USA and the censorship thingy - why?

I would have thought Mother fucker or cunt was more bleeped than fuck , Breasts are screened cause of the sexual side Most people can’t see them as food supply I never suckled from my mothers breast when i was younger , i sure have made up for it with my wifes tho :)

Hmmm… I understand what your mean. I don’t know that it is changing really, but what to me is a bigger issue is that excessive violence seems to be way more ok than foul language. The depiction of violent action, in my opinion, is a more offensive thing than foul language. Assuming that media consumers emulate what they consume (another discussion) would you rather have them say bad things or do bad things?

@sandystrachan That is an inereting thought, but still then, why would you screen breasts, even if everybody sees them as sex objexts. What is wrong with that?

As said already above, american television stations don’t seem so restrained when it comes to violence.

Huston and colleagues have estimated that the average 18-year-old will have viewed 200,000 acts of violence on television (Huston, A.C., Donnerstein, E., Fairchild, H. et al. Big World, Small Screen: The Role of Television in American Society. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1992

I would say violence is worse than boobies.

Because sex on tv is still a taboo , violence is acceptable I have no clue it’s just how i see it

I don’t know what you are watching because it seems to me the language on television and movies is atrocious. Saying fuck used to have impact and make people sit up and take notice. Now every 5 year old kid is saying it. I think if better vocabulary were used in television and movies perhaps kids would learn something besides more swear words.

With regard to naked bodies, I simply have a sense of propriety. In most cases nakedness is gratuitous, is not necessary for the plot, is just there for the shock value.

I object to the violence as well. But sex and violence sells.

Bottom line, I would be comfortable with less sex, swearing and violence, not more.
I am American by birth but living in Australia.

I hate sex in movies or tv and always skip forward past it , thankfully my 5 year old doesn’t swear . That could be down to watching kids tv and not adult stuff , tho she hears bad language everyday she knows not to copy .

What is interesting to me is that Americans seem to have no sense of context. I can understand the Puritanism about gratuitous sex, because of our colonial history. We began as a Puritan nation, and historically these things take a long while to surrender their hold. (Look how long it’s been since Constantine, and yet the Pope, remarkably, still has some influence.)

However, one is struck by the seeming inability for some people to disengage the context from the behavior. As one example, a legislator tried to ban the showing of “Schindler’s List” on television because of nudity(!) How could he have imagined that it would have been titillating in that context?

Also the ex post facto uproars that sometimes occur after an “excited utterance” of the word Fuck (didn’t this just happen again a couple of weeks so on SNL with a new cast member, and weren’t there calls for her to be fired?) well, this seems to me to be the very height of absurdity.

@pdworkin None of the founding fathers were puritans to my knowledge;quite the opposite, and the Puritans were a small minority. The mayflower myth is just outrageous and a wishful idea from a christian point of view. Although many sects found a sanctuary in the US.

You’re right. It is facile to say Puritan, but “highly religious” would be correct, and would have had the same outcome.

@pdworkin Yup, true.

@jazzjeppe
America seems to be a country full of contradictions, paradoxes and heavy polarization. As the biggest christian nation;in many ways fundamentalist, it is a paradox how so much smut and filth comes out of it, as well as how fantastic and productive this culture is.

A country that religious but seems to consider that individual competition in the market makes it fair that people live on the street with no right to health care.

To understand this country I think you need to leave your Swedish perspective and live in the culture for a time. Just as an Americans would need to visit Iran to understand it, leaving the American perspective.

Obviously, America don’t run the mill as we do in Sweden. We swedes do have a tradition of feeling morally high and mighty. It is arrogant, and it is flawed.

I also think it’s kind of silly to bleep when it’s obvious what is being said. Here’s a video some may enjoy: http://www.funnieststuff.net/viewmovie.php?id=1396

@jazzyjeppe, for a good laugh (maybe), you should google “jimmy kimmel unnecessary censorship”.

Well, one settlement here was started by Puritans. They didn’t start the Nation, though, any more than the businessmen in VA or the convicts in GA did.

