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Marketing Sexual Repression
How attitudes in the USA shape attitudes around the globe
The USA has for nearly a century been the entertainment supplier of choice to the world’s audiences. No one does schlock like Hollywood, whether it be on the large screen in a movie theater or on smaller screens in the living rooms of billions of people. Seven basic plots, three basic character-arcs, and with both incredible CGI and unlimited quantities of gratuitous violence, what’s not to love? As a result, few cultures have avoided being shaped by American entertainment and thus few cultures have escaped its insidious effects.
The USA has had a problem with human sexuality since nearly its very beginnings as a series of disparate tobacco-growing colonies in the early seventeenth century. The baleful influence of Judaic-Christian mythologies with their abhorrent neuroses regarding all the elements of human psychology that make life worth living (laughter, sexuality, the enjoyment of life in general) was constantly reinforced down the centuries with predictably unpleasant consequences. It was not merely the presence of Catholic missionaries and Protestant Puritans that led to the USA’s persistent inability to cope with ordinary human sexuality; it was also the near-constant influx of uneducated superstitious peasants from around the world who inevitably brought with them the…
