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I can tell you my personal and entirely unscientific experience. When I first got of the plane years ago, to go to college in the US, the US culture struck me
by biohacker42 18y ago
I can tell you my personal and entirely unscientific experience.
When I first got of the plane years ago, to go to college in the US, the US culture struck me as deeply puritanical. I can't put it into exact words, but there was clearly a big difference compared to Europe.
I spoke with other immigrants and they felt the same thing. The best a Brazilian friend and I could come up with was that it was like everyone got stuck in that very awkward phase when you're 12-13 and just switching from hating the other sex to being uncomfortably attracted to it.
It seemed to us that somehow Americans just never outgrew that uncomfortable phase, which Europeans and Brazilians outgrow by the time we're 16 at the latest.
Again, this is just personal and subjective evidence.
And I just remebered something much less subjective. Here's some empircal evidence.
I remember watching The Abyss on basic cable, this again shortly after I came to the US. And at one point Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio's character is out and needs a defibrillator and her boob falls out.
I distinctly remember being genuinely surprised that it was blurred, it was such a nothing! Not a sexual scene, just one boob and someone went through the trouble of blurring it, a profoundly silly thing. I did not expect the US to be that puritanical.
- kingkongrevenge 18y ago> this is just personal and subjective evidence Yeah, and I've been around the block and think it's total nonsense. Maybe compared to Rio sober Americans are a bit frigid, but not compared to any northern european country. I really don't think blurred boobs on broadcast TV indicates much about anything. In case you haven't noticed, TV and magazines don't indicate much about reality in any country.
- biohacker42 18y agoAny northern European country? Again purely personal experience but the only northern European countries I've felt to be similarly puritanical as the US are the UK and Ireland. The Scandinavians, the Germans, the Dutch, etc, far more... libertine, imho.
- racetrack 18y agoThe best way I've heard it described is: America: Sex, oh god PROTECT THE CHILDREN. Violence, that's cool. Europe: Sex, it's natural. Violence, oh god PROTECT THE CHILDREN.
- kingkongrevenge 18y agoYes there are these tendencies in the censorship, but they're ultimately meaningless. The UK is a much more violent society than the US, statistically. That is real and meaningful. Who gives a crap about the differences in how movies are rated.
- dinkumthinkum 18y agoThat's not true. What nonsense statistics are you using? There are dozens of U.S. cities with higher per capita murder rates than London or any other city in the UK. How quaint it is to contradict someone with vague and controversial statistics.
- kingkongrevenge 18y agoMurder rates are higher in the US, but murder is a small fraction of violent crime. All other violent crime is much more common in the UK than in the US. In my own personal experience it's also much more indiscriminate in the UK. It's rather easy to avoid trouble in the US, whereas you have high rates of home invasion in the UK in middle class neighborhoods, for example.
- ZeroGravitas 18y agoDo you have a link to these stats? I don't think most people in the UK would even know what an home invasion is (I know from Ice-T) and Wikipedia claims it is notoriously hard to get stats this topic since it's not a defined crime in many jurisdictions.