There’s a lot to be said here for VENUE!!!
I was born and raised American. Other than a few Playboy magazines my father kept in his bathroom, I was exposed to very little nudity when I was growing up, and could probably be considered a “prude” by most standards. (I am female, by the way.)
I spent several years living in France when I was in college and in the years after college. Nudity there is quite common, at least in advertising. And in advertising, it is mostly young, nubile females. I didn’t have regular access to television, but even in the 80’s, female nudity was not shocking if you saw it in a magazine or on a billboard.
I also visited French beaches, which are all pretty much topless (optional). Women could choose to wear a bikini bottom or a one-piece, but very few French women appeared on any beach wearing a two-piece bikini. I generally went with American friends, but I really didn’t feel at all self-conscious about going topless at the beach, since it was expected.
That said, I doubt if any French person would be less than shocked to see an adult woman walking around in a mall or on a street with just a bikini bottom on.
In other words, while nudity may be more accepted, that does not mean it is universally accepted. It depends on where it is seen. Very few French people would have been shocked by the Janet Jackson incident, since nudity is seen on TV on a regular basis. But that’s a far cry from saying that nudity is a generally accepted practice.
In Islam, it is an edict of the Qu’ran that women should cover themselves, and hide their feminity from men. This is essentially saying that it is a law of God, if not society, that female nudity is prohibited.
In the US, though, we’re just plain weird. We don’t have any solid religious reasons prohibiting nudity (other than 1 Timothy 2:9-10, and that assumes that our society is based on Christian ethics). We have adult bookstores within a block or two of churches and schools. We have unlimited access to the Internet, and the “accidental” nudity that appears there. Prime time TV shows talk about sex and nudity on a regular basis, and partially-dressed (implying nude) people appear on daytime TV every day.
On the flip side, we do NOT want to recognize the fact that women have breasts. We’ll admit on the radio and TV and advertising that women have sex (and that they are supposed to enjoy it), but not that they have breasts. Laws about breast-feeding in public are jokes just by their very existence–We certainly don’t have as many laws about changing a baby’s diaper in public, even though that involves much more nudity than breasts do. Right after the Janet Jackson incident, one of the local rock stations put up bulletin boards all over town showing three completely nude women, from the knees up, but with their backs turned toward the camera. There was no protest about the billboards at all that I was aware of, and they were up for more than a month.