SEX ON AMERICAN TELEVISION
If aliens came to Earth and watched only
US network and commercial cable television, they would believe Humans had
sex exclusively in bras and panties, pants, sometimes men's briefs.
In high school in the mid 70's, when I went to any R rated movie, I was almost certain to see exposed
breasts, often full female frontal nudity. Today, one must turn to pornography, or to see any nudity in a more or less mainstream production, to pay
cable series such as Spartacus or Game of Thrones.
Also when I was in high school, a lot of
teenaged girls were getting pregnant because information about sex was
unavailable to them. Free and open talk about sex over the internet has made that
phenomenon almost non-existent. Plenty of teenaged girls still get pregnant,
but it isn't because they don't know better.
I personally dislike pornography, and I
tremble to think about 12 year olds learning about sex from the faceless acrobatics they are likely to see on the internet. However, it seems the more proliferation of pornography that there is, the more acceptable that it becomes, and the more that young people seem to know about sex, the more conservative the CARA team, that is, the folks at the Organization of Classification and
Rating Administration (part of the Motion Picture
Association of America, inc.) becomes. We are left with a media that shows almost no beautiful nudity or tender, realistic sex (aside, perhaps, from the brutal realism of many rape scenes).
But CARA is conservative only about nudity. Not about violence.
Bar none, the most gruesome bit of violence I've ever seen in any movie or TV show was on FX, a commercial cable network that adheres to network standards of
nudity and violence, on the prime-time program Nip/Tuck. In the episode I
saw (the last episode of the series I ever watched) a woman wanted an elective mastectomy. It seemed a reasonable request, because every
woman in her family's history had gotten breast cancer and many of them had
died from it. The plastic surgeons on the show unequivocally told her
they would not do the operation. The day after receiving this news
the woman came into the waiting room of the surgeons' office and sawed off
her breast with an electric carving knife. One could see the viscera inside the breast; flesh and blood flew
everywhere. But I suspect many Americans were gratified that neither they, nor their impressionable children, once saw a nipple.
