How has media changed as far as accepting sex and violence?
Asked by
Waffle (
248
)
February 18th, 2009
I’m doing a project in which I analyze how media changed the acceptance of portraying sex and violence. That is, how loose is media with displaying the two.
If you can find any information or articles, that would be great.
Observing members:
0
Composing members:
0
11 Answers
Many shows used to not show men and women in the same bed.
Check out Dick Van Dyke and you’ll see them sleeping in twin beds that aren’t even touching.
The Flintstones was the first show to depict a couple sharing a bed.
As far as TV goes…
Landmarks:
The 1st lesbian kiss was on LA Law in 1992.
—The 2nd was on Roseanne in 1994 (but semi-blocked out).
—The 3rd on Relativity in 1997.
The 1st gay male kiss was 1991 on Dawson’s Creek.
The 1st interracial kiss was on Star Trek in 1968.
Remember when Dennis Franz showed his ass on NYPD Blue? Apparently that was okay but when a woman does it it costs $1.43 million. Gotta love the FCC
That link may give you something to work with.
Plenty of info on this topic in the databases (of journal articles) at your library. Try keywords “media and violence and norms” or “media and sex and norms”. Play around with other terms such as “values” and “culture” too.
There’s an excellent documentary movie on this question called This Movie is Not Yet Rated. If you can get your hands on that it will give you a really interesting range of examples. (It also exposes the issue that the MPAA, the movie ratings board, is lying about its members having young kids—they hired a detective to find out who the current members were and most of them didn’t have kids under 18.) Great, entertaining movie.
i love that ‘bacon’ is in the topic listing haha
i can’t think of anything specific, but if you flip through a psychology book (or a psychology oriented website, probably) you’ll probably be able to find at least a decent amount of information on that.
i’d like to mention a few examples, but i can’t remember them that well, and i don’t want to give you half-right answers. :p
Funny how violence is shown no matter what. I dont think violence has really been censored that much in the past few years, you can watch any news channel and see more death and destruction then in your average movie now a days.
The sex part is still iffy, though have you ever watched any of the spanish networks? I thought most of the women on it were naked one day.
And one of the main points in This Movie is Not Yet Rated is that violence is way more acceptable than sexual pleasure. They give as an example the movie Boys Don’t Cry—it has several scenes of extremely intense, graphic violence, but the only thing the MPAA wanted changed was the length of an orgasm face (an orgasm we only see by looking at the face of the character who’s having it).
It is good for ratings and that is all it is about.
Answer this question 
This question is in the General Section. Responses must be helpful and on-topic.
Composing members:
0
