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Comment by chippy | Hacker News Reader

Where America has a huge hardcore pornography industry, common nudity on major motion pictures and award winning TV shows, nudists, hippy communes and sex cults in the country, Burning Man and San Francisco, it also has a strong protestant conservative prudishness. It's very confusing to a European.

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Europen conservative protestants are hanging around here as well, we just seem to try to avoid annoying everyone else with our choices ;-)

And, BTW, that title should be no problem to most of us IMO.

The American sexual liberation movement started in the 1960's, and centered on the west coast/San Francisco specifically.

Before that America was literally founded (in the north at least) by religious conservatives who were too prudish for Europe. In fact the early US Quaker movement banned sex all together.

You're probably thinking of the Shakers, compared to other non-conformist sects, the Quakers had relatively few hangups about sex.

That being said, I can attest to at least the Shaker melody (well known from Copland's "Appalachian Spring") as a touchstone of American culture. It's pretty good.

Shaker, not Quaker

Also Puritans.

Puritans were actually very pro-sex (within marriage), which was a marked contrast to the pro-celibacy views of Roman Catholicism, and opposite the view of the Shakers.

See, for example, http://www.challies.com/quotes/the-puritans-and-sex which quotes quite a few Puritan writings.

Roman Catholics are pro-celibacy? You mean the priests?

yes, sort of -- I mean that Roman Catholicism includes pro-celibacy views, particularly regarding priests (to go along with pro-marital-sex views; it's not single-sided.)

The point was to show the contrast -- the Puritans were only pro-celibacy for the unmarried, which they viewed as a temporary state; they had a pretty one-sided "everyone should get married and have lots of sex" view. They themselves considered this to be in opposition to RC views. (And, in particular, comments about the Puritans being anti-sex are way off base.)

I thought RCs had the same view?

Also - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUspLVStPbk :-)

It's very frustrating to someone who lives here. Folks often go to great lengths to maintain a "holier than thou" appearance yet enjoy the same vices they condemn.

It's more fun that way.

Murica's a big country with many diverse regions and cultures

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