The article is titled 13 Things Americans Do That The Rest Of The World Just Finds Is Bizarre.
Among the things Americans do that the rest of the world thinks to be bizarre are driving too much, eating too much cheese, being able to buy anything you want, including firearms, at Walmart, cheerleaders, flags, taking coffee everywhere, proms, alma mater obsession, white teeth mania and being obsessed with being the best country in the world.
Plus.
America's weird version of puritanism, opining, "You guys can't separate nudity from sex...and extreme violence/gore is considered normal, and shown regularly on TV."
I like cheese, long drives, drinking coffee and Walmart.
But.
I agree that America's weird puritanical streak is very bizarre. To illustrate America's weird version of puritanism, the P-I article used the Janet Jackson/Justin Timberlake Super Bowl Nipplegate Scandal.
That entire brouhaha over that particular Super Bowl halftime show was just ridiculous. And bizarre. And weird. The exposure was of such short duration that I missed it during a random eye blink. Luckily, I was recording the Super Bowl and so was able to see the outrageous spectacle after it became such an absurd cause celebre.
In America a movie that shows too much skin can easily get an R-rating, while it takes a lot of blood and gore to get an R-rating.
On TV the networks banned baring butts after the Super Bowl Nipplegate Scandal. Prior to that there was an occasional bared butt, past the family hour.
On non-network, cable type TV, in America, the human body is still exposed, at times. But, again, that is usually only bared butts. For example, on the Discovery Channel we have Naked & Afraid, where a man and a woman are left in the wilderness, naked for 21 days. The butts are clearly bared, uncensored. But the frontal bits have varying degrees of blurring, I assume with the degree dependent on the size of that which needs to be blurred.
While we are blurring the frontal bits of the man and woman on Naked & Afraid it is okay to show them bludgeoning various critters.
On network TV, CBS for example. Last night I watched the latest episode of Inside the Dome. The episode had one incident of a couple doing that which married people do that can result in a baby. Nothing remotely graphic shown. What is graphically shown was a couple men getting shot, one point blank. We see another guy blown up. The previous week we saw a woman battered to death with a bat, leaving a big pool of blood.
With that big pool of blood perfectly okay to show on American network TV.
Could Michelangelo's David make a tour of America without requiring a fig leaf?
Probably.
As long as he kept off American network TV.
I don't know what happened to us formerly free-spirited Americans that turned us, collectively, into such prudish puritans regarding the naked human form, while being such free spirits regarding seeing that same human form subjected to horrific violence.
It is perplexing. And I can understand why others in the world find it bizarre...
No comments:
Post a Comment