The history of the print media”s engagement with sexuality is a topic of enormous complexity. Depictions of sexuality in the periodical press are shaped by cultural attitudes and beliefs, representational and reporting practices, political economies, and audiences across time and space. The print media have been richly social since their inception, and all but the most rigorously controlled media systems have covered topics of a sexual nature. Sexuality has been represented as an object of social regulation, a topic of prurient interest, a problem to be solved, regulated, or eradicated, a form of commerce, and even a patriotic or religious duty. The press has played a major role in the modern project of demarcating normal sex and sexual subjects from deviant practices and identities. It has fomented moral panics around sexuality and helped liberalize sexual norms, sometimes simultaneously. The commercial, advertising-driven press developed in tandem with the sexual content it contained, and has long been a vehicle for racialized narratives of rape, imperiled femininity, and vice, adultery, and divorce. Through advertisements, classifieds, and specialized content in “obscene” journals, print media have, in some contexts, advertised sexual services and even brought people together for various types of sex.