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RE: Sex bad - violence good
I found the recent appeals court ruling against the FCC's "fleeting expletives" policy to be very interesting. I think it rather hopeful.
I've long thought our approach to censoring TV is preposterous. Last year, Comedy Central broadcast The Queens of Comedy, which basically consists of the stand-up acts of four black comediennes. I couldn't even understand what the point of showing it was - there wasn't a single joke, and rarely even a single sentence that wasn't substantially bleeped out.
If we're to understand that the "bleeps" render the foul language unintelligible, then the entire show was unintelligible. If we're to believe that Comedy Central thought the audience would understand almost everything they were hearing, despite the bleeps, then what's the point of the bleeps?
Let's be honest. It's not only the sequence of phonemes in the word "fuck" that communicate its meaning. Pretty much anyone can "lip read" that word. And since the set of words that actually get bleeped is pretty small, most listeners are now so attuned to it that even though their ears hear the beeping sound, the language center in their brain "hears" the original word. So what are we really doing here? Seems like nothing more than pandering to the Christian right, to me.
If the point of this censorship is to "protect" us, then a show like that shouldn't be shown at all on TV. And that's true of almost any show that has more than a "fleeting expletive".
But then, that would be real censorship - the kind our Constitution says we don't like. So, I say, stop with the bleeping bleeping. It's a free country, and if you don't want your kids (who use that kind of language anyway) to hear that kind of stuff, then turn off your TV. Better yet: throw it away and go live with the Amish.
RE: Sex bad - violence good
Perhaps it is because Germans got guns out of their system during the horror of two world wars during the 20th century, and no longer find them fascinating.
Americans by contrast have not yet suffered enough from guns, so the fascination is still rampant.
In my experience people who complain about sex are not very good at it.
Perhaps Germans are just much better at sex than we Americans are.
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Sex bad - violence good
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.
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