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this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
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Oh yikes. Like ma’am we have freedom of expression in part for the arts.
There's a legitimate concern about kids being in front of screens constantly. I'm sympathetic towards the idea that the constant attention grabbing stimulus is maybe not so great, especially when it's thick with advertising and other propaganda.
But the fixation on violence and sex, absent any concern for general quality of life for children, makes kids out to be this latent criminal element. The political inclination towards asking "How quickly can we start treating kids as criminals?" is a huge facet of social decay in the 90s/00s.
For all her talk of "It takes a village", Clinton seemed totally unconcerned with the quality of life in American neighborhoods.
I totally agree with you, but I do think this drive to censor constantly is a problem that we need to address. We stopped treating kids as latent criminals by infantilizing them. But we still have people on all sides clutching their pearls at legitimate artistic expression.
Where do we draw the line between art with mature themes such as Oedepus Rex, the Iliad, and Shakespeare and something trashy with artistic merit like a violent but artistic video game, a Tom of Finland sketch, a Claude Cahun photo, or the writings of Patrick Califia, or something completely devoid of artistic merit? Where is the line between Dostoyevsky and CSI? Between Shakespeare, Judd Apatow, Chuck Tingle, and lemon stealing whores? Is it just artistic skill? And why are we so keen on letting the government decide?
I'm less worried about the degree of "trashiness" than the raw volume of content. If every corner of my street had a big screen flipping been Oedipus stabbing his father and fucking his mother, and TVs were blasting "Big Oedipus Coming Soon!!!" on top of a frenetic display of a roaring Sphynix ripping a guy's head off, I wouldn't like that any better.
The use of these images to grab people's attention, with each one big footing the last, is a problem. And you can hide behind "Think of the children", but I mostly see it as revolting to adults.
I've had my elderly mother say, more than once, that she doesn't like watching Rated R movies because they're too gratuitous.
I get that, and I can respect a “you’re free to do it but certain content needs a bead curtain style barrier”, but additionally I think we need to develop a cultural reminder that distaste is not a justification for such strict restrictions.
In short my main issue is that we live in an era where the stakes keep raising, and everything remains gratuitous to the point I dislike it and yet the responses only restrict that which is behind the bead curtain. We have saw movies but nsfw communities on the internet are being whittled away by credit card companies. The blue social space is dying for family friendly spaces while politicians remain vulgar. I demand my right to smut but I don’t want it on a billboard
I don't think the issue is simple distaste. It goes to the aggressiveness of solicitation. If my mailbox is overflowing with beaded curtains, I would still consider that a problem.
That's more market consolidation than censorship. Bigger and more profit-oriented pornographers can survive this rule in a way small fries can't. Even then, the so-called deregulated corners of the internet are the absolute worst of the lot when it comes to invasive advertising. Hell, the harshest criticisms of Google/Facebook/Microsoft atm is in how they've begun to adopt the advertising style of low-rent porn sites.
I agree that the Tipper/Hilary/Lieberman pearl clutching of the 80s and 90s was awful. And I'll happily spot you how attempts to censor and de-sexualize inevitably cultivated a class character (Skinamax and high end escorts are fine, but god forbid a poor person see a nipple during the Superbowl or get a BJ at a truck stop). We're seeing that come around again with the folks screaming "Pedophile" at every LGBTQ organizer. And I think Clinton herself has lived to regret the hysteria she helped fuel, after the Comet Pingpong hoax.
I'm right there with you. And I can't help but think the calls to End Smut would be curtailed significantly if billboards were - generally speaking - dismantled and made illegal.