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America's Unhealthy Media, Porn Vs Violence
Preacher
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
http://youtu.be/Iz2N6BMOsyQThis a video from freaking 1980! It discusses the prevalence of violence directed at women and all the films that champion the violence. What was true back in 1980 is even more true now, America has a problem (and maybe other countries, but I can only speak for Merica since that's the country who's media I consume) with violence and violent media's acceptance in our mainstream society. Like any given night on any of the major broadcast networks you can tune in and see acts of horrific violence (decapitations, eye gouging, executions) from 8pm to 11pm these are perfectly fine to show on broadcast tv (cable is even worse at times, like fargo for instance had a graphic scene where a person got his leg caught in a bear trap and you could see in detail him putting his own bone back into position on his leg). What you can't tune in and see on any major network is frontal nudity or sexual penetration. I believe there are even network rules about speaking about vaginas and dicks, you can't even say the words when talking about sexual organs!
It's strange that Sexual fantasy is considered forbidden for main stream media and sexual fantasy is pretty healthy for people to engage in, where as violent fantasy is fair game, and violent fantasies can be pretty harmful. Why is it ok to show a dude get shot in the dick but not show a man using his dick for sex? This is not some shaming of violence, I like action movies, but at some point I wonder why is one fantasy main stream, and the other something you have to find on the internet or in some back room store with the windows blacked out?
This is a topic for a discussion on America's love of violence and fear of sex. Its not really a gender wars or topic on why feminists hate porn, so don't turn it into that please.
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
pleasepaypreacher.net
pleasepaypreacher.net
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It's grown into it's own issue from there, but Puritanical sexual moires basically come down to keeping women from wanting to do it when you don't want them to, I think.
edit: I should reiterate that it's grown far beyond that. Even in a relatively enlightened(?) environment like this one, people will decry freaky porn as spawning evil rapists while being A-OK with enacting ultraviolent murder fantasies in a video game.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Cuz your daughters or wife might have Feelings about that, and that might lead them to go lose their value.
Or, even worse, your sons might.
Men have control issues in general, I feel, and this is just one more way in which that is expressed. Can't have the wife leaving, or the daughter running off, or the son getting the gay.
But violence, now there's a language we can understand with our monkey brains. And it is a means of control, if obviously a harmful and ultimately self defeating one.
I think they are pretty directly linked. Though I'd be ok if we're going to get dongs going in, to at least seem some dongs you know, some flopping brain.
Another great example of sex being stupid in merica is the first ME game had one sex scene and wound up on fox news for that, despite the game having several overly violent moments including flat out punching a woman in the face for daring to ask you a question your character didn't agree with.
pleasepaypreacher.net
We can look at abstinence-only outcomes and see the problems with hiding the most basic information of sex, I suspect this goes all the way down the line to extreme stuff.
I'm not even talking about outlets, I'm talking about honest, shameless discussions. Imagine if violence were as taboo as sex, if parents got embarrassed or angry when their kids asked them about guns. It'd be a hell of a mess.
pleasepaypreacher.net
At the very least, sexualization of nudity is kind of an idiosyncratic thing. In the US, nudity taboo and sex taboo are linked, but that isn't universal by any stretch.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
What is weird though is that we sell sex in america in almost all of our commercial media, but we have to do it behind tight clothing and innuendo, just can't show someone getting their dick sucked because they bought a bmw.
I mean fuck sake we have dick pill commercials on at all hours of the night, and they still have to hide what the pills are for "Oh look she's painting his wood and then they sit on it after they are finished."
pleasepaypreacher.net
The story goes that violence and sex are bad, evil, detrimental, whatever. With violence we can draw the line fairly easily between appropriate acts and inappropriate acts. With sex, the line is more difficult to define.
When a lady kills a guy in a movie we can show it, because everyone knows it's fictional violence, and they shouldn't do that in real life.
If we depict a lady sucking off a guy in a movie, people might not know that it's wrong, and that they shouldn't do it. They might think it's an endorsement. So it has to be implied.
