Thread: Why is sex inappropriate?

You can certainly publish anything you want these days - maybe just not in the particular forum you want..

Originally Posted by CloudlessSky

Well yea but I don't think there was sex on tv in the 60's, and the hippie revolution did influence it but it took much more time for it to seep into US culture. The 1960's wasn't just one big acid trip at woodstock watching jimi hendrix and the grateful dead jam out on the guitar, most of the US was still conservative.

Absolutely - but the cultural revolution was underground - mainstream media remained firmly under control of conservatives until near the end of the 60's by which time the revolution had won by completely unexpected means - a new generation had grown up filled with countercultural ideas and rebelling against their conservative parents. As always happens with prohibition it doesn't actually stop anything, just makes it forbidden fruit and creates a huge underground traffic in it.

I totally agree with a lot being said in this thred. When you look at the situation...why is watching a scene from final destination more allowable than a scene from showgirls? With a parent, anyone can watch final destination at any age. Showgirls? NO....you have to be 17 to watch it. I really don't understand the law, and i really don't understand why we as humans feel uncomfortable about it. Without sex none of us would be here. Without murder, this place would be a lot better.

There's a movie called Antichrist with William Defoe where sex is portrayed pretty viscerally. It's rated X, but it's not meant to arouse you. In fact, it more or less does the opposite. Should it be marketed under pornography because it shows full penetration even though it's a horror film? Should it be sold in adult movie stores? If you'd seen it, you'd know the answer is absolutely not, adult film stores carry films specifically to masturbate to, and just because two films have full penetration doesn't mean they serve the same purpose.

Likewise, having poetry moved to SB simply because one of them is vulgar is a slap in the face. And I want to know why a little vulgarity automatically turns something from artist corner material to SB material. That, I find to be truly senseless.

Originally Posted by Auron

I totally agree with a lot being said in this thred. When you look at the situation...why is watching a scene from final destination more allowable than a scene from showgirls? With a parent, anyone can watch final destination at any age. Showgirls? NO....you have to be 17 to watch it. I really don't understand the law, and i really don't understand why we as humans feel uncomfortable about it. Without sex none of us would be here. Without murder, this place would be a lot better.

^ Kind of similar to why is alcohol legal when it kills millions every year and destroys families, while people are being thrown in jail for puffing on a joint.

Originally Posted by Original Poster

My concern is not my ability to see what I want so much as my ability to publish what I want. But I'll get back to that later. Right now the mainstream media is sexualized, but sex itself remains pretty taboo. It's all revealed through innuendo. And music videos are allowed to arouse and confuse the fuck out of kids without actually being pornographic. That doesn't seem healthy to me, either. Death certainly comes before sex, but there are plenty of ways to explain death to a child that is not violent, such as the death of a pet or a grandparent. Violent death is a different story, because we as a society are desensitized to violence. I'm not saying violent imagery should be banned, of course, I'm simply saying it's a lot less healthy to become desensitized to violence as it is sex and nudity. MTV does not actually desensitize kids to sex, anyways. It arouses them but keeps it just taboo enough to remain arousing through seeming dirty and forbidden. And it becomes a forbidden fruit.

I don't think that being more honest about sex means automatically that families have to watch porn together. I simply think the taboo is causing a mental illness. And you can't exactly cite the 50s as a healthier time and place. The more forbidden it's been to talk about sex, the greater the mental illness has been. Why do you think table legs from the victorian era all looked like penises?

The main reason it is banned is because its much easier for young teens to rationalize having sex with each other than it is for them to kill each other. If your concern is that you want to publish a tv show with sex and breasts than go ahead and propose it to a pay-per-view channel or a subscription channel. Or if not go ahead and make your own channel. But that is the reason most people want a ban on sex. Now seeing that your name is Original Poster and your avatar is the mask from V from Vendetta, I take it you are from 4chan and you have seen quite a lot of "cheese pizza". I am not saying your agenda is to make that more acceptable but it certainly does seem like a logical conclusion.

If you want to watch or publish a show with breasts you can easily do that on an adult channel like HBO, showtime, or cinemax, etc. If you want sex on the disney channel or on a news channel or any other public channel (They all have to go by the same rules) its just plain unprofessional and you're not going to get anywhere with that debate. With that said, there is nothing else to debate. Good day.

^ Can I Like that all except for the last 2 sentences?

