Re: Even the supposedly "Progressive" corporations are a bunch of Puritans in the USA
I think that one can be easily traced back to the first settlers to America
Jeez, what did they ever do to you? Did you find a clovis point in your soup or something?
Maybe you're thinking of the first European settlers in what's now the US, but the Vikings weren't noted for their sexual repression. Nor were the Spanish, particularly.
The Puritans were latecomers. They mostly started arriving around 1630, some 65 years after the Spanish established St Augustine and Española.
The Puritans also weren't anti-sex. They may have demanded a certain level of public modesty (which, sure, I think was unnecessary, but in the greater scheme of things was pretty minor); but they liked their sexual congress within their framework of mores. We have plenty of evidence of that in their journals and poetry and other writings; see for example Hughes, "Meat Out of the Eater: Panic and Desire in American Puritan Poetry".
Public repression of sexual content in the US is motivated by a combination of acculturated neuroses with a long and complex history (not just "it was the damn Puritans") and a cynical calculus of sociopolitical control. While some of the anti-porn zealots (e.g. Dworkin and MacKinnon) are or were, I believe, genuinely motivated by a belief in an inherent social danger,1 most of them are of the other variety, loudly condemning in public what they fetishize in private. It's useful in US politics because enough of the polis supports it, and they're encouraged to continue supporting it because it's useful.
Like any industrial democracy, the US has a long history of using one form of social difference to distract from other categories, and thus discourage the formation of alliances against the group in power. In the late 19th century US politicians and other influential people did a great job of burying class differences behind race and ethnicity; that's why class politics are nearly absent in the US (unlike in, say, the UK), while race remains a raw wound.
(Ethnicity has largely been defused by the "becoming white" social-mobility mechanism, which proved too hard to stem because of the demand for skilled labor, and by the growth of mass media, which expanded people's social circles and so interfered with their ability to easily classify and stereotype people based on ethnicity. Race is tied to a simpler and more-apparent set of bodily markers and so is easier to trigger.)
In other words, complex problems are complex.
1I saw Dworkin at Miami University in the early '90s. I was not persuaded of her thesis, but she certainly seemed sincere.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
