In fact now that I think about it, when that Picasso painting was in the news a week or two back for setting a record price at auction, some channels blurred out part of it in case their viewers got offended by cubist depictions of the female breasts: http://metro.co.uk/2015/05/14/fox-news-blurred-out-the-breas...
You can show all sorts of atrocious acts of violence on network TV, but display a penis for 3 seconds and it's a $325,000 fine: https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-15-32A1.pd...
No word yet on how this horror will affect the fine children of Roanoake, VA - no doubt the monies collected for the fine will be channeled to treating their post-traumatic stress disorders.
http://jezebel.com/fox-news-blurs-the-boobs-on-a-picasso-pai...
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?377387-The-Etiquette-of-...
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/jsgeq/would_the_f...
http://techliberation.com/2006/11/07/nipple-indecency-is-com...
If someone could dig up a youtube, that would be great.
I may well get burned for this, but I'm going to quote a friend's quip from years back. I think he made a good, if caustic, point. (Your choice of term "puritan" is the operative word here.)
"It's cultural baggage. The country was colonised by Puritans. You know, the segment of British population whom even then Victorians considered uncomfortably prude."
I do believe there is a kernel of truth in that. As to why it has remained such a dominant feature in the collective US psychology, now that'd be an interesting study.
If it helps at all, remember that the US was founded in large part by the Puritans.
You answered the question. This country's first moral code came from puritans who were trying to get away from England because the other religions there had too much frivolity.
Fox News displayed the entire video of the Jordanian pilot being burned alive by ISIS, yet censored the buttocks of a man featured in a segment on nude beaches.
As far as I can tell, it's generally extremely rape-y for cultural reasons -- from a Western POV I'd describe it as very misogynistic. Yet the genitalia are censored, implying the genitalia are somehow more obscene than the acts that involve them.
More and more I see America having a lot of Puritan values, which is spreading. Even countries who wouldn't have freaked about penis or saying fuck on tv, suddenly find themselves adding pixelation and muted audio to their native language
Compare American television from even the late 90s to now. It's absolutely night and day. We have a long way to go on chilling out about sex (it's a weird line to draw given our fetish for violence), but the trend is definitely in that direction. The problem with America is that we are really eight or nine different nations stitched together, and it shows not only in our divisions on family values in different parts of the country but also our growing inability to agree.
It was weird.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24608499
> Facebook is allowing videos showing people being decapitated to be posted and shared on its site once again.
> The social network had introduced a temporary ban in May following complaints that the clips could cause long-term psychological damage.
[...]
> Its terms and conditions now state that it will remove photos or videos that "glorify violence" in addition to other banned material, including a woman's "fully exposed breast".
So,(in 2013) they allow beheading videos so long as you're not glorifying violence.
http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/facebook-actually-sorry-for-bann...
And in 2013 breastfeeding mothers were banned from Facebook.
The breast feeding policy changed in 2014 http://huffpost.com/us/entry/5473467
This social taboo is pretty much exclusively limited to the US. The rest of the world is a lot less freaked out about genitalia in general.