I think at least part of it is a backlash against the proliferation of pornography (its shocking just how prolific and how degrading porn actually is compared to the ‘good ‘ol days’). A lot of youngsters were first confronted with porn as children through their smartphones.

But a lot of it also has to do with changing attitudes towards woman and sexuality. We’ve had corporations marketing woman and teen girls as sex objects for decades now, but we now also have an increase of violence against woman and we have the manosphere and far-right extremists campaigning against basic woman’s rights like abortion, equal pay and whatnot.

So I guess the real question is, are more people taking offense of nudity because of their conservative beliefs? Or are more people viewing nudity in popular media as a means of sexualizing (and thus degrading) women?

I don’t like prudes either, and I do think it comes in part from certain kinds of morally compartmentalized people who are wound so tight from societal/religious/cultural pressures and envy of those who don’t feel as bound to such things that they need it to keep being some taboo thing for their own weird peace of mind.

Not sure if anyone said this yet but I do wonder sometimes if it’s also about control/atomization. Having a socially disconnected populace that can only satisfy their innate sexual urges by some sort of supernormal stimuli viewed on a screen that the system can control is just another data point that can be exploited/behavior controlled.

The less real connections someone can make with real people who don’t conform to their supernormal standards, the less they might be able to form communities that can be self-sufficient (to a degree) or fight to change things in the real world. Being physically intimate with someone isnt just a way of sharing pleasure or expressing affection, it’s also one of several highly motivating factors for people to touch grass, which is where 99% of everything that matters actually happens.

Beyond the scope of the topic here, I suppose. Porn is just one avenue. I’m not against it, but there are plenty of reasons to revile the abusive industries that churn it out, and the proliferation of hollow AI porn bots that give people psychosis.

I also blame marketing research and of course, capitalism, for degrading everything they touch to soulless data points to be collated and directed by the whims of those with the power to do it.

I find the wanton sexualization of the 80s and 90s almost wholesome compared to whatever the fuck is going on these days. Sex is too important to be relegated to porn - but that seems to be the mission now.

We’re allowed to have heaps of gratuitous violence, action, and misery in our art - but for some reason sex/nudity has this unique obligation to directly progress the plot (if it can’t be removed altogether). Sex apparently can’t just be part of character development, themes, world building, or just gratuitous fun, anymore without giving these fucking prudes the ick.

Different people have different reasons.

Small group of real prudes: either actually feel this way, or hold various levels of opinions, or are generally ambivalent to sexual content but have decided to construe sexualization with sexual misconduct. It works; no sex, no sexual misconduct.

Then the advertisers cater to those people because they don’t want to get bad press and want the broadest appeal: non sexual things appeal to prudes and non prudes alike: so make everything non sexual. Avoid offense and maximize eye balls.

Then platforms want to attract advertisers, so they make rules and filters that over reach. Afterall if nothing is remotely close to sexual then we don’t chance there being an Ad next to something sexually offensive.

Then the content creators, whos livelihood depends on the unequal relationship with the platforms self censor to attempt to avoid the broad stroke of platform censorship.

The middle ground then becomes vacant. The sexual but not sexually offensive content gets thinned out. So there is less and less of a reason for platforms, or advertisers, or creators to allow, endorse, or create that content.

This is why vocal opinions of small groups hold so much sway today. The cycle feeds into itself as people whos only interaction with sexual content is hardcore porn generally fall into that second “ambivolent but lets avoid it just to be safe”. This pipline then has a complicated but similar relationship on the political side of things.

No. These things come in waves. We’re certainly on the prudish side of the cycle right now, but the modern prudes are a far cry from the prudes of yesteryear.

The world propensity for prudeness is trending down on a macro scale, but we are also at a point where the existing prudes have consolidated and are the strongest they’ve been in the short term.

Porn has also become a lot harder and the exploitative nature of the business has become more apparent. It’s not just people’s opinions that have become more prudish (though sure, they have) it’s also that porn is now, broadly, much much harder.

People were shocked about deep throating in the 70s, for goodness sake. Today that’s light fayre.

Very much so.

I am Danish. A lot of our culture and humor used to revolve around the naked body and sex. This has totally changed within the last 20 years.

My personal theory is that social media censorship of anything sexual is the reason. America exported their prudish culture and it is erasing our culture.

It’s really all our faults. The first time someone used the phrase “horny jail” unironically and wasn’t slapped into the following week, we invited this. The first time someone complained about a sex scene in a movie and wasn’t shunned from their entire social circle and relegated to hanging out with the Boomer ladies at the local church, we began building the world we’re trapped in.

And the people in here defending this new secular Puritan paradigm all sound fucking insufferable. It doesn’t matter if you’re an upright prude because your gullible enough to think sex makes God angry or if you’re an upright prude because you think it’s a feminist position. Either way you’re still a jackass who’s clinging to a sexual morality invented by bronze age goat herders to maximize the prices they could get for selling their teenage daughters to their middle aged friends.

Much could be said about this.

Some people are prudish. Some people are not. Media could have two different versions: the sanitized version made for the first group of people, and mature version for the second group. Sometimes this is not possible in which case it’s better to just have the first version so that it’s suitable to the largest audience.

There’s also been (I think justifiable) backlash against adult stuff because kids now are big users of the internet thanks to the addictiveness of social media and the tiny supercomputer they carry with them everywhere that is now necessary to participate in society. Sanitizing everything for everyone is one solution to this problem. The other is keep the mature stuff but require age verification to view it.

Also, people often browse social media in public and are aware someone might look over their shoulder and see something that might be misinterpreted as porn. Nobody wants that.

There’s a great article in The Atlantic about the disappearance of communal showers without curtains or dividers in the US. Nude beaches and nudist colonies are apparently disappearing as well.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/2025/11/naked-locker-room-end/684907/

Summarizing in my own words,

Progressive era reformers had communal baths built before municipal plumbing systems existed so that the poor who could not afford their own private bath could keep clean. Bathing suits at the time would fall apart and clog filters, so boys and men were required to bathe naked (apparently women had to be clothed). People naturally also showered naked without dividers or curtains. By cultural momentum, this practice stuck around long after bathing suits had advanced.

Fast forward to today and people are realizing that separating showers by gender isn’t enough to prevent any discomfort or sexualization of naked bodies because there’s awareness of different sexual orientations. Additionally, the internet exists and cell phones with cameras are ubiquitous. Nobody wants to have an image of their nude form spread to half the world over social media where it previously would only be seen by a few people for a few minutes. Add to this the fact that easy access to a vast amount of internet pornography has massively sexualized nudity. Communal showers are disappearing because a large number of people (including me) hate them.

I hate it so much.

I’m watching the Magicians, on Amazon, and I use subtitles. All the curse words are purposefully filled in with random letters, so as not to offend the reader.

IANAL, but in my opinion this violates the “functionally equivalent services” test of the Americans with Disabilities Act Title IV, and in a just world they would get hit with a massive lawsuit.

I have fucking seen mouths blurred to stop lip readers understanding even slightly impolite words!

The oligarchs are using porn, and specifically child abuse, to get total control of everything said and done, to create secret social scores to be used against us.

It’s forced on us by rich Christians