Sex seems like a problematic topic for Americans.
On the one hand, this is the land of the puritans, a country beholden to a Bible belt, a place where breasts aren’t allowed on television (unless you’ve got good cable).
On the other hand, this is the place where 12-year-old girls wear short-shorts with “juicy” written on the fanny and where books written by porn stars are on national best-seller lists.
I’m curious about the sexual identity of Americans because on Tuesday I’ll be sitting my American Citizenship test, one of the final steps in officially becoming a U.S. national – the last being a swearing-in ceremony where I recite the Oath of Allegiance.
Now that I’m about to stew in the same melting pot with y’all, I wonder if the hyper-sexualized pornografication of one half of the American psyche is an over-reaction to the national culture’s other, more chaste, repressed, do-gooding half?
Are they even halves, for that matter? Or do the extra-naughty and the overly-nice only represent the extreme ends of the bell curve, and America is actually far more mainstream than I think?
And where do these extremes come from? Because I don’t think they exist in other free western nations in such distinct polarity.
Thoughts?