For those of you who haven't read it, I highly recommend the blog Ellen linked up in the naughty bits post below. Firstly, it's a damned entertaining look at life behind the counter of a porn video store. Secondly, there are no pictures. In a funny sort of way it reminds me a lot of the kinds of stories my parents used to tell when they ran a liquor store years and years ago.

When it comes to sex, the United States is one messed up country. Personally, I blame the British. No, really, think about it. For about a hundred years the US was Britain’s dumping ground for people too pigheaded, weird, dangerous, fanatical, or crooked to be left on their doorstep. With the Enlightenment giving both the continent and Britain a bit of a conscience, it ended up being a lot easier to stick all these folks on boats rather than hang them from trees or burn them. Much less mess, and sometimes they actually would end up paying taxes.

Oh, some of them would promptly hop boats back, but the ones who were dumb enough to do this were usually dumb enough to head right back to their old villages. Once the constable found you out (and they always found you out... even London was a smallish city in pre-industrial times) it was a quick trip to the gibbet for you.

Now, the first puritans are actually well known for thinking sex was just fine, as long as you were either married (to each other) or unmarried. They did have big, hairy problems with it if it was your neighbor's husband you were playing ride-the-pony with out in the woods, and usually the penalties were pretty darned unpleasant. But overall, sex was seen as just another natural part of being a human. And of course you couldn't have kids if you didn't have sex, and in pre-industrial societies procreation was felt to be an almost sacred duty.

But something really weird happened on the way to the brothel, and this one I can't pin on anyone but ourselves. As late as the 1860s the bawdy business of sex rollicked along in America. Big cities, D.C. and New York especially, had entire city blocks given over to “houses of entertainment”. Every wide spot in the road had "special ladies" that were available for discreet and not-so-discreet encounters. Oh, sure, there were temperance unions and reform leagues and revival crusades, but those were mostly dried up raisin people too bitter about the world to really enjoy it.

The Civil War changed all that. It's really hard to understand from this distance in history, but the Civil War represented not only a physical trauma, but a mental, spiritual, and emotional wrenching beyond experience before or since. September 11th was an event which brought the country together. Imagine an event with that much emotional intensity tearing the country apart. Now imagine events like that happening with that much intensity again and again and again for four and a half years.

When it was all finally over pretty much everything was turned upside down and inside out. Permissiveness, tolerance, and the old "wink-wink, nudge-nudge" attitude were seen as casus belli to the event, and so suddenly the dried up raisin people started to get listened to. America went through a tremendous moral retrenchment, and the whole country was swept end to end with a fervor that represented the beginning of fundamentalism as we know it today.

And so the brothels started to be outlawed and closed up. Morality police stalked the streets of the cities and the halls of government. Comstock got his act passed and suddenly even attempting birth control was illegal. In a way that would be strikingly paralleled eighty-five years later, people had had a bellyful of chaos, death, and destruction, the panicked fears and pitiless wastes of war, and they were quite willing to legislate calm and order if that's what it took.

It wasn't all bad. The people that took away the red light districts and briefly took away all the booze also gave us child labor laws, public education, and the idea that a prison was a penitentiary, a place to learn from your mistakes, instead of just a holding cell until you got turned loose or sent to the gallows.

But the Civil War cast a long, long shadow on the generation that lived through it. The few good things that the reformers came up with were probably more than outweighed by the systemic oppression they felt necessary to impose as part of their security blanket against the bloated corpses of the battlefields. Overt sexism, racism, and plain old upper-class snobbery on a scale that must be read to be believed held our country in thrall for the rest of the 19th and most of the early 20th century. At some points it was so stultifying to our intellectual climate that entire communities of expatriates sprang up in places like Paris and London.

And each time a generation would start to crawl out from under this onerous weight of reactionary self-protective custom, another war would manage to impose itself, and a whole new generation would want to keep the old ways because it was all they had left to remind them of a time when they didn’t know what happened to a horse, or a man, when they got shot in the stomach. It wasn't until war itself got so expensive that it was simply impossible to involve entire generations in it at once that we started to really become socially liberal again.

And yet we still live in the shadow of the moralists. To this day prostitution, the archetypical victimless crime, is illegal throughout most of the country. Pornography is caught in an Oruborous of desperation drawing desperate people to do desperate things and perpetuate a desperate image. Proper use of contraception is still not taught in most schools because too many people believe that teaching how to prevent pregnancy somehow promotes the attempt. We have a very long way to go.

But I think I'm still going to blame the British. Anyone that can come up with Benny Hill has to be guilty of something. ;)