I don't get it. Violence, good. Sex, NO NO NO WE CANT HAVE THAT!!!

[KyuubiNoKitsune-Hime]

Oh and why is Anita brought up in every thread at every possible chance? I cannot for the life of me understand the weird obsession with her.

Because people think she's an actual threat to freedom of speech and freedom of expression, that she's not only trying, but fully capable of getting games banned for having boobies in them.

 

[CaitSeith]

You're comparing pears to apples. Violence is too broad, sex is pretty specific. You have to either compare violence and sexuality; or torture and sex.

well thats a very odd choice of example. if you think violence is sexuallity then sex would be equivalent to torture? SO biascally you are saying that sex is the worst part of sexuality?

Not the worst; but the extreme or a practical use. But if you have a better example, you're free to share.

 

[happyninja42]

You're comparing pears to apples. Violence is too broad, sex is pretty specific. You have to either compare violence and sexuality; or torture and sex.

I disagree, considering that the OP's question is the presentation of those broad subjects, and which ones have the most taboos and restrictions on them. A sex to violence comparison is perfectly fine. Because it doesn't really matter the type of violence being depicted in the media, it's usually more acceptable to show, than anything remotely sexual. You can have people dying in explosions, gun fights, sword fights, pretty much you name it, if it's a way that someone can be injured/killed, it's more likely to be allowed for the viewing public, compared to something sexual.

OT: As to the question of why, it's because most of the religions of the world, have very specific taboos about sex, and what is dirty/sinful, while most of them have at least at one time, thoroughly embraced violence, frequently in the name of their god. It's a form of currency that is more familiar to just about every culture, and something that they endorse frequently. As to why the various gods people believe in are so hung up on sex, I have no idea. Though there is a book by a particular atheist (I forget his name), that delves into the subject of why gods are so interested in what you do with your nekked time. My personal theory is that since the various religious rulers used, and still use it, to control the population, the easiest way to do that, and to insure that your followers make more people for your religion, is to declare ownership of sex and procreation, and set up specific rules about it, so they do it in ways that help to foster your rule. You can't have them thinking it's ok to have sex with whomever they like, no, they can only have sex with someone they marry (in accordance with the religion), and that person also has to be of the same faith. Thereby locking in 2 people to the faith, and having a much higher chance that all their offspring will be locked into your faith too, and thus giving you their money so you can continue to rule.

This has lessened over the generations, as the cultures have evolved to realize a lot of those rules are total bullshit, but the legacy of that sexual branding is still evident in our cultures. And the fact that examples of sex in religions are usually used as a cautionary tale to avoid punishment. I can't think of an example of sex (at least in Christianity), that was presented as a good thing. Usually it was "somebody did something sexy, and got punished for it". But there are tons of examples of righteous battle in the name of god, cleansing the heathens and all that jazz. So, yeah, from the start, there is a bit of a bias to "Violence good (when it's sanctioned by us)" and "sex bad".

 

[sageoftruth]

I thought Shamus Young wrote a pretty good article about that a couple years ago.

Spoiler: Experienced Points:Why is a Bare Breast More Offensive Than a Severed Arm?

Source

This question gets asked a lot. "Why is a bare breast more offensive than a severed arm?" This question - or one like it - has been around in one form or another for decades and is usually presented as a challenge or a demand for explanation regarding the way movies are rated, marketed, and edited.

Then videogames came along and suddenly the difference is even more extreme: Games with nudity or frank discussions about sexuality are hard to find, and when they do show up they're usually very controversial. Meanwhile, games about murdering hundreds of people are so common that it barely warrants a mention. It was a big deal when Catherine came out and suddenly we had a videogame that talked about sex and relationships, but Hollywood makes a dozen movies around those concepts every year. Our fixation on violence and aversion to sex has always been seen as a kind of strange thing (particularly to Europeans regarding American culture) and gets dragged up every couple of years when one side goes "too far" with their content, or when people complain a little too vigorously about seeing something they don't like.

This question is usually framed as a criticism of the broader culture in general: "Why is it okay to cut off someone's arm, but not okay to show them naked? What kind of sick culture loves violence and hates sex?" I think this question is kind of misleading, and makes some faulty assumptions about why we choose certain forms of entertainment and how they make us feel.

Before I dig into this, I need to drag one argument out behind the shed and shoot it, because otherwise it's the only thing people will discuss in the comments: Your particular standards for what is "offensive" are no more valid than anyone else's. Everyone seems to think that their attitudes to the human body are perfectly normal, and that everyone else has these strange fixations or hang-ups. When arguing about what's appropriate for "family" entertainment or what's fit for (say) television, we usually see arguments like this:

1) Can you believe those people, freaking out over bare arms and bellies? As long as you can't see a woman's nipples, it's just fine for family entertainment.