I think part of the issue of sex as taboo is that it is just such a complex subject for parents to grapple with kids. As I said earlier, I am not at all comfortable talking with my mother about sex, and in this culture that's normal. My mother on the other hand does not understand why I am not comfortable (she thinks I am a Puritan), and it occurs to me that the fact that she lives in France while I live in the US has a lot to do with that: very different cultural norms. Here we have strong taboo against parents and children discussing sex, even though at some point there is the talk, but there is an expectation that pretty much before and after that we can avoid talking about it as parents and children. My seven year old son this morning wanted to know, why girls are more comfortable than boys, and what I thought was "Because you are probably heterosexual." But what I said was "They are just more comfortable to you, and that's ok. To me boys are more comfortable. We all have our preferences." which was a way of answering the question without mentioning the dreaded s word. And while he is still seven I think that is the right answer. I just hope that I will have the nerves to answer his questions truthfully once he grows too old for such half-answers, without it being extra-awkward for both of us, or maybe the extra-awkwardness just cannot be avoided.

Originally Posted by CloudlessSky

The main reason it is banned is because its much easier for young teens to rationalize having sex with each other than it is for them to kill each other. If your concern is that you want to publish a tv show with sex and breasts than go ahead and propose it to a pay-per-view channel or a subscription channel. Or if not go ahead and make your own channel. But that is the reason most people want a ban on sex. Now seeing that your name is Original Poster and your avatar is the mask from V from Vendetta, I take it you are from 4chan and you have seen quite a lot of "cheese pizza". I am not saying your agenda is to make that more acceptable but it certainly does seem like a logical conclusion.

If you want to watch or publish a show with breasts you can easily do that on an adult channel like HBO, showtime, or cinemax, etc. If you want sex on the disney channel or on a news channel or any other public channel (They all have to go by the same rules) its just plain unprofessional and you're not going to get anywhere with that debate. With that said, there is nothing else to debate. Good day.

I'm much more comfortable with teen sex than teen violence. But actually yes, teens and young adults are committing violence, mass murders, etc. Not a good thing, and not purely caused by the saturation and glorification of violence but certainly not free from its influence, either. That'd be like saying the sexualization of MTV has no effect on teen sex even though it obviously does. But honestly talking about sex will not increase the sexualization. I have a major problem with the fact that society is so majorly sexualized but the actual topic of sex is taboo. That is just fucked up, as well as counter productive. Now stop using strawmen.

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

Absolutely - but the cultural revolution was underground - mainstream media remained firmly under control of conservatives until near the end of the 60's by which time the revolution had won by completely unexpected means - a new generation had grown up filled with countercultural ideas and rebelling against their conservative parents. As always happens with prohibition it doesn't actually stop anything, just makes it forbidden fruit and creates a huge underground traffic in it.

yes but still now that you've admitted the 1960's was still conservative you agree with my original point with how the 1950's and 1960's was very restrictive. I feel like since people were not paying that much attention to these restrictions their focus was more on being the first country on the moon, producing GREAT comic books, pretty much all the superheros we still make movies about today, getting insane olympic medals, making vast improvements in technology, and all these other great things done in these years. You have to wonder if having the public see sex and violence every day distracts them from achieving these great feats. That is what is truly important to me, what influences a society to achieve greatness, and what distracts it from doing so.

Only the very narrow mainstream media was conservative through the 60's, and at that time they had the monopoly on television, but liberal media was publishing underground - books, music, FM radio came along and broke the stranglehold of pop hit AM radio. The big story was Hollywood - and I love this one..

The old conservative Hollywood studios were all teetering on the brink of bankruptcy in the late 60's because they had become totally out of date and irrelevant - the elderly tycoons who had founded the studios in the 20's and 30's were totally out of touch with the new public tastes, and nobody went to see their movies anymore, until along came the New Hollywood - guys like Lucas and Spielberg and Scorsese and a whole host of liberal directors & producers known as the Film School Generation and influenced by European avant-garde films of the 50's & 60's, which were finally available to the American public thanks to arthouse theaters and other underground venues. Out of sheer desperation the old Hollywood studio heads hired these guys and gave them carte blanche to make their own films their own way - it was the beginning of Auteurism in the US and it saved Hollywood - suddenly we started getting relevant films like The Graduate, Easy Rider, and many more that actually spoke to real people who were sick of old-fashioned repressive entertainment lite. Thus were the 70's ushered in - until the 80's by which time the studios were mega-rich in a whole new unprecedented way and were beginning on their current trend of mega-blockbusters as big investments with the only goal being the biggest profit imaginable. Unfortunately this mentality has led to the demise or near demise of decent artistic films coming from Hollywood, aside from the indie market.

