Asklemmy

It's a trend I've seen on Reddit and laterly here. I wondered if it was a north American thing? A slightly preachy, straight laced approach to life that feels kinda of smug, judgmental and insular.

It's forced on us by rich Christians

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.

This is organized purity insanity. Well funded.

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

I noticed this too. Looking back on how things were in the'80s and '90s. Seems like a lot of those things are not OK today. Seems weird in a society that so routinely treats people like trash. You can kill them but you damn well better say on YouTube that you "unalived them." Stupid.

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

I've been thinking it's a combination of the opinion solidifying nature of social media, going through the "me too" movement, and exposure to a US administration completely bereft of morality, ethics, or intelligence that highlights the worst of our society.

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.

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.

The problems you're talking about in the OP are purely monetary. Advertisers don't want it so media/content can't do it and survive.

The upcoming generation are behaving less unruly these days I think for 2 reasons :

• Everything is being recorded and shared all the time. You fart in an elevator and you might go viral. God only knows the fear you'd experience waking up hungover after a party in this world.

-Regular rebellion against the previous generation. We had eminem, limp bizkit, rage against the machine, Bart Simpson, an entire barrage of "fuck authority" as a culture. Only real way to rebel against that is "fuck yeah, authority".

not people. the system is getting more prudish.

As a child from the seventies. YES.

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.

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 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.

i don't think i'm particularly prudish. i'll routinely go out to clubs and do demos with like nothing on, but that's in a setting where it's expected. i also appreciate not having sex shoehorned into everything i watch or read.

like yeah it's a facet of existence, but it's not everything. i'd rather have it be meaningful and intentional instead of everywhere.

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.

yeah definitely not the people. its the loudest complaints that set the rules. i think its more like insufferable people are ruining it for everyone else.

People have viginas

Name one.

Seven dirty words:

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

Honestly, censoring the closed captioning is an accessibility nightmare, and you start wondering if they're doing algospeak, or if they're the kind of person who takes the same tone of voice with disabled people and toddlers.

I see two forces working in that direction.

One is advertisements. If you run a social media platform or website or anything similar, and hope to display ads, you better not show anything they don't want associated with their brand.

The second is the rise of political movements (you know which ones) that have nothing better to offer than "modesty" and "traditional values" (whatever that means) as ways to fix the issues society faces.

I am a big movie fan and watch a lot of movies from all different periods and the amount of nudity in mainstream R rated movies has fallen to almost 0. In the 70's, 80's and 90's nudity in mainstream movies was pretty common. I can't even think of the last big movie that had nudity in it. Something clearly shifted but I am not sure what.

Maybe this is you generalizing people judging only from controlled social networks, like Instagram that censors out absolutely everything except hate speech.

As far as I see where I live kids nowadays are very much the opposite of prudish, maybe too much at that. 13 year olds barely knowing anything about life and trying their best to brag about how many people they're fucking while swearing like they're characters from a GTA script.

Hey.

We have sex scenes - tiddies out - in the middle of the day on regular TV in Germany.

Beware of complaining about "this generation" - it definitely means you might be over the hill.

Different cohorts are exposed to and brought up with different experiences and media. People brought up in a media landscape that's personally produced for social media, and subject to scrutiny globally... Are more concerned with what's socially acceptable. Is that really surprising?

This concept has been called "profilicty", but was foreshadowed in the 70s/80s by the philosopher Guy Debord when he said:

"We've gone from a society of being, to knowing, to appearing to be".

If you're raised on videos of people who have hired luxury cars, and mansions to appear like they've made it, whilst others are torn down with a barrage of comments for saying the wrong thing.... You too might worry about appearances (and your status).

But most young people are fine, they're good in fact. They're still new. Don't worry about them. They're just young people... And don't believe the media.