Go Violence!

Reading Ozzy’s latest post today got me thinking.

Does anyone else think that, pretty much as a species, we have a lot of things backwards?

Ozzy talked about the legal drinking age and pointed out that while we believe that a person aged 18-20 is perfectly old enough to join the army, risk their lives and kill people…they’re still not old enough to drink a beer at the end of the day.

Want to know why I think this is? It’s because we’re a very ‘pleasure negative’ society. We’ve somehow got it programmed into our heads that if something feels good, it must be bad, shameful or just plain wrong. Anything that is done purely for pleasure is looked down upon.

This is so bad that we’ve actually become a society where violence, murder and causing pain is actually more acceptable to us than something like drinking, smoking or sex.

Don’t believe me?

Today I was watching CSI : Crime Scene Investigation.

This episode covered two cases. One was the brutal murder of a guy with Downs Syndrome. The other was about a snuff film made by a pornographer.

I want you to think about what they actually showed in this episode.

For the Downs Syndrome case we saw a very grisly scene where a body, mostly eaten by red ants, has been stuffed into a truck’s toolbox. We saw ‘flashbacks’ where a guy threw his used chewing tobacco at a guy with Downs Syndrome, strapped him to the back of a bucking rodeo horse before eventually throwing onto a set of bull’s horns attached to the front of a truck, impaling him.

For the snuff film case we saw a woman getting her throat slashed, gallons of blood getting sloshed around…but here’s the thing. At one point the investigators walk into a guys house while he’s filming amateur porn…and we don’t see so much as a nipple.

Why?

Because if we saw a naked, female nipple on primetime TV, CSI would be off the air before you could say ‘concerned citizen’.

Vicious murders? Fine. Blood? Fine. Drug use? Fine. The naked human body? Oh hell no.

Am I going insane, or am I the only one who thinks this is ridiculous?

It’s true in any media. There were five or more GTA games before GTA San Andreas, all featuring the same level of reckless behavior and violence. In any of the GTA games you could steal cars, run people over, kill cops and so on… but no one got too worked up about them.

However, once it was discovered that there was a no-nudity, sex scene in GTA: San Andreas, not featuring actual people, mind you, the whole country was up in arms about it. It was all over the news and papers for months despite the fact that this content had been cut from the game, meaning you had to download and install a third-party patch in order to find it…The equivalent of demanding a movie be taken off the shelves because a janitor at the studio found a ‘questionable’ scene on the cutting room floor and released it over the internet.

Again, Cop killing is fine. Consensual sex in a game rated for people over the age of consent? Are you mad?

Then, we have ‘torture porn’ movies like Hostel and Saw that feature nothing but two straight hours of people getting killed and maimed in various horrible ways. With movies out there like that, what are people concerned about? Banning studios from showing people smoking in their movies.

Again, it’s perfectly fine to watch a guy get strapped to a chair and have both his Achilles tendons cut with a bolt-cutter. It’s also perfectly fine to watch a guy throw a girl into a pit filled with dirty hypodermic needles…but sex? No way! That might give people ideas.

If that hasn’t convinced you yet, think about this…While watching TV you are far more likely to see simulated rape than simulated consensual intercourse. People will watch a show where a girl gets dragged into the back of a van by five guys who beat and rape her and think nothing of it. Show that same girl get into bed with her husband with a smile on her face, and the switchboard at the TV station will be jammed with angry calls for days.

The weird part is that sex (with the proper precautions, of course) is absolutely harmless. Anyone with kids has definitely done it, anyone 16 or older has probably done it and anyone past puberty wants to do it.

We need sex to continue the species, and as a recreational activity it’s a hell of a lot of fun…so why do we consider it so wrong that murder is a staple of TV entertainment, but sex is absolutely forbidden to be shown on TV. What is honestly so offensive about a nipple?

I’ll tell you. It’s because we look down on anything that’s done purely for pleasure and recreational sex is just about the maximum amount of pleasure a human being can experience. It’s something you do purely for self gratification.

I guarantee you this. If sex was a painful activity rather than a pleasurable one it would be as commonplace in the media today as murder is.

So that’s the society we live in, folks. If it’s fun, it’s wrong. It’s just that simple.

Thoughts?