Anaïs Nin’s story “A Model” begins with this:

My mother had European ideas about young girls. I was sixteen. I had never gone out alone with young men, I had never read anything but literary novels, and by choice I never was like girls of my age. I was what you would call a sheltered woman [. . .]

(I think a character in one of Michel Houellebecq’s novels says something about American movies’ influence on European sexuality and implies Europeans are somehow behind in this regard at some point in the past, though I can’t find the quote.)

Today’s stereotypes depict “European ideas” as being sexually hedonistic, especially regarding teenagers who are supposed to be under their parents’ control. One can such ideas manifested in discussions of, say, the Dutch response to emerging sexuality, or in Amy Schalet’s “Sex, love, and autonomy in the teenage sleepover.” If widespread assumptions about European and American sexual ideologies flipped at some point in the 20th Century, I’d be curious to know why and how.