250 Years USA: The Horny States of America?

You don't have to like America to be grateful for it. This is one of those uncomfortable truths that is particularly evident in the realm of sexuality. Yet hardly any other country has liberated and emancipated the Western world in matters of Eros as much as the United States. 250 years after the Declaration of Independence, it is time for a sober assessment – and it turns out surprisingly positive.

The Biologist and the Sheep

It all began with an entomologist from Indiana who had primarily studied gall wasps. In 1948, Alfred C. Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, shaking puritanical America to its core. Kinsey and his colleagues interviewed over 5,300 men, with up to 521 questions per person. The result was as scandalous as it was illuminating: 37 percent of the interviewed men had experienced at least one orgasm with another man by the age of 45. Homosexuality was thus not a fringe phenomenon, not a vice of a few confused individuals. It was part of the human spectrum.

Kinsey's real bombshell, however, was the Kinsey Scale: a continuum from 0 (exclusively heterosexual) to 6 (exclusively homosexual). Seven levels that challenged the black-and-white thinking of an entire civilization. The core thesis was: “Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats.” Today, this sounds like a matter of course. In 1948, it was a revolution. Within two months, over 200,000 Americans bought the book, which was simultaneously on bestseller lists and under fire from church critics. Five years later, the second report on female sexual behavior followed. What it revealed was hardly less provocative for the time: women masturbate. Women have orgasms. Women desire. America had to come to terms with these self-evident truths in 1953.

In the Laboratory of Pleasure

Where Kinsey had interviewed, William Masters and Virginia Johnson observed. Their 1966 book Human Sexual Response was based on direct observation of almost 700 subjects in a laboratory, under scientific conditions. The study identified four phases of sexual arousal and demonstrated that women can experience multiple orgasms and that libido persists into old age. Above all, the duo shattered a myth of psychoanalysis: they disproved Freud's theory of the "mature" vaginal orgasm versus the "immature" clitoral orgasm and showed that clitoral stimulation is the decisive factor. This was a direct medical assault on a century of male interpretive dominance over female sexuality. This book also became a bestseller.

Seven years later, science took the next big step: in 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its diagnostic manual – no longer a disorder, but a variant of human sexuality. Morality had lost. Empiricism had won.

Sex and Police and Politics

Parallel to science, the courts fought. In 1965, the Supreme Court ruled in Griswold v. Connecticut that married couples could not be denied access to contraceptives. Seven years later, in Eisenstadt v. Baird, the same applied to unmarried individuals. The birth control pill had already been approved in 1960; the right to use it with impunity had to be fought for.

Then came the night that changed everything: In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn, a bar in Greenwich Village – one of many raids, but this time the last one that was accepted without resistance. Gays, lesbians, trans persons, and drag queens fought back. For six days. Exactly one year later, on June 28, 1970, several thousand people marched through the streets of New York. This was the first Christopher Street Liberation Day, precursor to all Pride parades worldwide. America had not only initially denied freedom, but it had also given birth to the movement that enforced this freedom.

Yet even in 1998 – one has to read this year twice – two men in Texas could be arrested and convicted in their own home for having consensual sex. The "Homosexual Conduct" law criminalized oral and anal sex between same-sex individuals. In 2003, the Supreme Court, in Lawrence v. Texas, with a six-to-three vote, overturned all remaining sodomy laws in the USA. Justice Anthony Kennedy stated: "The liberty protected by the Constitution allows homosexual persons the right to enter into relationships in the confines of their homes and still retain their dignity as free persons." Twelve years later, the same court declared same-sex marriage a fundamental right in Obergefell v. Hodges. Nationwide.

We took the liberty of writing "Equality" on Lady Liberty's tablet – whom we call Lady Magic – The Declaration of Independence in one word!

Fucking on the Assembly Line - Industrial-Scale

And then there's the other side of America: the one no one officially mentions, but everyone knows. Hollywood produces blockbusters – Los Angeles also produces "the other thing." The American porn industry is the world's largest market in this area. The USA accounts for an estimated 25 to 30 percent of global revenue, which amounts to approximately 97 billion dollars annually. The US share alone – around 15 billion dollars. America, which still had states in 2003 where consensual anal sex was punishable, is simultaneously the dominant engine of a global sex industry. No nation has industrialized, distributed, and monetized human sexuality so intensely.

This is not a contradiction. This is America, the country that views prudery and libertinism not as opposites, but as two sides of the same obsessive relationship with sexuality.

The Paradox as Program

What remains from 250 years? Kinsey proved that sexual diversity is normal. Masters & Johnson proved that female pleasure is real and measurable. The courts proved that dignity and privacy are stronger than majority morality. And industry proved that desire supports an economy larger than the global music market.

America is bigoted. It banned enlightenment and globalized pornography. It arrested queer people and ultimately granted them the fundamental right to marriage. It pathologized, criminalized, demonized sexuality – and then sent Kinsey, Masters & Johnson, and the Supreme Court to repair the damage.

Sexual freedom, as we know it today, did not emerge despite America. It also emerged through America. In that sense, it's not a contradiction. This is USA! No, it is its people.

Kinky regards!

Thymos Emm

*(* "We don't try to shock anyone – that only creates distance. We want intimacy." Journalist, author 'The Dominus Effect', kinkster, scene-goer. Committed to the kinky world of Munich and beyond. Loving sadist: 'Come on, give me a smile!')