Personally, I am more offended by violence. I took a survey once at work and among the 15 or so respondents, about half of them said they would limit how much sex/nudity their kid(s) saw on TV and the other half said they were more concerned about violence. I then took a second survey and discovered the parents who were concerned about sex and/or nudity tended to practice fairly conservative religions, while the parents who expressed more concern about violence tended to either not practice religion at all or practiced a very liberal one, such as the Unitarian Universalists.
So I blame the Puritans. Their views seem to have dominated American social mores since they got here. No wonder Europeans threw them out.
Straw man, slippery slope, and snark. Wow. Work hard, and you might attain the excluded middle.
Many people take kids to see the Sistine Chapel, or the Louvre. Breasts are not “un-family.”
Well, of course, it isn’t possible to you that we might actually have a viewpoint based on morals, on social values, on freedom, and on criticism of excessive intrusions of church and state. No, it must solely be to make ourselves feel sophisticated. (There? See? Excluded middle. You’re learning.)
If I brought snark to this thread, it was just to add to the snark that was already here.
Janet Jackson “debacle”? Tit exposed, some people complain, talk shows go back and forth on whether it was deliberate flashing or not. That hardly makes for a debacle. Nobody even lost their job. Some Americans don’t even remember it.
But oh, the American bashers, they don’t forget it. “You know, those silly Yanks, a little nipple pops out and the whole country just goes insane! What a bunch of rubes.” Well, it didn’t happen that way, and I’m sick of hearing it. Nobody except snotty foreigners and angsty hipsters even thinks about the so-called Janet Jackson debacle.
Annecdotally, Americans get up in arms about “violence” in videogames and music whenever some loser shoots up a public place. But generally I think the whole “offended by sex” thing is based on the fact that kids can actually catch STDs or get knocked up from sex.
It’s not like Brazil or France where they have topless orange juice commercials, but we seem to get plenty of sex in our media here.
I don’t know that Americans are any more tolerant of explicit violence than they are of explicit nudity. I’m talking mostly about broadcast TV rather than cable. Or ads, or stuff than you don’t have to pay to consume.
ISTM that exposed nipples (for instance) are not less common than broadcast movies where someone gets shot and the brains splash onto the lens. But I don’t watch a lot of TV, and we don’t have any premium channels.
I don’t know if there would be less outrage if whats-his-name had punched Janet Jackson in the face rather than flashing her boob.
If they want topless dancers at the Super Bowl, they need to make it clear that this is what they are going to do, so people can decide whether they want to watch or not.
It’s because Americas is a rabidly Christian nation, and Christianity is anti-sex, anti-pleasure, and pro-violence, hatred, suffering and war. Sex makes people happy, it causes pleasure; those are evil things by Christian standards. Christianity is a religion built on the hatred of life and of all things human, a religion of self-hatred, guilt and death.
I would just like to second what other people have said and relate my personal opinion. If I’m watching a movie with my family, I would rather have it contain violence than nudity/ sex any day. We can all relate to nudity, not so much to violence, so in a way the violence does not hit as close to home . And at this point nudity is usually only shown in a sexual context. Thus, nudity usually equates to discomfort, unless I’m watching it alone. Sexuality and family do not mix. Even to watch explicit sex or prolonged nude scenes with my guy friends my own age can be a little awkward bc it can evoke thoughts that can’t be dealt with at that time .
Sorry that the writing is disjointed, I’m having trouble getting across what I’m trying to say. Basically, it’s awkward to watch sexy stuff with people you aren’t having sex with.
It’s not that nudity is dirty, or bad. (Well, some people think so, but I don’t think that’s the main issue.) It’s that nudity (outside of certain contexts) is embarrassing.
Most of us would be embarrassed to be seen naked, by the wrong person or in the wrong place. And we might well be embarrassed to see someone else naked, depending on who or where they were, if it was in a situation when we weren’t expecting to see someone naked.
And that, I think, is a big part of what’s behind the restrictions on nudity in America, whether on TV or in public: many of us just don’t want the embarrassment of having to see naked people when we’re not expecting to.
