Your pops is right, but have you never watched the A-Team series? Damn near every episode had gunfights and nobody ever died, it was just dudes jumping and diving around.Foehunter82 said:
Why are Americans so prudish?
- Thread starter Zontar
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I could easily ask why Europeans are so smelly. It's rude, not accurate, and would make me look like a stuck up ignorant foreigner who refused to accept that different people can be different and that's ok. Perhaps you should remember the old joke that's not a joke, What's a pervert? Someone who has a sexual interest that I don't. You can readily apply the word prude in place of pervert and have a similar punchline...
That's what he was getting at, because at the time of the film's release, a bunch of people were whining about how violent it was compared to the original series. I have seen the original series as a kid, I just don't remember much from it, not that I really grasped much of it to begin with. I understood a "good guys vs. bad guys" theme but I actually wasn't aware of the "on the run from the authorities" aspect of the show until I was a grown man. Many of those older shows were like that for me.SecondPrize said:
It's... not really fair to include Canada in there. We aren't really that much less prudish than Americans, we're just less willing to impose our personal norms onto other people. Canadians rarely try to impose their own values onto others, though we do often try to "lead by example" and hope that others will follow our lead. For many Americans, they really do seem to believe that they know best and that it is their (often God-given) duty to spread that word to everyone who doesn't share it.Zontar said:
Which is to say that the answer to your question is "Religion". Not merely in believing certain things are indecent or immoral, but to proselytize to the unbeliever. For many Americans it is not enough to act in a certain way and say certain things, you have to go on the offensive against people who don't act the way they like, say the things they like nor believe the things they like. You can see this in quite a few area's beyond Sex and Violence, notably Politics and Social Engineering. It's a big reason why so many people claim that Atheism is a "religion" - there are quite a few atheists who act in ways that are nearly identical to evangelicals, so there are (tenuous!) potential comparisons to be made. And why so many people in the world hate and fear American culture - it gets jammed down the throat of the world on a regular basis because America has the money to do it. Pushing their values onto the rest of the world.
So yeah. tl;dr - Religious-type belief and behaviour.
captcha: on the ball... I see someone set the captcha to "Irony" this morning.
I think it's fair, our regulations are a lot more lax when it comes to just about everything in terms of media, and we don't go into moral outrages over things that are broadcast or screened nearly as easily or often. In fact the only people who are Canadian who I can think of who have moral crusading as something they are known for are almost all expats who moved to the US.Tono Makt said:
I don't want to bring up Kingsmen for the umpteenth time, but it is telling that in the US it's an R rated movie while here it's a 'fun for the whole family' one, and unlike the UK ours didn't get edited for that to happen.
I think it is because no politician ever gains anything by taking a stand against "think of the children", unless there are other, serious objections like freedom of speech for adults. Only the children lose much, and they cannot vote. So the level of censorship is largely dependent on the probability that someone will start a moral crusade, and the USA has freedom of speech (which includes freedom to advocate censorship) and a fairly large population. Canada has a low population, so there are less people who might start a moral crusade, and a lower chance of censorship occurring.
I have to disagree for a number of reasons. First of all I don't think there is much truth in the notion that the majority of media strives for the PG-13(or equivalent) rating. Even if that was true, however, I still don't think that would be problematic. As I mentioned before, the line drawn between too much and too little sex/violence in mainstream media is largely arbitrary and varies a lot from person to person even within the same culture.TwiZtah said:
I imagine(and correct me if I am wrong) that there is a level of the depiction of sex and graphic violence that you would find to be in poor taste in mainstream media. I'm sure there are those that would find where you personally draw the line to be overly prudish. On the flip side, there is a non-insignificant number of people both in North America and Europe that think that there is already far too much sex and violence in the supposedly prudish American media.
Personally I find the use of graphic sex and violence to be a bit of a crutch to get an easy emotional reaction from audiences rather than through the use of skillful writing and acting to get the audience emotionally invested in the characters and events occurring in the story. It sometimes feels like the cliche and inept public speaker getting up on stage and screaming "SSSEEEXXX!!! Now that I have your attention..."
P.S: Pretty sure this thread should be moved to R+P instead of off-topic given the direction the discussion has gone. Without actually counting I would guess over 80% of posts mention religion in some respect
A kid costs 220 thousand dollars. If you have a kid in highschool or college, your entire life is over, you can't afford college anymore. Enjoy your life of miserable blue collar work with no time for hobbies.
Oh and the girl might not even like you and girls ALWAYS win child custody over here, so if she gets bored of you, you lose your kid, have to pay 800~ dollars a month out to the girl that doesn't allow you to see your kid while she poisons the child against you, raises them poorly and pretends to not have another boyfriend so that she can continue getting money from you. The only option at that point is learning another language and moving to another country that won't extradite for the United States, so basically a country that is poor.
So having a kid is risking ruining your entire life. I sometimes see like 50 year old guys in entry level work who say they never get to see their kids because they lost custody and they try to make friends with their coworkers to justify their 12 hour work shifts, and they have this awful, dead on the inside humor and everybody has to pretend to laugh. I want to puke everytime I see something like that, that's not living life. That is misery.
