Thank you for sharing your perspective. I’m especially interested to hear opinions from other cultures. From my perspective I must say nothing is that simple. My point was certainly not that nudity = pornography.

And just as France is not defined by Degas’ anti-Semitism or the 19th-century/fin de siècle brothel culture of the ballets he painted, the “new world” is not defined only by its Puritanical roots. Though I am American and “without cultural and artistic education” I have referenced not the Italian Renaissance masters (good point) but the ancient Greeks who celebrated the male nude in an article about France’s own Gauguin.

If you read the comments above you will note that I don’t see pornography in the Rorschach test of Courbet. I think there is an appreciable difference between the normalcy of unnecessary nudity (my point in this article) and pornography. I debate that in the comments above with (I believe) a fellow uneducated Puritanical American. It is an interesting thread with great examples, background and counterpoints.