I would not say people are coming more prudish, but rather policies are. Why? I assume because cash is king, and the best way to get cash is in advertising. Advertising has always been prudish since it needs to appeal to the masses.

Policy eventually influences/dictates culture. This is most obvious with the world 'unalive'.

Another idea, is that we are becoming significantly more moral and have increase civil rights. How does this relate? Well, if you grew up in the 90s or 00s you know that being told you were gay was not a joking matter, but a serious claim that could make you a social pariah. Now calling someone 'gay' as an insult is not as socially acceptable, is that because we are more prude or more moral?

I think what a lot of people identify as 'prude' culture is just another perspective of an attempt at being more moral and inclusive.

Yep, and it's a real problem imo. People are becoming afraid of sexual content. As someone who's been involved in free the nipple (a feminist movement aiming for the acceptance of bared breasts outside of sexual contexts), who's done nonsexual full nudity in various forms, and also has engaged in orgies, this prudishness really concerns me. Sexual and body liberation are part of women's liberation and general freedom, including in thoughts, expression, and action.

Sexual frustration, fear, resentment, and immaturity is also a part of fascistic thinking and I believe it's a contributor to the modern far right. Love and pleasure are becoming more stigmatized than hate and pain. Accepting that it's ok if art or someone's actions are more sexual than you'd like so long as it's not targeting you is vital.

Like obviously I appreciate NSFW tags, just because I acknowledge breasts can be nonsexual doesn't mean I want to accidentally have them pop up in my feed at work.

Also lol at censoring the magicians, one of my favorite shows and a prime example of a show that loses a ton of characterization and theming by censoring it

Yes. Sex and politics are not welcome anymore in conversations.

adult art being restricted from most Lemmy instances

That one is probably a liability issue. Especially a problem with real-life porn, but even with drawn material, you'll often get characters which don't look like adults. So then the mods would have to review each post, which is too much work, and they'd also likely see shit they'd rather not.
Considering this platform is mostly volunteers, if not fully, it's just not worth it.

It's the major social platforms pushing people to self-censor, mostly. It's a well-known phenomenon called "algospeak", where modifications to the language intended to bypass social network censorship end up seeping into in-person interactions, such as the verb "to unalive"

It’s driven by advertising money. YouTube people self-censor their speech out of fear of being demonetized.

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 forced on us by rich Christians

it's not a generational issue, but a marketing issue. It's not "ad-friendly". It's also a fascism thing. Performative moralizing and pearl clutching that rightoids use to smokescreen their pedophilia and their other favorite forms of rape. If they can construct an image of being hallowed crusaders of family values, it makes predation easier. because, you know, camouflage. It doesn't even have to work or be convincing for everyone; all they have to do is hijack the ideologically-possessed simps who line up to suck the same fuhrer's cock and the flock will immediately surround the wolf to defend them from any scary accusations, and even shield them from accountability when they ARE caught.

Have you completely forgotten the war on drugs? We never stopped letting the Puritans run things in this country.

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.

not people. the system is getting more prudish.

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.

If by "this generation" you mean the generation of people owning companies (that don't want their advertising associated with this stuff), the generation owning social media companies (that fold to the real or imagined pressures of advertisers), and the generation who writes the law... then I still have no idea.

This is organized purity insanity. Well funded.

I'd say it's the exact opposite. Porn has never been as mainstream as it is now, movies and video games have never been as violent. I remember that in the mid 2000s, GTA and Call of Duty were literally demonized because of the depiction of violence.
Now onlyfans modells openly collaborate with mainstream musicians and Call of Duty has stayed just as violent while appealing directly and openly to children. I am on lemmy.world, if I sort my feed by "Hot" and include all instances, I count about 2 or 3 NSFW post per page on average. And I'm not talking some cosplays, I'm talking hardcore BDSM stuff.

This goes into the realm of conspiracy theories, but it certainly feels like advertisers have some sort of agreement to stay away from controversial topics, keep the viewers minds clean and neutral. So that when it becomes necessary or more important profitable, they're easier to sway one way or the other. Don't think, just enjoy and consume please, and don't forget to hate who we tell you to hate.

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.

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?

There are several issues here.

The lemmy instance thing is because people don't like being spammed by onlyfans ads, torrents of AI generated porn spam, deluges of random penises men are happy to post assuming lots of people want to see it, and in some cases operators have ethical objections to porn production itself, or don't want to deal with the possibility of rehosting and being responsible for content containing minors being hosted on their services and the legal headaches that entails.

The last one about legal problems has arisen due to increased awareness yes but also increased pressure. The amount of hosting companies out there who look the other way for violations are fewer and fewer by year out of their own fears from payment companies, technical partners, etc. Even accidentally hosting that stuff besides the risk of getting you raided by cops at 2am and having your whole life gone through (while automatic weapons are being pointed at your face) could lead to your hosting being terminated and having to pay more and more each time that happens as you move up from the cheapest hosts to the ones left. It's also a hassle to move.

Censoring tarot cards, swear words in memes and on TV that's an example of corporate prudishness. That's an example of fear of upsetting advertisers, of people self-censoring to go viral, to avoid Zuckerbook removing their post and actioning their account because Zuckerbook has this weird notion of being family friendly and appealing to advertisers. So much of that lays at the feet of advertisers and Christian pressure groups who exist to beat the drums of fear of losing advertisers and pressuring those same advertisers to pressure the tech companies.

It's about risk compliance for those tech companies as well. Your bank would rather close all your accounts and refuse to do business with you ever again if you have less than several million dollars with them if you bring too many automated red flags. They won't care you have half a million with them, they won't care you protest your innocence, even the chance the system is right in flagging you a risk and getting hit by authorities leads them to a behavior similar to self-censoring where they self-police overly aggressively out of fear because you're just not worth the trouble and risk.

In the same way these companies don't care about artistic expression, they don't care about freedom of speech, they care about maximizing profits and that means minimizing compliance risks, minimizing risks of being legally actioned because there's even a chance what you shared could turn out to lead to legal liability, and minimizing risks of upsetting overly sensitive prudish customers and advertisers.

So at it's core its driven by a capitalist drive to avoid government scrutiny, fines, interventions, and by that same desire to offend the least amount of people and not upset advertisers by placing their ad for a new burger next to erotica art or bared human body parts or naughty words.

yes they are, US religiosity and prudishness is coming for us all.

It's been a slippery slope, Bush had aid pinned to family first values, Obama had Hillary tie aid to stopping sex trafficking, (not on Epstein's island though apparently) reads well in the news... alas it played out in the streets of Cambodia that women with condoms were jailed because why else you need condom unless you're a hooker ? also gave them a reason to stop and frisk women. My partner and I were living there back then, what a fucking mess.

My guess is people are tired of it. When you go through life and pretty much everything is sexualized, it starts to get boring and annoying. I hate how most movies used to have a romance or sex scene. Just imply it, is it really necessary to completely ruin the mood of a movie for it? We know people have sex and it doesn't really contribute to the story.

I hate it so much.

People have viginas

Name one.

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.

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

Seven dirty words:

1. Removed
2. Removed
3. Removed
4. Removed
5. Removed
6. Removed
7. Tits

It's not people, it's corporations. And it's more US specifically rather than global