[atoav]

This kind of censorship feels very (US-)american to much of the rest of the world. As someone who grew up in a catholic Hinterland, I am pretty sure the roots of the whole prudery come from organized religion.

Injecting people with shameful feelings about their most private (and most natural) parts of their lives is truly powerful. If you get the followers of your religion to see sexuality and nudity as something deeply shameful in the eyes of god, they will think about your religion before, during and after each slightly sexual encounter — you truly own them.

While in most catholic parts of Europe this kind of prudity became increasingly outdated during the last half of the century — to a degree where even my catholic Hinterland has no problem with topless women at the lake, my feeling is that the prude mindset runs much deeper in big parts of the US, Hinterland or not.

The overly prude censorship from the "freedom of speech"-nation was always somewhat surprising to Europeans. But only with the spread of (US-owned) social media platforms this became truly apparant. Shock! A female nipple! Censorship! Banned!

I'd argue that the rules of social media get internalized in society as well and that in a somewhat ironic sense this is making everyone more prude.

[sebow]

Your argument would be valid if catholicism or christianity in general would either grow or remain the same througout the western masses, which is not true. The only places in the world where christianity is growing is asia (most noticeably) and probably africa but there's less data for that.

You're right in saying this is mostly common to the american society(which itself propagated to the rest of the world), but I'm doubtful about the implied cause of organized religion. At least in europe this has not been the case for what, a century?