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I will never understand this obsession over nudity in US broadcasts while violence is ignored. Where I grew up it was the opposite. Movies like The Terminator

I will never understand this obsession over nudity in US broadcasts while violence is ignored. Where I grew up it was the opposite. Movies like The Terminator were heavily censored but you could see a man fully nude on daytime tv. What a waste of government resources over nothing. Could have focused on that missed child or unsolved murder.

ahartmetz 1y ago
It's insane. Violence hurts and kills people. Nudity... is people without clothes.
- mingus88 1y ago
  It is not insane if you understand how the U.S. developed. America was founded by religious groups that couldn’t integrate in Europe. Then western expansion required rugged living and violent displacement of natives, and lawless expanses of frontier. So we have had puritanical and deeply conservative cultures that are heavily armed for hundreds of years.
  - ahartmetz 1y ago
    Well I know that, but still.
  - yencabulator 1y ago
    That might be the explanation, sure, but it's still as insane.
dgllghr 1y ago
It never hurts to remember that many of the original European settlers to what is now the US were religious radicals who were forced out of Europe because of their religious beliefs. Their influence lives on to this day
- e40 1y ago
  This is also my hypothesized reason for the disparity in verbal communication skills between the average Americans and Brit. If you watch a lot of TV from both countries you will see a very obvious difference in verbal communication. Americans (of which I am one) are so much less articulate when it comes English. The difference is striking on The Graham Norton Show: almost every American guest stands out as less articulate. This is just one example. Another are interviews with regular people. That’s where it really became obvious.
  - acoustics 1y ago
    If religion had been the cause of a lasting difference, I would have expected it to go in the opposite direction. Articulate, persuasive, emotive public testimony done in a declamatory style is part of the fabric of historical American Christianity, much more than the mostly liturgical traditions of British Christianity. If there is a difference in communication skills, I don't think religious history explains it.
    - e40 1y ago
      Interesting perspective. I don't find many religious people articulate or persuasive. And how often do they have to give public testimony? The pilgrims lived in Holland for years in exile before deciding to go to the new world. It would seem to take an extreme group of people to do that, but articulate isn't one of the traits I would assign to them.
- Ylpertnodi 1y ago
  > It never hurts to remember that many of the original European settlers to what is now the US were religious radicals who were forced out of Europe because of their religious beliefs. Their influence lives on to this day. Forced out? Or wanted their particular version of religion to be 'the only one', (oh, as well as being 'persecuted')?
  - dgllghr 1y ago
pessimizer 1y ago
Fairly silly conversation. The nudity was only in the American version of the movie; in the Hong Kong version, the women were fully dressed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protector_(1985_film)#Hong_Kong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protector_(1985_film)#Hong... Also, I'm pretty sure that Europeans would be upset if there were a bunch of naked women sitting at a table packaging enormous amounts of cocaine at a school board meeting, especially if the tv decided to show this by itself. Although I might be wrong, seeing as Denmark had legal distribution of child pornography for a decade, with people arguing in Parliament that the sacrifice of those few children possibly saved many others from being molested. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Climax_Corporation#Child_pornography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Climax_Corporation#Child... A good* documentary on that is "Candy Film - Da børneporno var lovlig" (2016) ----- [*] for certain values of good that include tears and nausea.
jfengel 1y ago
I believe (without a whole lot of support) that Europeans mostly got over the fetishization of violence during the interminable wars up through the 19th century. They had one last massive burst in the first half of the 20th, but it was already clear that the new order was about trade rather than conquest. America was largely isolated from that. We had plenty of wars but the biggest was just against ourselves, and we turned it into a story of great heroism (rather than admit that the losers fought a bad war for bad reasons). We came to be proud of our violent adventures as we colonized westward. If this (absurd) chain of reasoning holds, we still love the excitement of violence while Europeans are largely over it. And this (dubious) theory also explains the fear of nudity. European wars were often nominally religious. (In fact religion was mostly just an excuse for the same old wars of greed, but it makes a better cover story.) Being proudly religious is kind of embarrassing now. Americans didn't keep killing each other over minor doctrinal differences, at least not on a mass scale. Instead we showed off just how devoted we were, topping each other to be more and more against what everyone else was against. Literally, holier than thou. Not everyone is into that, but for a variety of history reasons the ones who are have outsized power, and they hammer anyone who crosses them. Most people wouldn't care, but the ones who care, care a lot. This is, as I've made clear, just a barely-informed guess. But I do think it has some elements of truth to it.
daft_pink 1y ago
I think it’s even more interesting the random ways that streaming services decide to pull episodes of TV shows that aren’t particularly moral like the Simpson or South Park. The Simpson episode where Michael Jackson sings a song uncredited is unavailable. You can murder someone’s parent and eat them on South Park but making fun of Charlie Kirk before he died was pulled. I don’t quite understand it.