It's not weird that we depict sex this way in the media, because we think sex is naughty, bad, and evil, but difficult to define.
What's weird is that we think sex is naughty, bad, and evil.
It's like any other issue with media / entertainment. The problem isn't with the media and entertainment. The problem is with the ideas and beliefs that generate the media / entertainment.
That's where I'm going nuts with american attitudes, why is sex to be used to sell things, but only in its most hidden ways? Why can we show a woman in a wet tshirt basically showing your her nipples, but oh my god don't show me bare nipples!
Why is america in 2014 in the same sexual place that puritans were back in the whateverfucking year they were around and made a damn?
pleasepaypreacher.net
Well. It's not.
But that's obvious and I know you know that's obvious.
The biggest problem is there is still an inordinate amount of fanatical religious nuts in the country who elect politicians on bullshit platforms like "Abortion is evil" or politicians who actually are fanatical religious nuts themselves. I'm talking everyone from local to state to federal level too.
Oh, that's easy.
City of God, Book 14, Chapter 18
We know sex is bad, naughty evil because we find the need to do it in private, hidden away from public scrutiny. Even the children produced by sex are not permitted to watch parents engage in the sexual act, because the parents are ashamed. Even people who frequent brothels do the act in private, to hide their shame.
Why is it shameful?
City of God, Book 14, Chapter 23
Sex is shameful because "the members are moved" (men get erections) through lust, not rational willing. The "sexual members" act independent of one's will, against one's will. A man cannot will his erection away, since it is motivated and controlled by lust. We are ashamed of our inability to control that lust.
And in case you were curious: But doesn't that mean procreation required lust?
City of God, Book 14, Chapter 17
Prior to the fall, Adam would have willed an erection. After the fall, Adam had erections as the result of lust, not the will, and so the erection is shameful, and so sex is shameful.
The answer to your question is "The Catholics".
pleasepaypreacher.net
pleasepaypreacher.net
In what culture are those atheists raised? They are raised in a culture whose morality traces its roots back through the City of God. They might decide against that later, but it still gets in there while folks are young.
Also, fun fact, what is the Religious composition of the U.S. Supreme Court? Oh, hey. Catholics and Jews. I wonder if the Catholics and Jews share a common origin story for humankind.
Others may have other explanations, but I'm pretty sure it is mainly the result of Augustine.
pleasepaypreacher.net
It's not about being afraid your kid is sexually active. It's about sex being an incredibly awkward subject to bring up around family. Especially parents/children.
I think the actual phrase Augustine uses is even more beautiful than the way you put it.
But why is it awkward? I mean you set the rules here, you set the boundries for your children. You don't have to fuck your spouse in front of them, but you could show them pornographic materials and explain sex and what it means. I mean I know that people will probably think that puts you on a watch list or something, but if we hid food like we hide sex, our kids would be dead of mal nutrition!
pleasepaypreacher.net
Are the central and south and east asians really open about sex?
The same reason we don't talk about sex generally.
Like, you say "You don't have to fuck your spouse in front of them". Just look at the exact same idea that leads to you saying this and you have the whole of the issue. Sex is very private for most people.
I think ownership of women stands up as a broader, older source of sex taboo. You don't want your daughters having sex and wasting your value. You don't want your wife having sex with random men. To keep them from having sex, you need to hide sex. That means men can't be sexual in public, either, because it might stir those urges even if you keep the sex itself under wraps.
A woman is property, valuable for reliably producing heirs for you (or the man you sold her too). If your wife or daughter's having sex of their own will, they're suddenly unreliable for heirs AND potentially getting sick or pregnant--not just a loss of value, but an increase in expenditures!
It doesn't have to be awkward, we set the rules man! WE CAN CHANGE THINGS! Its one reason I want to have a child, I want to try and raise a kid with a healthy sexual attitude! You can't change the world yourself but you can make a dent!
pleasepaypreacher.net
My understanding is that Islam has hangups similar to the Judeo-Christian hangups.
