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blog (coffee shop)
by I've lived in Germany for four years now, and one of the more striking differences--besides the ostensibly straight dudes in way-too-tight pants, the utter and total lack of green vegetables, and the magnificent booze--is an almost complete inversion of American attitudes.
Back home in the states, violence (against other people, on the TV, by people who hunt animals, etc) is far more socially accepted than it is here. (With, perhaps, the sole exception of soccer games. It's even crazier other places in Europe--in Italy, there was recently a soccer game where the fans killed a cop by throwing a bomb at him, and another one where the game had to stop because the tear gas the cops were using on the fans drifted onto the field.)
In contrast, where the Euros generally abhor violence, they love the sexing--there's nudie mags at child-eye level in every gas station, German late night TV is nothing but phone sex commercials, and casual sex isn't something people get (ahem) worked up about.
I myself am a fan of the Euro ways. When I start a family someday, I'd much rather my kids were comfortable with s-e-x and nudity than, say, getting in fights with people they didn't know. In fact, I was back in the states a while ago, and was shocked by how much more physically aggressive people in the bar scene are. Everyone wanted to fight... I went to a relatively broad range of places, too, so I think it was a decent sampling. In comparison, I just don't think this would have been such a big issue over here.
Lest we get sidetracked, I'm not interested in debating the virtues of either viewpoint. Instead, regardless of where you stand on the mores themselves--OmniNerds, what's the deal? How did we and our brethren across the ocean come to develop such opposing views on guns and boobs?
Talk amongst yourselves.
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Sex bad - violence good by Occams :: NR6 :: Show
I agree that the differences are as you observe. I think that America has been more influenced by new Christian ethics which have influenced our authorities into very strict control over images of sex in broadcasting magazines or other media. Over time this has turned into self censorship by the media as the trouble for management caused by any departure from the standards is not worth the time and cost involved.
It is a hypocritical attitude because pornographic movies are made in America on a very large scale and we export some of the most explicit magazines. Some of our cities have red light districts that are almost as blatant as some European cities.
While we are not accustomed to the portayal of sex in the media, violence is the mainstay of our film and television industry and without it many productions would never succeed. So, gruesome violence is suitable for prime time but we get deeply shocked when Janet Jacksons left tit makes a brief appearance on TV.
We blur out any nipples (apparently it is only the actual teats that are of the work of the devil) that find their way onto television news while being happy to show real horrors of war.
This double standard is most severe in the electronic media because the use of the radio spectrum enables a federal power to regulate standards via the FCC. Federal politicians are extremely vulnerable to the Christian lobby. Major motion pictures invoke no such Federal power so the censorship is much less.
However bottom line is that Christian moral codes are much more concerned about sex than violence and law making this country is more heavily influenced by christian conservatives than is the case in Europe.