A grain of truth amidst a beach of madness....

[feren]

Bill Left, a morning deejay on WNND (the 80s and 90s station I am always listening to) succinctly summed up what's wrong with American culture today when he said, "And once more this goes to prove that naked people [on tv] are bad, but killing people as violently as possible is perfectly okay."

owner of a lonely heart

Comments

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[feren.livejournal.com]

[people who were raving about the Janet Jackson boob thingee and I bring up the awful violence on TV. Boy, they shut up right away.]

I'm not sure which is higher -- the body count in your average episode of Weekly Action TV Series [too many examples to choose from] or the body count in your average Terminator film. And then we have the evening news, which brings us all sorts of fun. If it's okay for our kids to watch some guy's head being blown off by an RPG in a movie or on the news, where is the problem with Jackson flashing the Super Bowl? Would somebody tell me why are we losing our collective minds over a nipple? A nipple is a lot less likely to injure somebody than a depleted-uranium explosive-tipped chemround fired from a tank!

I'll be honest here... I think the problem isn't that we have too much nudity on television, I think we don't have enough. Like Denis Leary said, men are absolutely mollified by nipples. If we saw more nipples on television we'd be too busy staring to go out and start barfights! And I dare you to imagine how peaceful things would be if we saw more than nipples! And hey, I'm a progressive guy... if men get to see naked women then by all means women should get to see naked men by the bucketload. Bring on the Chippendale dancers without their little posing pouches. Nudity for all! In my mind kids could do a lot worse than to see a naked man or a naked woman once in a while on TV when there's other garbage on with depressing regularity (I think of trailer-trash fighting over a block of moldy cheese three channels down on the Jerry Springer Show for some reason).

[Oh, I am one of Ted's friends]

A pleasure to meet you. You must be brave to be posting in my little center of angst. ;)

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[mesmericone.livejournal.com]

Thanks and I totally agree w/your statements. I am sure one of the reasons for less violence in Europe is the fact that they have little to no violence on TV.

A naked human body is a thing of art for pete's sake. Plus, if parents were parents and monitored their child's viewing habits, I think that things would be a lot better as well.

I love your philosphy about men w/nipples:) I can really see that:) hee,hee.....

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[aynjel.livejournal.com]

Ahh, but violence is socially acceptable. Sexuality is not.

Somewhat flip, but mostly true.

There's still an extremely repressed mindset that sexuality, and any blatent evidence of it (i.e., female nipples and men's naked dicks), is going to totally destroy the core of civilization (at least in this country). We have, to a certain extent, become desensitized to violence because there is so much "fantasy violence" (action movies, video games). Perhaps we need more realistic, more accessible games like Larry the Lounge Lizard or whatever it was. Plunk that in the hands of teenagers and let 'em go to town. Then maybe seeing nekkid bodies won't be such a big deal and maybe the cosmetics industry and the plastic surgery industry will get the smack-down the so righteously deserve when people realize that not everyone looks like Barbie or Ken.

Huh. I seem to have lost my point somewhere in there. I'm doing that a lot lately...