Whatever the direct cause, as an older person who grew up Catholic, quite literally the most surprising thing in life for me to discover: Sexual repression emphatically cannot be strongly blamed on religion.

And I'm not mentioning this to defend religion necessarily, I'm just surprised and almost "impressed" at how, in the absence of religious sexual repression, young people and the internet invented a whole new way of doing it.

It's possible that Roman Catholicism and then the Reformation made sexual repression a part of Western European culture in a way that survived the transition to a more secular society (although the US in particular is still mostly nominally Christian).

But some kind of sexual repression seems to be a feature of every human society. Probably that's because people in every society often harm themselves and one another for sexual reasons, so people everywhere attempt to repress that.

Birth control, especially barrier methods such as condoms, and modern medicine have dramatically ameliorated the degree to which people harm one another for sexual reasons. But rape, infidelity, and falling in love with harmful partners are still enormous problems, as well as some more prosaic problems mentioned in the article.

Also lots of repression in countries run by atheist ideologies.

Heh, if repression did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it?