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?
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.
The nudity taboo is a conspiracy by the textile industry to sell more clothes.
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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 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
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Haha written like a pamphlet during the Industrial Revolution. I love every part of this.
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Let’s just let people groom themselves however they prefer. We need to normalise accepting bodies of all kinds instead of pushing people to some particular ideal.
I don’t think you’re wrong that we should let people do what they want but it’s definitely troubling that so many people want pre pubescent hairlessness in their partner. Maybe we should do away with whatever is causing that
I see it as a supernormal stimulus: women’s bodies are less hairy than men’s, so a hairless body is the most feminine. Or, the young are less hairy than the old, so hairlessness is the most youthful.
Though one could argue that it is solely cultural, based on the fact that those preferences do change over time
Bruh what’s your problem with depictions of violence on TV?
They rarely serve a plot purpose, and getting pulled into a woodchipper is in fact worse and less normal than having sex.
Violence often does serve a purpose. For example, in superhero movies it’s often how the heroes stop the bad guys. That teaches us important lessons about life, like that we should shoot health insurance CEOs.
I agree. The only people that can claim the violence doesn’t serve a purpose with any intellectual honesty are the tiny number of anarcho-pacifists.
However, a superhero punching out a bad guy, or even a realistic depiction of a recent-ish war like in the opening of Saving Private Ryan, is very different from the kind of gratuitous onscreen gore that’s all over the place now.
They’ll claim the woodchipper serial killer stuff establishes who the badguy is or whatever, of course, but I don’t buy it, and I definitely don’t believe the producer is paying out that much on special effects for the sake of artistic integrity.
The closest thing I can remember seeing in the last few years to that is in The Boys when A-Train liquefies Huey’s girlfriend. But I think giving us a sense of Huey’s shock and trauma is absolutely necessary in that scene, because it establishes why he doesn’t just take the settlement money and move on with his life. We need to believe this event has profoundly affected him and made it impossible for him to ignore the problems with superheroes.
Really? Just since I posted this, I saw Mikey Madison getting shot into a lit stove and catching on fire.
I guess if you seek out slasher flicks… I like science fiction and cartoons
I actually have no idea what it was in originally - it was just a clip shown in the intro to Saturday Night Live. Which goes to show how normalised that sort of thing is.
Hell yeah! But actually, what?
he wants to look at boobs
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.
I have no idea what I just read, but it sounded like something I should agree with
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 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 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.
How arrogant to think your previous centuries don’t offer a culture of violence.
A billion porn sites and rule 34 are still not enough? Do mean really require titillation in all media to survive?
This attitude is exactly the problem.
OP wrote:
- Nudity as an expression of naturalness - not as a moral offence.
Porn and rule 34 is the opposite of this.
The most fitting example I found is the argument of a certain Protestant Pastor Schweigger who visited Istanbul in the 16^th century about the moral superiority of Germans over Turks: while Turks had gender seperate baths and used towels to hide their nudity even from their own gender to avoid sexual arousal. In Germany, men and women would sit naked side by side in the bath just naturally without getting aroused.
Nudity ≠ sex
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’!
No more prudish double standards!
Europe: symbolized by naked chick who gets raped by a bull.
OP: Europe is morally-constrained in aesthetics, must cast off these constraints.
It should be interesting to see where this goes…
