I kind of wish that the polarities of violence and sex in popular culture were reversed. Like, I wish that writers and filmmakers needed to justify up the wazoo their decisions to show a murder on screen when "they could have just done it tastefully in shadow or something," but no one even batted an eye at a sex scene. I kind of wish that erotic video games were the norm but FPSs were a considered a weird and loser-ish thing to play.
I mean, I really wish that you didn't have to justify either, but it bugs me that, of the two, killing is the one that you can use in wholesome family friendly entertainment but fucking is the one that you forever need to shield your children from even knowing about.
I don't think that this difference is innocent, either. Like, I think that sexual repression is a good means of control whereas the state always needs an army of young men who are willing to kill people.
listen. I understand if you dont want to see sex in a movie. But im begging you to think about how the prevalence of murder and acts of harm being portrayed in media vs. the censorship and hush-hush nature behind sex affects our relationships with it.
think about what this post is saying about the normalization of violence and demonization of eroticism. How sexual repression and the indulgence of violence lets a society be guided in a certain direction.
If you dont want to see a sex scene in a movie, thats fine. But this isnt about personal preferences. This is about how culture is shaped by what we choose to show. For the love of god.
I am a horror movie fan who loves gore and violence and murder, you know, a sicko, and I also think it is extremely weird and unsettling that violence is so much more accepted in media than sex. Compare the kind of violent content you can put in a PG-13 movie with the kind of sexual content allowed. It's fucked up!
Obviously I don't want anyone taking away my horror movies and replacing them with softcore porn or anything, that's not the point. Just... maybe we should be less worried about kids seeing a depiction of consensual sex and more worried about stuff like, idk, being taught that incredibly bloody revenge is a normal way to respond to being harmed, or that the right way to handle criminals is to explode them, or some of the things I think might do more lasting harm than the simple fact of violent imagery.
There was an episode of Deep Space Nine. Back in the... late 90s? I think? That featured a lesbian kiss. This being two or three decades ago now, they received many letters of complaint, a number of them claiming it meant the show was no longer Family-Friendly.
One of the writers responded to one of those letter, asking if it would have been more appropriate for the women to shoot each other with a phaser. He was answered in the affirmative, and his response was that if the person felt it was better for his children to see an act of violence than an act of affection, he might want to reconsider his definition of family-friendly.
