"I'm curious where the "US" part comes into what you've posted?" Europeans tend to think that the effots of the religious right in the US to make sex into a political issue over the last many decades (most aggressively since perhaps the mid 1970s) is very strange. They tend not to see it as the development of "magnet issues" by demagogues to get the population stirred up, and distract them from more important socioecoinomic issues, but rather as a sort of hysteria inherent in the American character. I guess I see it as a sort of hysteria in any event, whether it is really grass-roots, or whether the nation has been manipulated successfully in the cuture wars. People over here certainly don't want paedophia, or rape, or VD, but they don't by and large get hysterical about sex or try to blame complex social problems on sexual immorality. I am not saying that there are not individuals, and perhaps some communities and churches that get hysterical, but in general people's minds are not fixated on such things and they find the situation in the US bewildering. "My god, in the US you can't even change your clothes on a public beach!!" "You can't kiss babies anymore." True or not is not the point, that is the impression that is being left with travelers etc. and where there is smoke there is fire. What is going on in the US is certainly different from what is going on in Europe and I think Canada. They tell me that the age of consent, with some reasonable qualifications, is 14 in Catholic Italy, 15 in Orthodox Greece, and 13! in Spain, 16 Switzerland, and Germany etc. Look at this chart, and the US states are at the bottom. No state are down to 15 or 13! http://www.ageofconsent.com/ageofconsent.htm I am an American and would have been uncomfortable with the low ages of consent before I started living in Europe. But what I see are tight families and well-raised generally mature children. People I talk with feel that they can trust their offspring to make mature decisions at those ages, and I can see why they feel that way. Believe me, their advertising and TV shows etc are every bit as sleazy as ours (many of them are ours), so the kids are by no means protected from knowing about sex!! Of course Muslim countries tend to be concerned about sex and nudity. I am not sure what is going on in Latin America or Africa or Asia. So I am thinking in terms of the US relative to the other Western industrialized countries.