go to the beach. You have sex. You come home and shower together. You have sex. You take a nap. You have sex. You go out to dinner. You have sex. Repeat.”
Italy has a more sexual culture than America. You’d be hard-pressed to find a couple who has that kind of a sex life here. Yet, for some reason, America doesn’t have the reputation for being an unsexual country.
As I mention in The Myth of a Hypersexualized Culture, people tend to believe the exact opposite about America. Buying power dildos at CVS and gooning to Pornhub all day doesn’t mean you’re a sexual person — it means you’re alone. The average American is touch-starved. 1 in 5 young Americans haven’t fucked in over a year (IFS 2021).
If you hear about couples fucking like rabbits in America then it’s normally just the “honeymoon phase”, a blip of passion before the minutiae of everyday life, fueled by the Puritan grind, extinguishes their fire.
Puritanism Poisoned America’s Soil
Americans are weird about sex because they still see sex as taboo. America was founded by Puritans who emphasized strict sexual morality. They saw sex as a means to an end for procreation
Italy is rooted in Catholicism, which emphasizes that husbands and wives have a duty to fuck each other.
"The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife.” - 1 Corinthians 7:3-4
Contrast this with the Puritans, where sex isn’t supposed to be a fun time.
John Calvin, whose ideas Puritanism was built on, wrote in Institutes of the Christian Religion that marital sex was permissible but should be “free from all immoderate affection.”
William Perkins, a Puritan theologian, wrote that sex was for “mutual help” and “procreation,” but warning against “excessive delight” as a distraction from piety.
Cotton Mather, a Puritan clergyman, praised couples who kept their affections “chaste” and “temperate,” implying that too much passion—even in marriage—was a moral failing.
Massachusetts Bay Colony records from the 1640s-50s show couples fined or whipped for “uncleanness” or “lascivious carriage” if their sex within marriage was too public or playful.
Puritans might have been hard workers and great at procreating for the sake of it, but they were fucking boring.