ahartmetz 1y ago

It's insane. Violence hurts and kills people. Nudity... is people without clothes.

mingus88 1y ago
It is not insane if you understand how the U.S. developed. America was founded by religious groups that couldn’t integrate in Europe. Then western expansion required rugged living and violent displacement of natives, and lawless expanses of frontier. So we have had puritanical and deeply conservative cultures that are heavily armed for hundreds of years.
- ahartmetz 1y ago
  Well I know that, but still.
- yencabulator 1y ago
  That might be the explanation, sure, but it's still as insane.

dgllghr 1y ago

It never hurts to remember that many of the original European settlers to what is now the US were religious radicals who were forced out of Europe because of their religious beliefs. Their influence lives on to this day

e40 1y ago
This is also my hypothesized reason for the disparity in verbal communication skills between the average Americans and Brit. If you watch a lot of TV from both countries you will see a very obvious difference in verbal communication. Americans (of which I am one) are so much less articulate when it comes English. The difference is striking on The Graham Norton Show: almost every American guest stands out as less articulate. This is just one example. Another are interviews with regular people. That’s where it really became obvious.
- acoustics 1y ago
  If religion had been the cause of a lasting difference, I would have expected it to go in the opposite direction. Articulate, persuasive, emotive public testimony done in a declamatory style is part of the fabric of historical American Christianity, much more than the mostly liturgical traditions of British Christianity. If there is a difference in communication skills, I don't think religious history explains it.
  - e40 1y ago
    Interesting perspective. I don't find many religious people articulate or persuasive. And how often do they have to give public testimony? The pilgrims lived in Holland for years in exile before deciding to go to the new world. It would seem to take an extreme group of people to do that, but articulate isn't one of the traits I would assign to them.
Ylpertnodi 1y ago
> It never hurts to remember that many of the original European settlers to what is now the US were religious radicals who were forced out of Europe because of their religious beliefs. Their influence lives on to this day. Forced out? Or wanted their particular version of religion to be 'the only one', (oh, as well as being 'persecuted')?
- dgllghr 1y ago

pessimizer 1y ago

Fairly silly conversation. The nudity was only in the American version of the movie; in the Hong Kong version, the women were fully dressed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protector_(1985_film)#Hong_Kong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protector_(1985_film)#Hong... Also, I'm pretty sure that Europeans would be upset if there were a bunch of naked women sitting at a table packaging enormous amounts of cocaine at a school board meeting, especially if the tv decided to show this by itself. Although I might be wrong, seeing as Denmark had legal distribution of child pornography for a decade, with people arguing in Parliament that the sacrifice of those few children possibly saved many others from being molested. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Climax_Corporation#Child_pornography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Climax_Corporation#Child... A good* documentary on that is "Candy Film - Da børneporno var lovlig" (2016) ----- [*] for certain values of good that include tears and nausea.

jfengel 1y ago

I believe (without a whole lot of support) that Europeans mostly got over the fetishization of violence during the interminable wars up through the 19th century. They had one last massive burst in the first half of the 20th, but it was already clear that the new order was about trade rather than conquest. America was largely isolated from that. We had plenty of wars but the biggest was just against ourselves, and we turned it into a story of great heroism (rather than admit that the losers fought a bad war for bad reasons). We came to be proud of our violent adventures as we colonized westward. If this (absurd) chain of reasoning holds, we still love the excitement of violence while Europeans are largely over it. And this (dubious) theory also explains the fear of nudity. European wars were often nominally religious. (In fact religion was mostly just an excuse for the same old wars of greed, but it makes a better cover story.) Being proudly religious is kind of embarrassing now. Americans didn't keep killing each other over minor doctrinal differences, at least not on a mass scale. Instead we showed off just how devoted we were, topping each other to be more and more against what everyone else was against. Literally, holier than thou. Not everyone is into that, but for a variety of history reasons the ones who are have outsized power, and they hammer anyone who crosses them. Most people wouldn't care, but the ones who care, care a lot. This is, as I've made clear, just a barely-informed guess. But I do think it has some elements of truth to it.

daft_pink 1y ago

I think it’s even more interesting the random ways that streaming services decide to pull episodes of TV shows that aren’t particularly moral like the Simpson or South Park. The Simpson episode where Michael Jackson sings a song uncredited is unavailable. You can murder someone’s parent and eat them on South Park but making fun of Charlie Kirk before he died was pulled. I don’t quite understand it.