The "far" eastern religions have far fewer hangups, but I don't know much of the specifics. Like, they have Love Hotels, which are common knowledge and not considered weird. I don't know the history of what myth founds their acceptance of hotels explicitly for bonin'.
Same thing. It's a private thing so people don't wanna talk about it.
Of course we can change culture. People are trying to do that right now. But it's no mystery why the sex talk is so awkward for parents.
True. Preserving virginity is a practical reason to have sex taboos. I mean, no one's going to give you an ox in exchange for a daughter who isn't a virgin. That's just bad business.
But I think there is a transition from the sort of practically-minded taboos, to a more evil/moral taboo. In Greek and early Roman culture you see a different mix of sexual taboos, but they are focused on a mix of women as property, and preserving the integrity of young men, who serve as sexual objects for old men, because why not.
Yes, I think you are right that women as property might be the origin of having sexual taboos, but I think the nature of those taboos change over time from the practical / economic concern to a more moral and ethical concern. I think.
America has a weird thing where there is a near 1:1 correlation between sex and nudity
Sexy religion is historically pretty common, not only in the nebulous zone from India to Japan. Bunch of weirdos around the mediterranean, even.
Very, very private. It's not something that is asked or talked about in polite conversation in America; it's seen as personal business between two people. When I watch a movie with a sex scene in it that goes beyond "oh, steve!"-cut to something else- it makes me uncomfortable, like I'm a voyeur.
I'm unsure if this is due to Judeo-Christian morality or what, but I don't think the solution to "American tv shows horrific levels of violence but not pornography" is "let's add some pornography".
It's pretty easy to fake someone being shot / stabbed / whatever. It can be plenty of fun to be the person being fake-killed, and certainly nobody's going to actually get hurt (barring an accident, which is pretty rare).
It's much harder to 'fake' nudity or sex in any way that's convincing; the actor / actress is going to have to actually have sex, actually kiss, actually take off their clothes, etc, if you want to film that. Or a stunt double is going to have to.
A lot of actors / actresses are not comfortable with being put in that situation, for reason I'd hope are obvious.
These answers may be part of the story, but on their own they strike me as pretty easy and shallow. Take the first one: if the taboo around nudity and sex were just part of a social strategy for controlling women, then we would expect that matriarchal societies wouldn't have taboos around nudity and sex. But, as far as I know, they typically do. I remember, for instance, reading long ago about a society in a remote area of Southern China; they didn't have lasting male-female pairs, and society was organized around matrilineal extended family group homes. They were also libertine about sex. Male callers would show up at night to see a woman from a different family group home, and she would either decline or accept, and then if she accepted they'd fuck; but without a general expectation of permanency. All NSA all the time. But yet, despite not being patrilineally organized, and despite not restricting female sexuality, they nonetheless had a very specific social practice built up around this 'gentleman caller' model. There were strict rules for how someone could approach, when it would happen, what would be acceptable follow ups, and so on. It wasn't just fucking in the street because it felt good. In other words: they had all sorts of taboos about nudity and sex, including many of the same ones that we do (aka no getting naked or fucking in the street). It's just some of them that were different.
So: although I think it's got to be right that some, or even all, of our taboos can be explained in terms of strategies for harnessing biology in light of social and economic needs, I very very much doubt that any such story is going to be as simple as 'they're just there to control women' or whatever. I also think that it's going to be very hard to say anything informative about these issues without consulting the wealth of anthropological data that exists both about other cultures and about our own culture's past. Just as a methodological point, I think that it's extremely hard to understand the actual causal structure underlying one's society just on the basis of thinking about one's experience of living in it--that experience is too partial, and too shot full of false consciousness to count for that much.
This is what I was trying to get at in the recent 'Why Many Feel Even The Recent Past Was Better Than Now' thread, perhaps unsuccessfully.