2) Nipples? What's the big deal about nipples? Men have nipples! What makes female nipples magically offensive? It's all good, as long as we don't see anyone's genetailia.

3) What's so bad about showing genetailia? We all have them! It's natural! What is it with you religious nuts obsessing over private parts? It's not like we're showing people screwing.

4) Why not show people screwing? It's natural. I mean, as long as you're only showing two people at a time, and they're attractive, and not doing anything too kinky, I don't see what the big deal is.

5) Well actually...

George Carlin once said, "Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?" The same idea applies here. We all seem to think that everyone more conservative than us is a prude, and everyone less conservative is some kind of sex-crazed hedonist. We tend to classify things as offensive if they're shocking or go beyond the norms we're used to, and these norms are generally shaped by stuff like tradition, climate, and viewing habits. You can criticize American attitudes if you want to, but you likely have someone on the other side of you who says the exact same things about your culture. So for now let's set aside debates on who are the prudes and who are the hedonists and just accept that the border between mundane, edgy, and offensive is really blurry and trying to draw definitive lines anywhere is probably not an awesome use of our time.

Getting back to the main question: "Why is a bare [body part] more offensive than [violent act]?" Let's look at this in passive media (movies and television) before we consider the videogame side of it.

Most passive media is created with the expectation that it will be a communal experience. The vast majority of people go to the theater with someone. Television is often produced with the expectation or understanding that people will watch it together. Violence works for this because we all have basically the same type of reaction to violence. When something violent happens we experience cringing discomfort, body horror, or visceral satisfaction, depending on who was hurt and how they were hurt. Maybe I'm more grossed out than you, but in general everyone is feeling roughly the same thing.

This isn't true for sexual content. When naked bodies and sexual activity appear on screen, we're suddenly having very personal experiences that are probably disconnected from the experiences around us. Maybe one person is aroused. Another will feel inadequate or self-conscious about their own body. Another will feel embarrassed. Someone else will be grossed out. Someone else will find the whole thing ridiculous to the point of comedy. Someone who isn't yet sexually active can find the images scary or confusing. Another person stops thinking about the movie and begins worrying about what everyone else is feeling. We're no longer having a communal experience, we're having divergent experiences.

More importantly, arousal is a very personal thing and we're more particular about when and where we want to feel it. I don't mind being grossed out in front of my mom, but I definitely don't want to be aroused in front of my mom. Making something sexually titillating immediately makes it something that you don't want to see in certain situations. People aren't so much upset by what they're seeing as what they're feeling. While you can ease the impact of violent imagery by reminding yourself it's "just a movie", that's not so easy to do with sexual content. That really is a naked person and they really are affecting you on a physiological level. You can stop believing in a movie, but you can't control what sorts of things arouse or embarrass you.

This probably explains why people are so much more prickly when it comes to sexual content versus violent content. It's not that people think murder is better than sex, it's that sexual content makes them feel things they don't want to feel and turns communal entertainment into a moment of shared awkwardness. This is especially problematic in the world of television, where you look for content by surfing channels and you don't have a convenient way of knowing what sorts of content you're going to be exposed to ahead of time. This creates the dreaded "danger surf", where other people (the kids, or grandma, or your neighbor) enter the living room in the middle of your channel surf and suddenly it's your job to land on something tolerable that isn't going to shock, offend, or traumatize the other people in the room.

I don't want to make it sound like adult content never has a place on the small screen. But some people do feel that way, and I understand why. I get why they feel that television should be an inherently family-friendly medium. This problem has been made much, much worse by American cable companies insisting on selling their channels in bundles. As I pointed out above, everyone has a different idea of what is "okay", and bundles are a horrible system for dealing with gradients like this.

So that's television: A horrible tug-of-war between the family "prudes" who want to be able to channel-surf with the kids and the "hedonistic" singles who will reliably watch anything with gorgeous and sexually provocative young people in it. Throw in terrible cable service, the long-standing trend of content getting racier over time, the background culture war that's always going on, and the occasional accidental escalation of content levels and you've got a pretty good system for pissing people off and creating lots of silly moral panic.

So what about videogames? As odd as sex can be in movies and television, at least they have sex. What's the deal with an industry where massive body counts are the norm and human sexuality is barely acknowledged? Videogames don't have the drawbacks that you find in passive media. A single-player game is obviously designed for one person, so you don't have the problem of social awkwardness when you're viewing something salacious in mixed company. Their labeling is better than movies, offering details about what sort of content the game has to offer instead of a silly age rating. They're [over] marketed to young males, who are by far the biggest consumers of sex-themed media.

