Culture in the United States
Novels, plays, films and songs that put sin, morality and censorship on stage.
All topics · 10
Sin and Shame in The Scarlet Letter: Hawthorne's Puritan Boston
Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter follows Hester Prynne, a married woman in 17th-century Puritan Boston who bears a child outside her marriage and is forced to wear a scarlet "A." Britannica calls it a classic moral study. Hawthorne drew on real colonial practice: Plymouth Colony courts ordered adulterers to wear the letters "AD."
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Adultery and Reputation in Arthur Miller's The Crucible
Arthur Miller's 1953 play The Crucible dramatizes the 1692 Salem witch trials, in which 19 people were hanged, as an allegory of McCarthy-era anti-communist hunts. Its plot turns on John Proctor's past affair with Abigail Williams: that hidden episode feeds her accusations and forces him to choose between confession and his good name.
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Easy A and the Scarlet Letter in American Teen Culture
Easy A, a 2010 comedy starring Emma Stone as high-school student Olive, borrows the plot device of The Scarlet Letter. A false rumor about Olive's sex life spreads through school, a self-appointed religious leader tries to shame her, and Olive takes ownership of her reputation, echoing Hester Prynne's scarlet "A" in a modern setting.
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How the Hays Code Kept Sex Outside Marriage Off the Screen
The Motion Picture Production Code, known as the Hays Code, was Hollywood's self-imposed rulebook from 1934 to 1968. Adopted partly in response to public outrage and the threat of government censorship, it barred depictions of promiscuity, profanity and obscenity, among other content. The current film rating system replaced it in 1968.
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The Oneida Community and Its "Complex Marriage" Experiment
The Oneida Community was a religious utopian society led by John Humphrey Noyes, which grew from a group he formed in Putney, Vermont, around 1841 and lived at Oneida, New York, from 1848 to 1880. It practiced "complex marriage," rejecting exclusive couples, which set it sharply apart from the marriage norms and laws of its time.
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The Bible Belt and Sexual Morality in the American South
The Bible Belt is a region, chiefly in the southern United States, whose residents are believed to hold strong fundamentalist Protestant views; Merriam-Webster dates the term to 1924. Several Southern states still carry fornication or cohabitation statutes. Pew found in 2019 that only 35% of white evangelical Protestants accept unmarried couples living together without plans to marry.
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Are Americans Puritanical About Sex? The Stereotype and the Evidence
"Puritanical" means rigidly moral, and it recalls the Puritans who settled New England from 1630 and drew their criminal law largely from the Old Testament. The label persists in debates over sex, film and morals laws. Surveys complicate it: Gallup found in May 2026 that 65% of Americans call sex between unmarried adults morally acceptable.
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Fact-Checking Viral Lists of "Weird Sex Laws" in America
Some are, many are not. A widely shared 2021 list named Idaho, Illinois, Massachusetts, Mississippi, South Carolina and Utah as banning sex outside marriage, but Massachusetts repealed its law in 2018, Utah in 2019 and Idaho in 2022. The laws that remain are considered unenforceable after Lawrence v. Texas.
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Why Americans Still Say "Fornication": The King James Bible's Legacy
Largely because of the King James Version, published in 1611 and long the dominant English Bible. It renders the Greek porneia as "fornication" 26 times, in lines such as "Flee fornication." Many American churches still read it, and an IUPUI study reported that 55% of Americans who read the Bible use the KJV.
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Alfred Kinsey in Pop Culture: From 1950s Celebrity to Hollywood Biopic
Alfred Kinsey's books on male (1948) and female (1953) sexual behavior became bestsellers and made the Indiana University biologist a public celebrity, inspiring jokes, songs and later novels. His data challenged official morality about sex outside marriage. Hollywood retold his life in the 2004 biopic Kinsey, with Liam Neeson in the title role.
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