I think a valid observation is perhaps the big deal many Americans make of breasts and breast exposure, no matter why and when.
Granted, most men around the world, a few cultural exceptions aside, have some sort of Freudian passion for las tetas and in most conservative cultures, exposure is at least a bit of a taboo.
Yet, in the Western cultures, America seems to be an outlier in this aspect: it seems that this is somehow catalyzed by puritan culture to a level that makes me feel like a sixteen year-old all over again.
Here’s a few observations that show in what aspects Americans differ from other Western cultures, in this case the Old Continent:
Boobs in the media are a huge deal.
No one in Europe will give a rat’s ass if some chick shows some (accidental) boob during a show. In the US, as soon as a wild nipple appears, it gets scrambled out and pixelated as if it were the cursed part of The Ring’s videotape. It becomes a freaking news headline for days on.
A beautiful illustration is the interpretation of the “royal boobs” scandal: it really was about paparazzi breaching the royal privacy in most European media. The great difference is that the picture, boobs included were featured in most mainstream media, in the US the news chose to censor the breasts away and really was all over this scandalous exposure of mammary glands.
The general perception in America is that boobage is supposed to make every guy horny enough to be willing to trade their firstborn to get some lookie lookie.
Look at TV shows: even innocent sitcoms like How I Met Your Mother or Scrubs incessantly confirm the concept that a girl flashing her boobs should be treated as the second coming of Christ. Men do anything in exchange for some second base. There are special adult sites just about flashing. Speaking of second base, American culture considers touching breasts as a distinct step in three step road to intimacy, between sex and kissing!
Lastly, the US is only matched by Brazil in the insane amount of breast augmentations.
It’s also how we handle breasts in the US that persists the legendary status.
Topless sunbathing on beaches is in restricted areas that are fenced like leper colonie. Art showing some form of nipple is preferably made PG 13.
Oh wait, BREASTS ARE USUALLY EVEN ABOVE PG13 while violence, guns, horror, whatever often do pass this rating.
Realize this: Kate Winslet’s few frames of artistic tatas in Titanic are judged to be just as shocking as kids graphically murdering each other for over an hour in The Hunger Games.
Oh, the humanity and all the viewers screaming around here. I told you, I can’ t even talk to people whose kids are in there. Ah! It’s–it’s–it’s–it’s … o–ohhh!
Americans are used to covering breasts in places where no one in Europe would cover them e.g. in locker rooms, or behind closed doors in medical practice like the doctor’s exam room before a mammogram or a breast exam. In Amsterdam (granted, not the most prude place in the world) where I did my Med School, we would repeatedly practice physical exams on our fellow students and it was a requirement that both sexes were only in their underwear bottoms. And though I won’t pretend it wasn’t a bit weird at first, almost no-one objected. I doubt anyone would do this in the US without some form of protest.
