> "featuring idealistically rendered warriors and princesses, muscular and scantily clad (but not indecent)"
Picture a couple of lines later shows two completely naked women. Might be considered "indecent"
Picture a couple of lines later shows two completely naked women. Might be considered "indecent"
Notice that the men in the paintings of Vallejo are also almost completely naked, hacking away at monsters with large weapons. Yet you did not point to them and say they were indecent.
I really hope that the rest of the world doesn’t take over the sex/violence sensitivities as are prevalent in the US.
So there's a country with a giant porn industry, but at the same time newspapers are full of stories about “sexual predators” hiding under every bush, and someone's naked breast is considered worthy of being turned into a “national scandal”. Intuition hints that one is intertwined with another.
When people from elsewhere hear about gender neutral bathhouse (formerly “common village/family bathhouse”, or simply “a river”), they picture themselves asking a granny how's steam in the sauna. In certain countries, they immediately think of some kind of orgy instead (based on media descriptions and fantasies). And certain people of limited wit even try to reenact them in reality, with pathetic results.
Specific social convention makes people gasp, roll their eyes, and hide the children when they see someone without clothes, not their strict moral principles. It is highly unlikely that it will disappear by itself. On the contrary, there are forces that benefit from it. The aforementioned porn industry have successfully used commoners' fears to ban non-corporate-produced wanking materials from the biggest websites. Not even nature is allowed to compete with exclusive providers of images of sexual nature to the consumers.
In my neck of the woods we are much more relaxed about nakedness, and find the scandals in the US around this topic amusing. But for instance the lengths at which for instance facebook goes to to avoid nipples and penises feels more like an overstep in cultural freedom.
It would be fine to just ignore that stupidity, but people who spend time in that hellish environment adapt to it, and actually start to believe that there is some deep meaning to the rituals they have to make, and even invent their own explanations.
I think the line is usually drawn around explicitly sexual acts.
(I also don’t believe being indecent is necessarily a bad thing in art. It is sometimes just another effect which can be used.)