And you know the moon landing was nothing more than a political ploy to make America look greater than Russia, right? They were kicking our ass in the space race so we had to do something - Kennedy just created the moon landing as a way to make Americans feel superior again and have greater confidence in government. But I do agree with you that I wish Obama and comapny would do something decent now and then - it seems every time he opens his mouth he's just making justifications for his messed-up programs that serve nobody but corporations.

I don't think it was ever the public that did anything great, was it? Certainly people winning Olympic medals wouldn't be distracted much by whatever's on television. And we've taken huge strides in technology since then - it's moving much faster now than it ever did in those days. I think the change since then that makes everything suck isn't because of technology but a change in cultural attitude - now corporations are only in it to increase their profit margin as much as possible, they do it however they can whether strictly legal or not, because they own the candidates they pay to get elected, and they don't have to answer to anyone. Plus media doesn't seem to hold anyone accountable for anything anymore, the way say Woodward and Bernstein did back in the day. Mainstream media as well as cable and internet media seems mostly to be partisan and heavily biased. I see no tough journalism anymore.

You also have to keep in mind that some of the content of the 70s and 80s, on both television and in film, greatly surpasses modern film and television in controversy. At least regarding vulgarity and nudity.

True - things swung way past middle ground to counter the repression of the 50's and mainstream 60's, then balanced out better. But I think your choice of words might explain your dilemma -

vulgarity and nudity

I haven't seen the poem you're talking about - I might have seen the beginning of it on Live Posts if it involved a handlebar mustache and tying a damsel to the tracks - but I'm wondering if what's objectionable about it might be vulgarity rather than sexuality?

It's currently in SB, and it's probably vulgarity but the vulgarity is only vulgarity because it's sexually explicit. The one about tying a girl to train tracks was my replacement thread, which I may or may not include some of my cruder poems in at a later date

At least it only got moved into SB, rather than deleted and infracted. But you might want to start a Meta thread about it?

Nah I asked for it to be moved back and the mods said fuck no so I just made a new thread. This thread was created because someone on irc was using circular logic about following rules and what not and I figure if they won't examine the purpose behind things maybe ED will.

Showing of private areas isn't sex, it's only provocative and graphic.

Oh lawd, I hate that too. You can be as violent as you want on screen but the moment you show a nipple, people kick up a ruckus. It's fucking stupid.

In North American society, sex is in this weird gray area where it's both glorified but still somewhat taboo at the same time. Kinda like marijuana but to a higher degree. You have it shoved down your throat (pardon the pun) at every turn (tv, songs, movies, etc) and it's hyped so much to the point where you're expected to have sex frequently... but if you do, you're looked down upon and shamed for being "loose." dfsadfsgfaw

It's that overly glorified-yet-taboo status that makes people think sex is a really big deal, when it really isn't. If it wasn't so taboo, I don't think we'd have such a problem with teen pregnancy, STD's etc. Just like how removing that "forbidden fruit" factor eliminates or reduces interest in drugs, we as a society need to start doing that with sex.

I have a cousin that used to be really interested in marijuana - would listen to weed-related songs, look up bud related videos, smoke paper with his dumbass friends while they'd pretend it was a joint, etc. Instead of telling him it's bad like every "responsible" adult would, I let him smoke with me. Always made sure he was smoking small amounts, told him about it can become a bad habit if you don't keep your priorities straight, said he should focus more on school now and hold off on smoking until he's older, etc. He was in 7th grade (11 years old) when I started smoking with him, and now he's in 8th grade and no longer has any interest in it.

All I had to avoid was: glorifying it, making a big deal out of it, mentioning it 24/7.
All I had to do was: properly educate him on the matter, tell him he can afford to wait until he's older, remove the forbidden fruit appeal

That's all we need to do with sex. Now, obviously we can't offer kids sex like I offered bud to my cousin, but the rest is easily doable. Just tell them about the dangers but don't exaggerate like teachers do during sexual (mis)education class.