(Yeah, I know: that still leaves the question of why we’re embarrassed about seeing nudity, and whether we should be.)
It was in the headlines for weeks after it happened, resurfaced several times later as the court cases progressed, and was a late-night punch line for over a year. More than half a million people complained to the FCC. The FCC fined the network $550,000 (which compared to Super Bowl ad revenues is peanuts, but its still a large sum). “Debacle” seems like a fair term, and I find it hard to believe that anyone in this country would be unable to remember that it happened.
Cayuga: thanks! You said what I would have…better. Another thing that came out of it was that many of the (very few) remaining live tv broadcasts were switched to time-delay, adding a significant extra cost to production.
I’ve never really understood why anyone would make a big deal out of being outraged regarding what they see on TV. My attitude is that since I don’t like TV, I don’t watch TV. This protects me from both nudity and violence, as well as profanity, moronic political commentary, conspiracy theories regarding the moon landings, and a great deal more.
Some Americans that don’t remember it are graduating into high school because they were too young to remember when it happened. How long is this singularly stupid episode going to be paraded up to prove how dumb we are?
Something a lot of people in this country probably don’t remember is that in 1997 Lucy Lawless (TV’s Xena, Warrior Princess) performed “The Star Spangled Banner” before a hockey game on live television…and at the end, one of her breasts popped out of her strapless top. There was little, if any, public outcry. Of course there wouldn’t have been nearly as many people watching this hockey game as watch the Super Bowl and Janet Jackson is more famous than Lucy Lawless, but Lawless was something of a sex symbol at the time and her wardrobe malfunction was covered in the national media. But IIRC, it was just considered a minor, silly/mildly racy story about a celebrity. Lawless got teased about it on Leno, and that was about it. The incident doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia article, as the 2004 Super Bowl incident does.
It seems unlikely to me that general American attitudes about a woman’s nipple being exposed at a televised sporting event changed dramatically in just seven years. I was living overseas in 2004 so I wasn’t hearing firsthand the reactions of many Americans, but I can believe that whatever concern/outrage there was came mostly from people who suspected that Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction had been planned.
Lamia: I remember the Lucy Lawless incident. I wonder if one of the differences is in the vast number of protest letters written in the two events. We know that the Super Bowl incident produced a huge flood of letters, but did the hockey game incident? The letter-writing storm was much of what forced it to be a major issue, rather than the amusing so-what that it ought to be.
The current scandal (?) regarding Anne Hathaway not wearing any panties is currently hot stuff on the right-wing-hate-radio circle-jerk of conservative talking points.
(But, to be fair, they do the same whenever a celebrity hits anyone, so violence doesn’t get any kind of free pass.)
I think the distinction is fallacious. If someone went out in “simulated” nudity, to the degree of being indistinguishable from the real thing, they would not be tolerated in the U.S., and would very likely fall afoul of the law. Meanwhile, tv and movie violence is (in many cases) visually indistinguishable from the real thing. When you have really good special effects of heads being blown open, the argument, “It’s only simulated” doesn’t carry all that much weight.
When was the last time you recall seeing a bare female nipple on network TV? Serious question. It seems to me that as cable has become much freer with the female nudity, network TV has gotten ever raunchier with the dialogue, but much more conservative with the visuals.
Until we can once again see a bare nipple during medical dramas when they’re defibrillating a patient.
No, it really has turned even more puritanical at the same time as fashion has become more and more revealing, and ads more and more suggestive. My first view of a bare breast on screen was in the execrable Johnny Be Good, rated PG-13 in 1988. In 1997, Titanic recieved a PG-13 rating despite a very sexualized bare breast scene. Now, bare female breasts in a sexual context are an automatic R rating.
I’ve never spoken to anybody that actually agreed with the “outrage” over Janet Jackson’s nipple. Everyone I know, and everyone I talked to, all said that the hoopla over it was stupid. I realize anecdotes don’t prove anything, but that seriously felt like a very manufactured controversy.