Oh and the girl might not even like you and girls ALWAYS win child custody over here, so if she gets bored of you, you lose your kid, have to pay 800~ dollars a month out to the girl that doesn't allow you to see your kid while she poisons the child against you, raises them poorly and pretends to not have another boyfriend so that she can continue getting money from you. The only option at that point is learning another language and moving to another country that won't extradite for the United States, so basically a country that is poor.
So having a kid is risking ruining your entire life. I sometimes see like 50 year old guys in entry level work who say they never get to see their kids because they lost custody and they try to make friends with their coworkers to justify their 12 hour work shifts, and they have this awful, dead on the inside humor and everybody has to pretend to laugh. I want to puke everytime I see something like that, that's not living life. That is misery.
Americans aren't really that prudish compared to other cultures. I find that people who believe that they are tend to fit into one of two categories:
a. Foreigners who have never been to America or known any Americans particularly well. They have this vague sort of nebulous media-created idea that Americans are all really prudish in some sweeping but hard-to-give-specific-examples-of way.
b. Americans who haven't traveled very widely and don't really know any foreigners. They have internalized the fashionable-but-untrue meme that America is some sort of cultural backwater with respect to the rest of the world.
The only bit of this whole "Americans are prudes" meme that I lend any credence to is the possibility that, having the high obesity rates that we do, we as a nation may have a collective body-image problem that other places lack. But, again, because we have super-high obesity rates, it's not like that body-image problem isn't in some measure justifiable.
Seriously, you wanna see some prudish cultures? Look to East Asia. Or, heck, look to the Middle East.
a. Foreigners who have never been to America or known any Americans particularly well. They have this vague sort of nebulous media-created idea that Americans are all really prudish in some sweeping but hard-to-give-specific-examples-of way.
b. Americans who haven't traveled very widely and don't really know any foreigners. They have internalized the fashionable-but-untrue meme that America is some sort of cultural backwater with respect to the rest of the world.
The only bit of this whole "Americans are prudes" meme that I lend any credence to is the possibility that, having the high obesity rates that we do, we as a nation may have a collective body-image problem that other places lack. But, again, because we have super-high obesity rates, it's not like that body-image problem isn't in some measure justifiable.
Seriously, you wanna see some prudish cultures? Look to East Asia. Or, heck, look to the Middle East.
I think we are more prudish in the sense that we are less tolerant of media that is sexually charged/suggestive. For specific example consider that, at least when I lived there in the early-mid 90s, it was common to see ads in Germany that showed bare-breasted women, like a billboard in the downtown area. The covers of porno mags were posted in the front windows of the shops that sold them and regular television turned into various levels of pornography, from nude game shows to good old fashion sex-on-screen, after about 9PM. None of that stuff would be tolerated here.rgrekejin said:
I think it is fair to say that Americans are more prudish when it comes to sex than any part of Europe I visited and far less prudish than any part of the Middle East/Africa I visited. I'd say we are on-par with what I saw in my brief stay in England/Scotland, though the specifics may vary.
Ummm...I think you might have accidentally posted this in the wrong thread. This thread is about why Americans are(or perhaps more accurately, why they are perceived to be) more prudish than other western nations. Not sure what the financial burden of having children and the unfair bias in child custody has to do with thatthe_dramatica said:
I suppose that's fair assuming your point is that Americans are more prudish about sex because the legal system there can create a possibly unfair burden on one or both parents in a potentially unplanned pregnancy. Your post still could have done a better job relating the issues you brought up to the discussion at hand. That being said, I don't think the financial burdens of having a child are a major factor in the supposedly prudish nature of American media. For better or worse, the modern culture largely separates the act of sex from procreation, focusing instead on its use as recreation. It might be more accurate to say that the 'prudish' would rather see sex portrayed as a means for procreation and expressing love rather than the casual, consequence free fun it is often portrayed as in mainstream media.the_dramatica said:
I don't really know the full history of it being North of the border, but one thing I always look at to put things in perspective is that while people think Americans are prudish consider the fact that around 90 or so years ago they actually outlawed alcohol. Now things change but whatever 'puritan' roots they have run deeper than the rest of the Western world. I mean I don't really drink myself but it's hard to fathom a society that would voluntarily outlaw alcohol.G.O.A.T. said:
I will grant you that we may be less tolerant of full nudity in ads, but I'd dispute that we're in general less accepting of media that is sexually charged or suggestive. My own experience living in German was a bit different than yours, although that could be chalked up to either regional or temporal differences. I was there in the mid-2000s, and I don't remember full nudity on any billboards (although the town I lived in was pretty small, and on my periodic sojourns to Berlin I wasn't really paying much attention to billboards). There were a lot of those cheap half-sheet daily papers with full of nude pictures just inside the cover that people would leave sitting on train seats without much thought as to who might pick them up, but the point still stands. I would argue that the difference between a society where you're willing to accept a bare-chested woman selling you beer and one where you'll accept a woman in a skin-tight bodysuit that leaves nothing to the imagination trying to sell you a hamburger (while sensually washing a car!) is one of a few scant degrees. There are certainly far more prudish cultures out there.Gorrath said:
Furthermore, the OP is talking about prudishness with respect to violence, as well as with respect to sex. And I don't think there's a culture anywhere in the Western world that's as tolerant of violence as America is. PG-13 movies have effectively achieved violence parity with R movies - the average PG-13 movie today has as much violence as the average R movie (and MORE violence than the average R movie had back in the 80s when the ratings system first started).
