Having grown up in an authoritarian country, then having the internet basically force it to liberalize was a great feeling.
Ironically some liberties offered even less than a decade ago are eroding away because of the new internet overlords, often under the guise of some trumped up reason like "security" or "social" cause.
These day they don't even try to hide their true greedy objectives anymore, as seen in the removal of the YouTube dislike button or manifestv3.
And having grown up in a liberal country, then having the internet and Hollywood dominance basically force it to implement US copyright laws and prudish censorship has been really sad.
I couldn't agree more. It is disturbing how quickly things change in regards to the freedom and the liberal way we see naked bodies.
While my example gas nothing to do with the internet it might still be interesting.
When I grew up nudism wasn't uncommon in the GDR, but after being unified with western Germany not one generation later it is more than fringe.
We only see unified filtered body types and the normality of seeing many different bodies in a non sexual way. While on the other hand even non nude bodies on Instagram often are sexualized beyond belief to maximize engagement.
We denormalized nudity, the regular body but commoditized the stereotypical filtered body.
I don't really know if it supports or opposes you point here, but pornography in the GDR was illegal while in unified Germany it is generally legal. I guess it kind of supports your claims that peoples bodies have become more commoditized, that porn is more acceptable than simple nakedness. On the other hand it kind of shows how the previous regime had its own hangups about human sexuality.
Yes, when growing up watching Hollywood movies my parents always joked that showing a naked body was not done, but insane aggression (eg beheadings / limbs falling off / etc) was perfectly fine. I think that was while watching Total Recall somewhere in the 90s.
> showing a naked body was not done, but insane aggression was perfectly fine.
[1] is a decent documentary about the weird and inconsistent standards applied by the MPAA. But yeah, violence is fine, man-focused sex is passable, woman-focused sex is bad, homosexual sex is RIGHT OUT, etc.
Um, there are a lot more (often gratuitous) sex scenes in US-made TV/ movies than Japanese ones, from what I've observed. And while there's generally far less glorified violence, you only need to watch something like Alice in Borderland to see some pretty explicitly violent stuff.
Ironically some liberties offered even less than a decade ago are eroding away because of the new internet overlords, often under the guise of some trumped up reason like "security" or "social" cause.
These day they don't even try to hide their true greedy objectives anymore, as seen in the removal of the YouTube dislike button or manifestv3.