  So I was thinking about a long post concerning the mysterious absence of gratuitous nudity in modern cinema, when urlLink Political Animal posts a link to urlLink this . A new study from the Harvard School of Public Health has found that a decade of "ratings creep" has allowed more violent and sexually explicit content into films, suggesting that movie raters have grown more lenient in their standards. ....The study, which was issued on Tuesday, quantified what children's advocates and critics of the ratings system have said anecdotally for years: that a movie rated PG or PG-13 today has more sexual or violent content than a similarly rated movie in the past. Now, my thesis is that before PG-13, you basically couldn't make an R-rated comedy without a little gratuitous female nudity.
The list of early 80s comedies with some fleeting frontal shot of women's breasts is as long as your proverbial arm. This list is topped, of course, by Phoebe Cates' mind-altering appearance in urlLink Fast Times at Ridgemont High , but a long list of shower scenes, changing scenes, love scenes and just flat out bizarre unexplained nipples preceded it. I realized the worm had turned while watching urlLink Bad Santa two days ago. This movie, if you aren't familiar with it, features an incredibly foul mouthed drunkard played by Billy Bob Thornton as a criminal who dresses up as Santa, then steals half the store after it closes on Christmas Eve every year. Don't worry, the ending is heartwarming. Billy Bob's character gets laid multiple times in the film and never is there a bare nipple to be found !
What could be the point of this? He must say the f-word 150 times throughout the movie, making references to anal sex and Mrs. Santa's sister all the way. The producers knew they were going to have an R-rating and frontal nudity would have been completely appropriate for the film.
Yet for some reason, they held back. This is a huge puzzle to me. What's going on here? On one hand, we have some researchers saying that ratings creep has been occurring for the last 11 years in a big way, and on the other, we have films that aren't explicitly about sex avoiding nudity like it's a bad thing . Weird. I'd also point out that depictions of explicitly sexual violence have gotten more common over the last few years. urlLink Monster has an absolutely agonizing rape scene, and indy films especially seem to equate showing this sexual violence with realism, rather than exploitation. But the type of nudity I am talking about from the 80s was in my mind far less exploitive in the sense that it was often celebratory of the power of the human body.
It was objectification yes, but modern feminism has certainly shown us the double-edged nature of that kind of objectification, in that it also becomes a tool of empowerment in the enlightened woman. So it depresses me that essentially neutral nudity has been expunged from film, while horrific dysfunctional power struggles and sexual violence still seem to have their place. 