http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/PG-13-Movies-Ratings-R-Study-Violence-231394731.html
Yeah, it wasn't about too much blood for good taste or anything, it was just about any blood not fitting in with what the A-team was.Foehunter82 said:
America doesn't have a reputation for being prudish, it's simply something thrown around as a joke and occasionally politically, and then people take it too seriously. At the end of the day America has more of a reputation for being decadent and perverted, when you look at regions like The Middle East, Africa, and large parts of Asia one of the first things a lot of these nations lead with when being critical of the US is our social bankruptcy due to our attitudes on women's rights, sex (without marriage), and increasing tolerance of things like homosexuality. Population wise most of the world is heavily anti-gay, and women are second class citizens. People tend to forget that China and India each individually make up about 1/3rd of the human race, with the remaining third including the Muslims, Africans, Hispanics, and whites all together. We tend to have a very naïve view of the world based on the fact that America and parts of Europe are very powerful, and seem to think that internal attitudes among ourselves represent some kind of global truth. The thing is that America is pretty much the "World Police" in a very real sense, we're acting as the bodyguard and protector of nations like Canada, and most of the EU (or are supposed to be doing so) as a result we act as the "face" of the civilized world and we're the ones who take the brunt of the criticism. America seems prudish mostly in comparison to more bohemian European powers, who themselves don't get a lot of criticism for it from the rest of the world because everyone else is looking at the US. The world being America-centric is something people complain about, but it's also something a lot of countries benefit from.Zontar said:
To put things into perspective, the US has a truly massive porn industry, and according to some figures I read (admittedly a while ago) porn starlets can make more producing smut in the US than almost anywhere else in the world, which means we've apparently seen a lot of immigrants coming into our porn industry from Asia, Europe, and Russia since they can get paid more here due to the voracious American appetite for porn. That said compared to some other nations we limit prostitution to one national red light district (the state of Nevada), and put limits on general public displays of extreme sexuality, meaning that you cannot go topless in the US for example, even at the beach. That said our youth in particular still tends to dress provocatively. Politically we DO have some grappling over policy, but for the most part even the conservatives tend to not be all that limiting, they are mostly concerned about how things look in public and accessibility to minors, very few politicians (there are some, as exceptions exist) are really anti-porn in a big way. Of course it needs to be understood that part of the logic here is that if you want that kind of stuff you go to Nevada, you just don't do it elsewhere. Hence the tagline "what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" that city, and the state around it, is pretty much the playpen of America.
Now yes France, Germany, Holland, etc... can all claim that they have less general limitations on sexuality and more of it in their general media. However that hardly makes the US prudish (overall) especially in comparison to the world. What's more the nations that are more liberated at the US also don't get crap for it largely because all eyes are on America, your typical Arab sitting in The Middle East going off about America and it's perversion might be making better points if he say went after Germany but odds are he doesn't know much about Germany. Of course more cosmopolitan haters tend to expand it to a hatred of the entire West and lump us all together, since after all we do things like allow women to be free, and allow recreational sex without much penalty, and pretty much all western nations INCLUDING the US have tons of whores, in the US we just happen to confine the overt trade of sex to one state as I explained... that and the porn industry where a loophole about "Art Films" allows people to have sex on camera for money without it being considered prostitution, technically while people call sex movies "porn" legally speaking all "porn" is illegal in most places (the one exception mentioned) but for an "Art Film" to be considered "porn" in a legal sense it needs to be reviewed (processes can vary state by state) individually and found to be offensive and without redeeming merit. Needless to say too much porn is produced to review everything (volume counts), and all it takes is a bit of creativity with the "plot" (there is a reason porn movies make pretensions of having one) to avoid the whole "without redeeming merit" bit. I won't say the US has the hugest porn industry in the world, but it's quite titanic, and while I can't say how accurate they were (or are now) some things I've read have implied we also pay our porn stars more and make them bigger celebrities than anywhere else in the world.
Absolutely they strive for the PG-13 rating, more people will watch the movie, parents pay for their kids to go to the movie.Silent Protagonist said:
See how ridiculously bad pretty much all fight choreography is in American big budget movies? Yeah, there is no impact to punches and they cut every third nanosecond and the guy who controls the camera has a massive seizure all the time. It is easier to mask a bad fight doing this, and that means they can make it PG-13. Compare that to movies like The Raid which didn't have even near the same amount of money for their budget and they made some of the best fights in movies ever. They don't shy away from blood, gore and actual impact, plus, they have a choreographer that isn't 13.
No, what people complain about with American sexuality is that EVERYTHING needs to be sexualized, no exceptions.