Take your clothes off, we need to talk
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!
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
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
Amen to that.
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
thanks
Username checks out?
The quality has also dropped dramatically since the emergence of American streaming services while creating entertainment has become more accessible with freeware and open source programs. The world lost it‘s appetite for Hollywood slop.
Haha written like a pamphlet during the Industrial Revolution. I love every part of this.
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.
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".
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.
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
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!
::: spoiler light nsfw meme :::
It's not gay if the balls don't touch. So they tell me. :)
it's not gay. Been there, can confirm
They also are probably wearing socks.
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.
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.
Hear hear! My shaved ball sack is oh so delicious to touch! (That's not an invitation btw. My balls are mine)
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
It makes sense in porn, when the point is to show every detail up close, hair obscures the details. It's just that so many people then decide porn is what they want to model themselves after, or what they expect of partners...
Are we the hippies now? ;)
Peace and love, my friends.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gT2wY0DjYGo
I'm not your comrade, friend.
I'm not your friend, buddy!
I'm not your buddy, mate!
I'm not your mate, dude!
I’m not your dude, bro!
I'm not your brother, daddy!
I'm mot your mate, you're the mate (or is this a higher Rank, dunno about navy)
We are all comrades in these trying times.
Solidarity forever.
Trust me, no one wants to see me take my clothes off.
I disagree, you were just taught to be ashamed of your body. Just as you shouldn't be ashamed of your face or hair or height, you shouldn't be ashamed of your nipples or butt or genitals.
Nudity is okay, your body is yours, and your nudity is not for others pleasure if you don't want it to be. Just as I wouldn't look at your face and be disgusted that you have a nose, i wouldn't be disgusted that you have other body parts.
europe's mojo has always been there
in fact i think we're leading at the moment
I for one welcome our bare, heaving and melonlike overlords.
This is unironically great copywriting. Either that or chatGPT.
I wonder what OP does for a living.
I'm surprised to see your little tricks got upvotes this time. Your pro-russia content is usually too obvious to stand a chance. This comment did not fool me however
Don't get fooled buddy we are clearly not all human beings living in the same planet...
I think it is an interesting subject.
I can't answer for all of us, but I can ask another question.
Before USA became a superpower and took over the world, we were many countries and we were at war most of the time.
Now, EU started in the '90s. It delivered some good points, yet our countries still defend their own interests. (see Denmark, fighter jets and spying for instance. No specific hate to my danish friends) German people défend their industry before anything else, Luxembourg fucks up with taxes, etc.
Then, will our future really be built on a very centralized EU ? Have we really a common identity and interest ? All I can see is every country backstabbing another.
So, should we go on ideolazing US culture ? Of course not. But I don't see a European culture in front of that. I 'd prefer we cherish our particularities but I don' t think european countries count for '' 1 '' voice.
The closest we can find if an european common culture is that we share a mass of land and our ancestors have been lusting after eachother since... well, just pick a date.
The EU can be strong by finding common ground where we can agree and respecting we will never agree on others. And that is fine. If we find the strenght to emulate what is made well in other countries and slowly push towards a better, negotiated, future.
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):
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.
They rarely serve a plot purpose, and getting pulled into a woodchipper is in fact worse and less normal than having sex.
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.
Really? Just since I posted this, I saw Mikey Madison getting shot into a lit stove and catching on fire.
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.
The west world is already fucked up. Forget it. I'm not from east so I can't speak for it. But west societies are screwed at a level that you can't even imagine. Extreme capitalism corporations, oligarcs and religious entities has the full power and the control they always desired. They control every corner of the human existence. This is not just an US issue. Being conscious is not even enough at this point, We will need to rise against everything... even governments, which are long rotten to the roots. At a point that political orientations are empty and no longer apply to what's happening. Even political side like socialism or leftist are acting against the population and are at the service of these rulers.
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:
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
Men have been yelling at me about my boobs for 35 years. Im fucking sick of hearing it. There are boobs galore on the internet so go look but leave the rest of us alone, they don't need to be everywhere. As for your appeal to nature: wearing clothing is human nature and i don't accept the distinction between human and nature.
We are all in agreement, the objectification and hypersexualization of breasts is part of the problem. But it is a symptom of a deeper cause.
Equating nudity with sex what leads to the "pornification" of our regular bodies. In countries where we feel safe being nude in public, there is much less sexual harassment and objectification.
Late 40s, that shit started in primary school
Germans still believe they’re morally superior by insisting that someone swinging their sweaty junk 30cm away from your face is somehow a cultural experience.
I’ve been to a German sauna once, never again. It was full of groaning fat dudes rubbing their sweat all over their bodies and some fit dudes doing stretching exercises in the sauna, all naked. I didn’t come there to be a creep, but it should be noted that even though it was a mixed gender sauna it was like 80-90% dudes because most of the women went to the female sauna instead apparently.
You can tell me all about nudity and sex not being the same, but if there’s some smoking hot woman next to me in the sauna completely naked I will think about sex. Hell, I will probably think about sex if she wears a bikini. To me this is actually natural, not forcing people to strip naked and then also stripping them of their instincts. To be perfectly clear, you absolutely should not make anyone feel uncomfortable or be creepy in any way just because you have thoughts, there’s no justification for that.
In that sense, I prefer my country’s sauna rules with towels and gender separation and I can actually just focus on sweating instead of pretending that I’m not a sexual being.
Japanese saunas are often naked and sex segregated occasionally with family sections. But there's no hanky panky, it's just a sweat and soak situation.
Yeah you know for some people they just happen to be naked but for Germans being naked in the sauna is civil religion and saying anything against that is blasphemy. You will be subjected to the German inquisition that consists of three stages:
I’ve observed this spectacle because someone dared to wear swimming shorts in the sauna, I learned that your towel soaked in sweaty ass juice is more hygienic than wearing swimming shorts additionally.
I might be able to get used to being around nude sauna users. But I wouldn't want to be nude myself when using a sauna. Unortunately, I live in an area that doesn't have any single Texitilsauna within range. Looks like the only way how I can ever sauna in my neighborhood will be by suing the owner of a sauna.
@shaserlark @Kornblumenratte
Yeah I think I’d also be fine with others being naked, like I don’t like it but who am I to tell others how to live their lives. What bothers me is this militant attitude towards nakedness, you’re going somewhere to relax but it really is an oppressive space.
Feel for you and hope this changes at some point.
That's not their point in the slightest
Yes, I'd actually say toning both down would be better 90% of the time.
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...
She is raping the bull bro learn art
I think the point was more about the double standardz on violence in censorship than it was about whether each region actually is or had been violent. As a famous US show, South Park pointed out almost 30 years ago in 1998...
"horrific deplorable violence is ok as long as nobody says any naughty words"
Culture can mean different things but the way I read the original post was that the culture being talked about was specifically the arts, and the main discussion about it was clearly censorship.
So the fact that Europe has a violent and bloody history is not relevant to the point that was being made. It is also a fact I don't think anyone in Europe would want to deny either because if we ever forget the horrors of war we are doomed to sleep walk into another.
There is only a double standard in OPs post if they were trying to pretend Europe has never been violent, but they didn't address that, they talked about aspects of censorship.
You've clearly got an axe to grind so I'm gonna leave it here and let OP debate with you if they choose to