Are we getting more tolerant as a society when it comes to nudity on television?

In the Bachelor, star Ben Flajnik and his date, Courtney Robertson, take an impromptu skinny dip. A naked man jumps out of a car trunk in Betty White’s Off Their Rockers. Howie Mandel appears nude in his dressing room on America’s Got Talent.

It’s all too much for the U.S. watchdog group Parents Television Council, which accused networks last week of “aggressively pursing a dangerous agenda” to obliterate television taboos.

The group said cases of full nudity have jumped dramatically on network TV, including shows from ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox and The CW: with 76 incidents in the 2011 to 2012 season, compared with 15 the year before.

“I think over the years community standards have certainly changed,” says Jay Switzer, former CEO and president of CHUM Ltd.

In Canada, there is also a more relaxed attitude toward nudity than in the U.S., where the environment may be more politically charged, says Switzer, who knows a thing or two about pushing the envelope.

His mother, Phyllis Switzer, co-founded Toronto’s Citytv station, which challenged regulatory boundaries in the 1970s with its “Baby Blue” soft porn movie night.

“I think we showed maybe the side of a breast on the first show, which was scandalous,” says Switzer. “People were driving in from Buffalo to see this on a Friday night.”

Switzer says today’s regular prime-time programming has gotten far racier than what he used to show at midnight, especially as networks have had to compete in a fragmented market that now includes the Internet, cable and pay stations.

“They’ve had to find ways to reach viewers in an increasingly noisy environment,” said Switzer.

Canadians are more tolerant of nudity on TV than Americans and, in general, less tolerant of violence, says Switzer.

“If Janet Jackson had a wardrobe malfunction at the Junos instead of the Super Bowl, you wouldn’t have ended up in years of litigation,” he says.

The cultural divide opened up a little wider with the Parents Television Council report.

“We have seen a concerted effort on the part of the networks to constantly push the outer limit of what may be considered appropriate for the broadcast medium,” said the organization in a statement.

In the vast majority of scenes, genitals were pixelated or blocked with strategic objects. But the council says this is still objectionable.

The study also found:

• About 70 per cent of the scenes depicting full nudity were aired on prime time before 9 p.m. and as early as 7 p.m.

• Use of pixelation to cover nudity jumped from two instances to a hefty 56 in the 2011 to 2012 season.

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John MacNab, the executive director of the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, a self-regulatory body representing the major commercial Canadian networks, said to his knowledge there were few complaints about shows such as The Bachelor or America’s Got Talent by Canadian audiences.

“There certainly wouldn’t be very many, especially cases where there is pixelation of nudity,” says MacNab.

Under the Canadian broadcast code of ethics, sexual scenes and coarse language intended for adult audiences are not supposed to be broadcast outside the 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. time slot. Such programming is also supposed to be accompanied by viewer advisories.

“In general, nudity isn’t a problem at any time of the day; it’s whether that nudity is placed in a sexual context or not,” says MacNab.

Some Canadian-produced fashion television series such as the now defunct Fashion File, for example, showed brief glimpses of nudity on daytime TV, but it was not in a sexual context, says MacNab.

Still, in an age where any child can Google naked pictures of Prince Harry in Las Vegas, does this even matter?

Shyon Baumann, an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s department of sociology who focuses on media, arts and marketing, says the findings of the study aren’t surprising.

“Our standards of tolerance have changed, especially when you have this accessibility of images through various media,” says Baumann. “Over time we have been getting much more tolerant because of exposure.”

Bauman agrees with Switzer that the competitiveness of the media environment, especially given declining revenues, has meant that some networks may think using nudity is a “good strategy to get people’s attention.”

Whether this works in the long run as people generally get more desensitized to graphic images is another issue, he says.

“The problem is, after you already have nudity, where do you go from here?”