America’s Sexual Exceptionalism

Get audio access with any FP subscription. America Retold: 250 years of the United States and the world. Read more from the series. Welcome to FP Free Week. To celebrate America’s 250th birthday, our entire site is completely unlocked this week only. Enjoy the article. “This most Delightful Country to Possess, / And forward with Industrious speed we press / Upon the Virgin Stream who had as yet, / Never been Violated with a Ship.”—Roger Wolcott, Esq., 1725 Sex, in U.S. culture, is often framed as a private matter, insulated from the public sphere, and certainly from international politics. Yet since before the founding of the United States, sex has been a part of the country’s foreign policy. Americans developed a deep belief in their own sexual exceptionalism. And they sought to spread it throughout the world, using—as it were—both hard and soft power. “This most Delightful Country to Possess, / And forward with Industrious speed we press / Upon the Virgin Stream who had as yet, / Never been Violated with a Ship.”—Roger Wolcott, Esq., 1725 Sex, in U.S. culture, is often framed as a private matter, insulated from the public sphere, and certainly from international politics. Yet since before the founding of the United States, sex has been a part of the country’s foreign policy. Americans developed a deep belief in their own sexual exceptionalism. And they sought to spread it throughout the world, using—as it were—both hard and soft power. From settlers’ early efforts to promote more seemingly “Christian” family arrangements among Native Americans to anti-prostitution efforts around U.S. military bases, the United States has long attempted to police the practice of sex beyond its borders. One result is that today’s global regulatory regime is highly focused on prohibiting prostitution—at the expense of more humane and effective polices. A 19th-century representation of Pocahontas being converted to Christianity before her marriage to Englishman John Rolfe. The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images As Europeans arrived in North America in the 16th and 17th centuries, they focused on sexual behavior to articulate their differences with Indigenous peoples and decide who was civilized and who wasn’t. As the poem above—written by a man who later become governor of the colony of Connecticut—indicates, European colonizers often conceived of their mission in sexual terms. And just as they saw the land as ripe for the taking, so were the Indigenous women who inhabited it. Colonists understood Native Americans as naturally licentious because of many tribes’ apparent comfort with nudity and sex outside of monogamous marriage. This conception of native hypersexuality shaped formal United States Indian policy from the American Revolution onward. As part of the assimilationist policies of the 1880s, for example, Office of Indian Affairs agents targeted women for having sex outside of marriage, cohabitating with lovers, and becoming plural wives, all as a means of supposedly civilizing them. These weren’t minor matters; prohibiting these activities would upend Native societies. Nevertheless, government agents insisted that sex was a separate—and highly important—category of conduct and were obsessed with reforming it. Americans continued to focus on sex when they took U.S. empire overseas. When U.S. soldiers arrived in the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, debates about prostitution followed. Much like Native Americans, U.S. officials saw Filipinas as both alluring “dusky Venuses” and dangerous vectors of venereal disease, who could infect soldiers and, eventually, those soldiers’ wives and children at home. At the same time, officials believed the thousands of troops stationed in the sultry tropics required sex. So, like European imperialists, the United States started licensing brothels and requiring the women working there to submit to weekly venereal disease exams. U.S. leaders believed this policy would make sex safe for soldiers, even as they showed distinctly less concern for the women who remained at risk of infection. As the Trump administration pledges to meet global health targets, it has terminated some of its best tools for doing so. Julia Ioffe’s new feminist history of Russia offers important lessons for the West. But what happens in Manila doesn’t always stay in Manila. Social reformers on the U.S. mainland had long criticized the European approach to prostitution and argued that it was incompatible with the superior sexual morality of the United States. When they traveled to the Philippines and discovered brothels draped with U.S. flags, run by U.S. officers, and full of U.S. troops, they hit the roof. Newspapers around the country decried the arrangement as “un-American.” In response, the Senate convened hearings and in 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt demanded that the military actively “diminish the vice” of prostitution in U.S. colonies. “It is criminal folly to believe

America’s Sexual Exceptionalism

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