prudery

From this professional and social high point, the swift collapse of Lawrence's reputation after his death in 1830, partly as the result of Victorian prudery, is an interesting matter of social history as much as art history.

Thomas Lawrence: The new romantic – review Richard Holmes 2010

Recent studies in India, for example, where sexual prudery is the norm, show that very possibly a majority of girls are sexually molested, often by family members such as cousins, uncles, fathers and brothers.

A Cultural Tolerance Of Child Rape? « Unambiguously Ambidextrous 2008

But the Serbs are not only peasants in prudery, they are artists and have some knowledge of handicrafts, so they saw that it was natural for a man cutting out the shape of a man to cut out the true shape of a man; they felt, therefore, no Puritan hatred of the statue, and their peasant thrift told them that it would be wicked waste to throw away a statue well carved in expensive material by an acknowledged master.

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: Part V 1969

But the Serbs are not only peasants in prudery, they are artists and have some knowledge of handicrafts, so they saw that it was natural for a man cutting out the shape of a man to cut out the true shape of a man; they felt, therefore, no Puritan hatred of the statue, and their peasant thrift told them that it would be wicked waste to throw away a statue well carved in expensive material by an acknowledged master.

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: Part V 1941

He speaks of these matters in the down right way of old times without any appearance of prudery, which is very different from our fastidious treatment of these subjects.

The Beginnings of Christianity. Vol. I. 1872-1939 1903

[58] In one of its civilized developments, this ritualized modesty becomes prudery, which is defined by Forel (_Die Sexuelle Frage_, Fifth ed., p. 125) as "codified sexual morality."

Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 The Evolution of Modesty; The Phenomena of Sexual Periodicity; Auto-Erotism Havelock Ellis 1899

Dismiss it as "prudery" or call it bullshit if you want, I don't really care.

An Althouse blog fund-raiser. Ann Althouse 2009

"I cannot affect," she says, "a prudery which is not natural to me."

Classic French Course in English William Cleaver Wilkinson

Certainly this accounts for much that is called "prudery" in women, whose repressed and starved instincts revenge themselves in a morbid (mental) preoccupation with the details of vice.

Sex and Common-Sense 1916

1. That was part of the irony of using the word "prudery".

"Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much." Ann Althouse 2007