It seems like a marketing no-brainer: Put more titillating sex in the game and sell even more to those young males everyone is so interested in. Forget the "Citizen Kane" of videogames, why hasn't anyone tried to make the Eyes Wide Shut, Chasing Amy, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, or Porkys of videogames? (And just to be clear, I'm not suggesting these are all great movies. Also, I'm talking about games ABOUT sex, not games with sex as gameplay. I'm not talking about pornographic games, but simply games where characters have or pursue some sort of sex life.)

But rather than chalk this up to puritanical attitudes to sex or a lust for violence, I think there are a lot of really practical reasons why sex doesn't show up in videogames. Assuming you're not making some sort of juvenile stick-thrusting minigame like hot coffee, then a game about sex is probably a game about people and relationships, and we've never been good at systemizing that sort of thing. We can't do games where people talk about sex for the same reason we can't do games about contract negotiation, subterfuge in diplomacy, or philosophical debate. Computers are too stupid to act as a proper conversational foil for the player. The best you could do is have a BioWare-style conversation wheel, and that would probably be really sad and awkward.

Worse, the "divergent experiences" problem becomes even more extreme in interactive media. If we all react differently to sexual content in passive media, then we're going to react even more strongly when we're asked to participate. I might be able to sit through an uncomfortable sex scene, but I really don't want to pick up and controller and push the characters into it.

So before we condemn our society as monsters because we don't have more sex and less violence in games, let's remember that this trend is more a reflection of what computers can do and less a reflection of what we value as a society.

Makes a lot of sense to me.

While I think he did a great job at covering why sex makes less sense from a business/entertainment standpoint, I don't think it covered why people express moral outrage over sex. He clearly covered why sex might put me off a game or a movie more than violence would. However, I'm still curious about why people feel the need to shield their children from it, lodge formal complaints, and even protest against it being in certain media. Where do people make the connection that "I didn't enjoy it" = "It's morally reprehensible!"?

My first guess would be that some people see the "sex is wrong" approach as an easy way for them to justify their discomfort as being the moral high ground, but I'm open to other ideas.

 

[happyninja42]

It's because sex makes babies so is therefore just the worst thing ever. You can't punch a baby into someone.

NOT: For the love of god please don't list scenarios where you could punch a baby into someone!

Actually, there is an old myth from...I think the Civil War era in the United States, about a woman (or possibly multiple) women, being impregnated by a bullet. I'm not even kidding. The story being that a man was shot in the balls, and got some of the stored semen on the bullett, which then, amazingly then penetrated the womb of the woman, and got her pregnant. I'm confident, that like the immaculate conception, this was just a story made up by a young, pregnant woman out of wedlock, and grasping at any excuse she could pass off as to why she got pregnant, that didn't involve her being an evil dirty slut who had sex!! So yeah, total bullshit, but the story does exist.

 

[happyninja42]

It's because sex makes babies so is therefore just the worst thing ever. You can't punch a baby into someone.

NOT: For the love of god please don't list scenarios where you could punch a baby into someone!

Actually, there is an old myth from...I think the Civil War era in the United States, about a woman (or possibly multiple) women, being impregnated by a bullet. I'm not even kidding. The story being that a man was shot in the balls, and got some of the stored semen on the bullett, which then, amazingly then penetrated the womb of the woman, and got her pregnant. I'm confident, that like the immaculate conception, this was just a story made up by a young, pregnant woman out of wedlock, and grasping at any excuse she could pass off as to why she got pregnant, that didn't involve her being an evil dirty slut who had sex!! So yeah, total bullshit, but the story does exist.

I actually knew that one. Mythbusters did. It was pretty great because it went a lot like your post. The entire time they were testing it they were giving background and different ways it could be possible but then by the end it was just "I mean obviously she just fucked someone though."

Yeah, Mythbusters, that's where I saw that. I knew I saw it somewhere, but couldn't recall what. Though the punch impregnation example makes me think of Fist of the North Star style punching, with the end result being a fully gestated baby. YATATTATATATATATATATATAAAAAA! "You know are bearing twin girls. Your delivery date is in 3 weeks. You are welcome."

 

[Synigma]

*snip*
... Hell, sodomy laws were only struck down thirteen years ago by the federal supreme court and right now we've got a pet adoption bill in Michigan that may very deliberately be trying to criminalize sodomy again*

**Not because the legislature is stupid but because the population is stupid. They typically don't have to justify the legality of an action to somebody who agrees with it.

