Comrades of the European Internet Forum,
enough is enough!
For decades, we have placed ourselves in the cultural shadows - well-behaved, conformist, as if we were the ill-educated child of the great American moral uncle, who must not be too loud, not too naked and certainly not too independent. While half-naked shoulders are censored at high school graduation ceremonies in the USA, heads are thrown around like bowling balls in TV series. All normal, all ‘entertainment’. But woe betide you if you see a nipple - then the censorship hammer screeches louder than a Trump on Truth Social.
I ask you: What has become of Europe?
We, the continent-born of the Enlightenment, the revolutions, the renaissance of nudity on canvas, in stone and on film - we have allowed a country that bottles cheese in cans, of all things, to tell us what is ‘moral’!
It's not moral, it's demurely stupid.
Why are depictions of violence in mass media allowed to flow freely like American fracking oil, but natural, aesthetic, tasteful nudity - which has been part of European art and culture for centuries - is algorithmically filtered out, demonetised and labelled with warnings as if it were uranium?
No more prudish double standards!
We need a cultural return to what we have to offer:
- Enlightenment instead of transfiguration.
- Pleasure instead of violence.
- Nudity as an expression of naturalness - not as a moral offence.
I call on you: Banish pixelated prudery! Let's tear apart the corset of American moral dictatorship like a badly programmed DRM protection! Save the freedom of the breast - for Europe!
Stop aligning your films, games and series with a market that beeps ‘fuck’ five times but completely waves ‘shoot him in the face’ through.
We are not Hollywood's post office box. We are Europe. We are culture. We are naked! - So, metaphorically. And sometimes literally. And that's okay.
Thank you for your attention!
I mean, yeah, we have become more prudish.
I will say that beyond American religious zealotry and aversion to human bodies there's a bit of a practical reason, too. In a user-generated media landscape if you allow NSFW without tags you end up becoming a porn site.
But hey, at least around here there's some NSFW friendliness (and those bits have become a straight up porn site, as expected).
We could definitely bear to be less US-style prudish about nudity in broadcast media again, though. Although I will say that if you think the old school 20th century approach to sex was all enlightened and not full of grubby dudes doing outright #metoo garbage you have some rose tinted glasses going on. Still, we can NOT do that and still not build our tolerance for human bodies on US evangelical nonsense.
Counter argument:
The more places ban nudity the more chance the one site that allows it becomes a porn site.
Currently if you want to post artistic nude you pretty much need to do it on a porn site.
The opposite may also be true, if more places accepted it then the amount of nsfw content spreads out, there might be more porn sites overall but with more incentives to specialize and innovate rather then allowing almost all of it and knowing users will come regardless.
There’s also a certain pendulum swinging effect. From the prude 1950s to the free love of the late ‘60s, the movies of the 1970s were a lot less prude than the 2000s are. It might take another generation growing up in this environment for them to rebel again and we’ll have another summer of love, somewhere in the 2050s
That's a bit of a US-centric read of things. The big change is that, fascist interludes aside, Europe had stayed quite a bit less prudish than the US. But then cultural imperialism happened, the Internet made all culture a suburb of US culture and now the ideas on what is acceptable or "not suitable for children" or "NSFW" are signficantly more consistent and more US-aligned than before.
I grew up in a time where exposed boobs were a relatively frequent prime time TV occurrence while in the US George Carlin was joking about words you can't say on TV. These days all cultural taboos are US cultural taboos. The pendulum is swinging upside down.