Where Have All the Puritans Gone?

Heh. Irony.

Europeans are always going on and on about how puritanical we Yanks are and yet here's an item about yet another group of non-Yanks who don't exactly agree with the Europeans on this whole American Puritanism thing.

Sample quote:

She [sociologist Martha Bayles] also discusses how, from a diplomatic viewpoint, this perception of us is damaging to our nation -- for instance, she says, a group of Mexican nationals visiting our country said they came away from exposure to our popular culture with the idea that most Americans are constantly having sex, and that when we're not having sex we are strolling about well-armed, and not afraid to kill our neighbors at the slightest provocation. Most of the world holds a similarly skewed view of Americans because of our movies and TV shows, products that Bayles argues are the most powerful diplomatic tools at our disposal -- though pop culture is almost never invoked in discussions of diplomacy among political types.
--Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez

So apparently one group of foreigners thinks we're too darn sexually conservative and another thinks we're too darn sexually liberal. Surely both sides can't be right.

Can they?