I just had a friend telling me about this bill and how mad he is about everyone turning it into something it's not. Fact is this stuff has been illegal in Michigan for almost 100 years already, the bill is changing some of the surrounding wording without removing it. The guy trying to get it passed to protect pets (something everyone is in favour of) didn't want to mess with the details and stir up unnecessary trouble (since the human part is already un-constitutional anyway).

Defendants of this part of Logan's Law believed that if striking "with mankind" was part of SB 219, this powerful law aimed at preventing another tragedy like what happened to Logan[footnote]a March, 2012, incident in which a Michigan husky named Logan was blinded and then died after being burnt by acid.[/footnote] would be delayed or even struck down entirely due to the heated nature of discussions about sex.[footnote]Article here: http://www.inquisitr.com/2775741/michigan-was-not-trying-to-ban-sodomy-with-logans-law-it-was-simply-not-un-banning-it/#X6w2bSePQ7dwvUX6.99[/footnote]

That does bring us back to the US being way too hung up on sex though. Or perhaps it's just that they think everyone else is way too hung up on it? Like this guy didn't even want to chance arguing between conservatives over an un-constitutional piece of legislature... but maybe it's just in his head? Maybe it's just in Hollywood's head that people would be so against sex in movies?

Meh, at the end of the day I still blame religion.

 

[Strazdas]

You're comparing pears to apples. Violence is too broad, sex is pretty specific. You have to either compare violence and sexuality; or torture and sex.

well thats a very odd choice of example. if you think violence is sexuallity then sex would be equivalent to torture? SO biascally you are saying that sex is the worst part of sexuality?

Not the worst; but the extreme or a practical use. But if you have a better example, you're free to share.

so the practical use of violence is torture? I think a much better practical use of violence would be prevention of something worse to happen. For example the use of violence to defend yourself or others from an attacker. As far as my example goes, heres what i think: Sex is the end object of sexuality, thus we should find equivalent end object of violence here. Thats a bit tricky because violence is used for many reasons, but the msot common trope in media is violence being used to defeat dangerous villians. So sex to sexuality would be as victory to violence.

 

[Ikasury]

https://youtu.be/TKhrQhdxjI8

Sex and Violence by the Exploited

kinda my response to this silliness

Ot: because 'murica is a CHRISTIAN NATION! >.< i actually had this discussion with a german friend, she did not understand why Lemons were banned from sites or why troll-wankers would harrass people about written porn when no one else cares... because some people aren't getting any and don't want everyone else getting anything...

plus the whole sad state of our supposed 'sex education', its weird being in a biology class in college and people don't know that sperm meets egg and that's where babies come from... this whole 'hush hush sex is taboo' thing is going to get us all killed...

since obviously thanks to new virtual reality technology we won't be needing 'real' sex anymore and most of us will never interact with another human being again... hooray! our species is doomed!

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-e...-put-on-hold-due-to-high-demand-a6855981.html

just saying~

who cares about violence? we're going to die out anyway~ XD

 

[___________________]

The world's governments understood a while back that the media is a powerful endocrination tool. If you show lots of violence people become less prone to violence, less prone to fight, more stable and easily controlable, like livestock. Because they have an escape from violence without having to get into confrontations directly.

By saying sex is bad and demonizing pornography and such, they make it more appealing because it's a no no place. Leading to people's current view on sexuality and long term relationships. Ever wondered why people are more addicted to sex than before? Why relationships don't last? Why women are increasingly objectified and subconsciously want to be objects and can't process love as well as they used to? All that and more leads to men losing interest in a number of things. Society becomes more feminine, much less masculine, no balance. The end result is the world you live in today. Where right is wrong. Where we accept war in other contries complacently, where men act more like women, more passive-aggressivly. Where no one stands up for anything and most people think that waving signs in the air or liking a page on facebook makes a difference.

Eventually producers, developers, directors, whatever, end up doing it because they already think that way so it becomes automatic.

Sounds strange and farfeched doesn't it? Well, it's human nature to copy what you see when you're a baby, so why should that die down when you grow older? It doesn't in most cases. If you were in "power", wouldn't you want to be more in control? Wouldn't you want to subdue people just a tiny little more so they'd be less hectic? So if the option to demonize something through the media presented itself, wouldn't you go for it? So easy, untraceable back to you. Tempting isn't it?


There you go brother. The media is a very easy to use tool for manipulation and a very scary one because it works so well and almost no one notices. Those who do notice aren't many and don't know each other most of the times. And it has been builp up for quit a few decades now. That way of being.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

Well, after video games were created, violent crime went down...

#badscience