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!
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so… Why are we naked?
Because there is nothing wrong with it.
fair enough i suppose.
Because it’s artistic and natural.
I don’t know, but there’s very chilly weather here and my pee pee is shrinking. Maybe we could try again in the summer?
hmm, that’s unfortunate, have you considered putting clothes on? I hear that helps.
Nice 😏
I assume that you haven’t watched any American TV shows for the past couple of decades. Nudity and gratuitous sex scenes are a staple of the American entertainment industry.
But note that that’s about nudity and sex being the same, and the sex is pornographic (that is, the intent in showing it is to arouse the viewer). The OP is about non-sexual nudity. In fact, OP doesn’t mention sex at all, but I feel like it’s reasonable to extend the argument to non-pornographic depictions of sex.
That’s also true. Actually, I think they’re (edit: sex and violence) both intended as pornographic in their own way.
I think, there is a strong difference between pornography and artistic nudity and those should not be viewed as the same.
From Wikipedia on Nude (Art):
Kenneth Clark noted that sexuality was part of the attraction to the nude as a subject of art, stating “no nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even though it be only the faintest shadow—and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals”. According to Clark, the explicit temple sculptures of tenth-century India “are great works of art because their eroticism is part of their whole philosophy”. Great art can contain significant sexual content without being obscene.
Ah, to be clear, gratuitous sex and gratuitous violence are both pornographic in their own way. Sorry, my bad.
Funny, I was under the opposite impression: nudity has almost disappeared from US shows.
Eh. Violence is still way more prominent. If feels like the whole point of the first 5 minutes of every cable show is presenting in vivid on-screen detail a new and unheard of way a person can be horribly hurt. Nudity is unusual and worth remembering, though.
Removed by mod
Hell yeah! But actually, what?
I have no idea what I just read, but it sounded like something I should agree with
he wants to look at boobs
Amen to that.
Ironically this comment implies there’s something morally wrong or depraved about that, or that wanting to look at boobs is an inherently sexual thing (to which only an immoral degenerate would succumb), which is exactly the kind of Puritan-derivative “sex bad” mindset that the post is rallying against.
thats deep
I took my clothes off I don’t know what else is going on but I’m having a good time thanks for inviting me I really appreciate it
Username checks out?
I can see your nutsack!
thanks
Haha written like a pamphlet during the Industrial Revolution. I love every part of this.
It’s a funny post, but a serious point. The Europe of my childhood was different countries all very different from the US. But over time American media and algorithmic dominance are eroding things toward being America with accents. And what will you get for throwing away that cultural identity? Americans will still sneer at Europe.
I think a trickier question is: if Europe ought to retain its own identity, then shouldn’t each European country retain its own identity instead of banding together as “Europe”.
My view is that it’s not necessary to pit regional identity vs European identity. I think it’s possible to have them side by side. I appreciate many things in my region that make up our identity, but at the same time as a European I can also appreciate many cultural aspects of other regions
I find identity tends to be like an onion, in that it has layers.
Also in that picking it apart is an unpleasant experience that frequently ends in tears.
I agree. I like the post and its message, but in general everyone needs to focus less on identity and more on community. People have really lost the plot these days. What are we doing all of this for? So our families will have a good life, right? Everyone the world over is mostly just looking for that.
…Now that you actually put it that way, it’s kinda weird to think of identity as something separate from belonging to a community.
Why stop there? Go back to the breakdown in feudal times! Which duke do you owe fealty to?
Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your rears!
We are all ich bin ein wieners now.
I didn’t take my dick out for Harambe, but I’ll do it for Europe
“A reliable way to incapacitate Americans” @GenosseFlosse
I’ve been to a bunch of nudist events in Australia, naked bike ride, nude beach, life drawing events, confest hippie festival and some gallery openings. I’ve also studied anatomy. People need to get their head right about what it means to be naked. Everyone has a body, and should be more comfortable with it.
Edit: Chatting with yanks on deaddit, they largely seem so afraid of nudity that they’ll be calling the police if there’s an adult naked around a child where in many other parts of the world it’s completely normal, eg modest family bathing scenes in anime.
HELL YEAH!
light nsfw meme
It’s not gay if the balls don’t touch. So they tell me. :)
They also are probably wearing socks.
it’s not gay. Been there, can confirm
The nudity taboo is a conspiracy by the textile industry to sell more clothes.
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.
