Speaking of Asian porn and influences on American grooming habits, most Japanese porn I’ve seen has most definitely NOT featured radical pubic depilation. And the average American must have seen even less of it than I have. Which is just as good because as mentioned it’s mostly boring as hell. Wonder what it says about your popular media culture when your sex cartoons are superior to your live-performance sex movies (The cartoons DO feature a lot of pubes-less nudity; then again, most of them used to feature only blank crotches – no hair, no genitals, no nothing!).
As has been mentioned by others earlier, a peculiar characteristic on Nihonporn is the apparent reluctance to show the girl enjoying herself or taking the initiative … unless she’s cast as some dirty slut. “Nice” girls are totally passive and act like this is something to be gotten over with. Which to the actress it probably is, but its portrayal is also a nice piece of sociocultural propaganda for the male consumer about the proper place of the woman. It has been theorized that in the corporate society that is modern Japan, your average Ichiro Salaryman is so badly disempowered as a person (and as of the last decade he can’t even count on lifetime employment anymore!) that the sexual fantasy-media have to portray a scenario in which the object of his desire is even weaker(e.g. the common scenario of the molested-on-the-metro-train victim who never seems to find it in herself to scream at the top of her lungs “Help! Police! I’m being fondled by a pervert!” while slamming his nuts with her bookbag… because it would shame her sooo much!).
As has been mentioned, East Asian “prudishness” does not come out of western-style religious puritanism, of it being “sinful”, but from a whole different value system about propriety in behavior, about not shaming your family/ancestors, about every thing in its place and time and every one in their place and accepting ot that place, lest it disrupt The Harmony. Lewd behavior in public is wrong not because fornication’s a Capital Sin, but because it’s improper, disrespectful and rude in that time or place.
And, like Aanamika mentions, even in societies with a historic trajectory of sexual affirmation, you can still develop cultural trends in the direction of “keeping women in their place”, with the sexual affirmation becoming reserved only to the ruling classes, or only to men, or only to men and certain women who are NOT the ones they would go on to marry.
