At about 10:00pm a magical thing happens in Europe: about a quarter of television channels switch over to softcore porn.

It doesn’t come as a surprise to the natives.  TV ads throughout the day regularly include topless women, posters on buses and in subways will sometimes feature a bare breast or two, unwrapped and easily accessible hardcore and softcore sex (both hetero- and homosexual) magazines are available in bookshops and on newsstands from the Rhine to the English Channel.

Now imagine if that were the case in America.  Imagine an America in which any adult was able to peruse through a sexually-explicit magazine while sipping a coffee with no need or desire to hide it from the view of others. Can’t imagine it?  Don’t want to imagine it?  Ever thought about why we, as Americans, are so ashamed of sex?

There are lots of books and articles that deconstruct and analyze European and American sex culture.  I’m not even going to begin doing that.  I think it is safe enough to say that Europeans are much more open about sex than Americans and aren’t afraid to talk about it, market it, and make money off of it.

Facebook’s Nipple Ban and the Porn Bailout

I came back from a whirlwind tour of Western Europe last week to news that the American pornography industry was seeking a $5 billion government bailout.  What’s more, the industry doesn’t even need it—yet.  Today, BusinessWeek reported on the “bailout”–or is the term “bridge loan” more politically-correct these days?

It won’t be in the news much longer, except as material for the likes of Jay Leno or Stephen Colbert, because it will never happen.  Don’t get me wrong: I’m not advocating that I would like to shell out money to either Hustler’s Larry Flynt or Girls Gone Wild’s Joe Francis, who, by the way, are about the most repugnant and grotesque poster boys for the industry that could have ever been found.  Couldn’t they at least get someone likeable like Hugh Heffner?

I also came back to a self-described “lactivist” sister-in-law who was outraged (and rightly so) that Facebook had deemed nipples offensive.

Aside from the porn bailout and Facebook’s Nipplegate, I came back to the United States with a refreshed realization about the extent to which the religious right and their delegates in our political system demonize, outlaw, and stigmatize the human body and sex.  I’m advocating a different type of bailout for this industry: the cultural and political acceptance celebration of sex.

The Embrace

Europe has embraced sex in a way that America never has: openly and without judgment.

While walking around Paris you may find yourself peering into the window of what appears to be a candy shop, but is, in reality, a lingerie and sex toy shop.  You’d think it’s a candy shop because it’s right next to a restaurant or fashionable boutique. You can find condoms just about everywhere, including underground subways—and not even the ones in the red light district.

And the red light districts of Amsterdam and Paris draw thousands of tourists and patrons a year—many of whom are Americans, like me and my friends, who are eager to glimpse inside a world that is so foreign to our Puritanical sensibilities that the word “sex” alone makes us blush. 

Yet, for all the hype that sex gets in Europe, The Guttmacher Institute’s data would suggest that Americans are the most sexually active.  For every 1,000 women between 15 and 19 years of age, France sees about 10 live births and about 10 abortions, compared to 55 live births and about 30 abortions in America.  And the rate of STD/STI/HIV transmission is a fraction of what it is in the United States. 

Observers in the United States cannot help noticing the contrast between France’s approach to issues related to teen sexual activity and those that prevail in this country. “Sexually explicit campaigns, like the one in France, arouse little concern among western Europeans,” says Barbara Huberman, director of sexuality education at Advocates for Youth, a U.S.-based organization that has conducted tours of France, Germany and the Netherlands to study the countries’ different approaches to sexual health issues. In France, she says, the government’s response to teenage pregnancy and abortion centers on consistent sexuality education, improved access to contraception and widespread public-education campaigns in support of contraceptive use. In the United States, she argues, policymakers try on the one hand to address high abortion rates by making abortion harder to get and, on the other, to address teen pregnancy by promoting abstinence.

“The gap between our countries’ approaches to teen sexual behavior is reflected in a wide gap in our teen pregnancy and abortion rates. It is unfortunate that in the United States, we lag so far behind,” says Jacqueline E. Darroch, vice president for research at The Alan Guttmacher Institute, who has studied adolescent pregnancy and STD rates in developed countries. “The United States is in a category with Belarus, Bulgaria, Romania and the Russian Federation, countries having among the highest teen pregnancy rates in the world. We don’t even come close to what’s been achieved in France.”  See: http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/tgr/03/3/gr030303.html.

Part of accepting sex is being able to talk about it and that means age-appropriate, comprehensive sex education and the availability of resources to the sexually active.

Once we educate people (youth especially) about safe sex and stop pretending that abstinence-focused sex education is helpful or beneficial for anyone (except the peace of mind of parents and clergy) we will be on the road to a much more open and sexually-liberated America.

Sex Sells (If We Allow It To)

See, what the adult entertainment industry in America needs isn’t a bailout, it’s exposure.  It needs an accessible marketplace and America is much too prudish to have one.  For instance, The Family Research Council, lobbies intensely against any type of freedom of speech that leans in the direction of nudity or pornography—including successfully getting Abercrombie and Fitch to discontinue their catalogue a few years ago, which often included artistically-photographed scantily dressed (though no nudity) men and women.  I’m still upset about it.  I’m more upset by the fact that the Family Research Council is a multi-million dollar organization supported by hundreds of thousands of members that aims to have an abstinence-only education system, pornography and abortion criminalized and prosecuted, and no rights or measures of protection for gays, lesbians, or transgender citizens, among a long list of other goals.  And, like all lobbying groups, the FRC gives generous cash “donation” to politicians that do their bidding.

The moral of the story?  The United States government will not give $5 billion to an industry that it has, historically, tried to legislate into extinction anyway. It’d rather give our money to GM, who can’t remain viable even though it spends millions of dollars a year convincing us that we need their cars.  If anything, GM should take a tip from the adult entertainment industry which has received the exact reverse treatment by the American Federal Government and which, instead of getting unionized, getting subsidized, and getting tons of tax breaks, has managed to weather legislative onslaught, regulatory nightmares, and a marketplace riddled by piracy and amateurs.  Want to know why, in spite of it all, the American porn industry is doing better than the American auto industry? They give people what they want.

But don’t let the government know.  Ignorance is bliss.

The Last Word

And if I’m wrong, and the government does give the adult entertainment industry the $5 billion that it’s looking for, I expect some nice DVDs along with my stimulus check.

What do you think?  Is America sexually-liberated?  Too much or not enough?