The nation’s changing sexual patterns were discussed by people across the political spectrum, including self-defined sexual liberals, libertarians, and conservatives. In postwar debates over sexuality, however, traditional political labels were not always reliable or helpful. The midcentury political consensus known as cold war liberalism was a flexible and extensive category, and in battles where the cultural and the political merged, seemingly similar concerns could emerge from vastly different places. Conservatives and liberals alike, for example, at some moments worried that Americans lacked basic sexual knowledge, and at others lamented the omnipresence of sexual information in the mass media. Both those who identified as sexual freethinkers and those who embraced traditionalism critiqued Americans’ alleged materialism and consumerism and complained that the modern focus on sex threatened to rob it of emotional meaning.

Along with a host of conservative social scientists who argued that national and international stability depended upon an immediate desexualization of American mores and morals, liberals like the sociologist David Riesman deemed the national focus on sex to be a new and particularly dangerous form of consumerism that distracted modern Americans from their civic duties. In an assessment of the assumptions and motives of postwar authorities who produced information on American sexuality, an important distinction emerges between sexual pessimists, who foresaw the decline and collapse of the nation in changes in the sexual status quo, and idealists, who envisioned a new sexual order as liberating and empowering. Those who believed that sexual behaviors outside marriage were potentially dangerous generally agreed that public attention to matters of sex was pathological, while believers in sexual liberalism cast the same behaviors as a welcome reversal of puritan repression. The definition of sex as a liberatory force, along with the belief that truths about sex can be unearthed and examined, was an important concept in the twentieth-century United States.

In the years after World War II, political and sexual respectability were closely linked and the social and political order that many saw as crucial to national stability was based upon deeply polarized gender roles and a conservative deployment of sexual energy. When the liberal sexologist Albert Ellis charged that "most Americans are sexual fascists," his choice of terms underlined the connections many saw between private behavior and the nation’s moral and political character during the cold war. So too did charges that sexual investigators, or certain sexual acts, were un-American or Communist. Sexual deviance, whether understood as homosexual activity, promiscuity, interracial sex, or any other arrangement that violated the prescribed path of monogamous sexual expression within marriage, was coupled rhetorically with political subversion. At the same time, the marital bond and the sexual satisfaction identified with it were viewed as cornerstones of family happiness and national stability. The tension between these two themes—American sexuality as a sign of cultural disintegration and political weakness or as the locus for familial and social cohesion—shaped postwar discourse on sexuality. Whether commentators on American sexual character championed new forms of sexual dissent or called for a return to traditional practices and beliefs, they shared a firm belief that Americans’ sexual behavior could and did shape their moral character, civic roles, and political future.

Americans had worried and written about sex before, of course, and observers had long drawn connections between the national interest and sexual behavior by punishing sexual expression that took place outside marriage or between "inappropriate" partners. The social purity movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, agitation for marriage reform in the 1920s, and intermittent campaigns against prostitution all defined various forms of sexual misconduct as pressing social problems and sought to correct them through education, moral suasion, and punishment. In her work on racial and sexual violence, the historian Lisa Duggan argues that legal and medical discourses work to mobilize "a specifically American version of normative national sexuality" based on proper gender roles, whiteness, and respectability.

The specifics of what counts as "normative national sexuality" have varied: in the early nineteenth century, class- and race-based notions of respectability were crucial to individual reputations and community maintenance, while more recently the AIDS crisis has rendered concepts of health and disease central to normative sexuality. Americans after World War II, however, outstripped earlier generations in the fervor with which they made sexuality a legitimate topic and the extent to which they insisted on its relevance to postwar social problems. Experts disagreed, often vehemently, about exactly what was wrong with modern sexuality, but virtually all commentators who addressed the subject diagnosed grave problems with American behavior and mores. Sex surveys since the turn of the century had focused most often on bohemian urbanites or on marginalized groups