But that Puritan ethic does tend to carry through to the present day, helped along by the neo-cons and their “family values.” Of course, neo-cons with “family values” often make the news for having affairs or visiting prostitutes, too, so you can see how sex would be something that works them up. In more ways than one, y’see.

Because the natural mutation of an “ethical” country is an immature nation, that’s why.

@ccrow lmao, LURVE!

Oh Sorry @jazzjeppe I don’t watch much TV and kid of fall short of an opinion here. Just want to say that show you horrible show you were watching back in the day was mostly likely 7th heaven. I agree, those people needed to be shot, lol.

This country has a false sense of morality. Most everything that is said in public is not strictly followed or practiced at home, not all the time. We want to look like the moral compass of the world, but we’ll have a couple of hookers in the hotel room with a line of coke on the coffee table.

I have the feeling that horrible day time tv show was 7th heaven, I was forced to watch it by my step dad back when he was around. Any who I completely agree with you. I have asked myself this question myself many times. I took German in high school all four years, and we learned a lot about European countries and such. It is so open over seas, you can open a magazine and see breasts. This is a normal everyday magazine featuring everyday material people read. I think it is great that this happens, I think kids are so sheltered from nudity. Nudity is natural and should be taught as such. People shouldnt grow up insecure about their own body because thats how the body has been presented to them all their life. As for cursing I believe there is a time and a place, but should they beep it out on tv? No, I do not think it is necessary. Parents needs to be the ones teaching their kids about these words and also about nudity.

good one @Trance24

I love 7th Heaven, I still occasionally watch it on megavideo. Must be a generational thing.

But that said I should think that would be a model for most progressive parents, they didn’t believe in spanking, they discussed everything, not sure about Santa Claus but I am sure Ruthie and Simon would not have fallen for that.

So if the drawback is they didn’t say fuck or have nakedness, oh well, I guess I’ll just have to deal with the deprivation and keep watching.

censoreship is weird over here, even on cable, you get the breasts and the swear words, but then the male body is a very rare sight, like it is still taboo.

That’s just a not-very-bright marketing decision. Their focus groups tell them that men don’t want to see naked men, and that women kind of like seeing naked women.

Other, more sophisticated research shows that this is a load of crap, but nobody in the media biz ever got fired for not taking a chance.

For some reason, Americans perceive nudity as having to do with sex. When your average American hears about family naturist parks and beaches, somehow it turns into a place where naked adults are raping and molesting defenseless naked children.

Several great nudist photographers have been hounded, persecuted, and even arrested when they published books of their works. Jock Sturges is one that comes to mind, and there was a woman photographer, Sally Mann, who did nude works of her children, and was threatened by the authorities as exploiting her children’s innocence for ‘filthy lucre’.

Face it, American society is just generally ignorant when it comes to something as perfectly natural as the nude human form. You can watch a movie where people are butchered like hogs, i.e.The Saw Series, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, etc. but to show the naked male or female form in a natural pose, with no sexual overtones…

Oh Hell no! That’s freaking immoral!! Sometimes, I am ashamed to admit I am an American.

Because some people think sex on tv is far more harmful than the graphic display of slashing, slaughter and dismemberment of human beings. Grown up kids have seen more than 10000 murders on television preparing them for life, but thank god, no bare breasts or the vicious display of pubic hair which could have ruined their lives.

I think with movies it goes in waves. For a while in the late seventies there pretty much had to be gratuitous female nudity for a movie to do well when marketed to an adult audience. Then a few ratings got added; people got tired of seeing nudity that didn’t have a point in the story (or said they did); there were a lot of movies without it; and then it became artsy again when it was used with purpose and skill.

Television censorship has clearly loosed up a lot over the years. They used to not bleep so much as just not have people saying these things on the tube. Look at George Carlin’s 7 dirty words and see how many of them you can say on television now. And Barbara Eden’s belly button is not even a blip on a television censor’s radar now.

As far as puritanical America goes, it depends a whole lot on where you are. Seattle has multiple naked bike rides each summer and every sunny day I’ve been out on the lake I’ve seen multiple people swimming or sunning naked. No one seems bent out of shape over it.