[lcrz]

This comment exemplifies the puritanical view that nakedness is somehow bad or impure.

Notice that the men in the paintings of Vallejo are also almost completely naked, hacking away at monsters with large weapons. Yet you did not point to them and say they were indecent.

I really hope that the rest of the world doesn’t take over the sex/violence sensitivities as are prevalent in the US.

[pksebben]

I wish we'd drop it ourselves. It's excruciating living amongst people who will pick up torches and pitchforks when anyone under 18 is remotely exposed to sexual content, but shrug and look stupid when that same cohort goes on a shooting spree.

[throwawayk7h]

Ok but quite a lot of these naked women aren't merely unclothed, they're definitely suggestively and even erotically drawn.

[black_knight]

Yes? This is fantasy art, not an anatomy book.

[LanceH]

Not just puritans, but the other extreme as well will say it is objectification.

[ogurechny]

Attributing it all to puritans is misleading and even anachronistic. A direct link would be possible at the time when the phrase “puritanism sells” made sense, but a number of generations have alreafy been born into the “sex sells” world.

So there's a country with a giant porn industry, but at the same time newspapers are full of stories about “sexual predators” hiding under every bush, and someone's naked breast is considered worthy of being turned into a “national scandal”. Intuition hints that one is intertwined with another.

When people from elsewhere hear about gender neutral bathhouse (formerly “common village/family bathhouse”, or simply “a river”), they picture themselves asking a granny how's steam in the sauna. In certain countries, they immediately think of some kind of orgy instead (based on media descriptions and fantasies). And certain people of limited wit even try to reenact them in reality, with pathetic results.

Specific social convention makes people gasp, roll their eyes, and hide the children when they see someone without clothes, not their strict moral principles. It is highly unlikely that it will disappear by itself. On the contrary, there are forces that benefit from it. The aforementioned porn industry have successfully used commoners' fears to ban non-corporate-produced wanking materials from the biggest websites. Not even nature is allowed to compete with exclusive providers of images of sexual nature to the consumers.

[VoodooJuJu]

Modesty is a virtue shared by many cultures throughout the world. It is not exclusive to the US or Puritans. And the US is not a cultural monolith. Millions of people in the US do not hold modesty as a virtue.

[black_knight]

It is true that modesty is not an exclusively US puritan ideal, but the US has a disproportionately strong cultural influence on other societies.

In my neck of the woods we are much more relaxed about nakedness, and find the scandals in the US around this topic amusing. But for instance the lengths at which for instance facebook goes to to avoid nipples and penises feels more like an overstep in cultural freedom.

[ogurechny]

Facepook is just another textbook example of bureaucracy breaking loose. Companies that give them money (for ads) declare that “content” (i. e. everything that exists in this world) can be “SFW” and “NSFW”, and they only want the former. Ergo, women don't have breasts. End of story. All the excuses and exceptions corporate human robots invent afterwards are just irrelevant icing on the cake.

It would be fine to just ignore that stupidity, but people who spend time in that hellish environment adapt to it, and actually start to believe that there is some deep meaning to the rituals they have to make, and even invent their own explanations.

[black_knight]

Is the misspelling of FB an intentional Russian joke? I haven’t heard that one before, but I can probably not unhear it the next time I hear a Russian speaker say that word.

[ogurechny]

Sorry, that line was glued to my screen awaiting transmission, one letter fell down, then some illiterate peasant fixed it.

[int_19h]

"Modesty" is culturally defined in the first place. What you would consider "modest" today often would be extremely immodest a century ago. And, conversely, some societies don't consider nudity to be immodest in and of itself.