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Old 09-16-2007, 03:28 PM   #21
Omera
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Re: Sex & Violence

off topic sort of...
When I was 3, I was watching that naked red head chick dance on a grave in return of the living dead.
back on topic again...
I agree!

Support Nakedness in Movies!
The first time I did that i thought it was funny...
Now it's just a little less funny
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Old 09-16-2007, 03:37 PM   #22
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Re: Sex & Violence

When I was younger (6-7ish) I found some porn mags my parents had and read them. Well, looked at the pictures mostly. I could read the articles but didn't understand the concepts at the time. Once my parents found out, they let me carry on. I even embarassed my mom once by running down the garden whilst she was talking to a neighbour over the fence clutching one and yelling "I've finished this one, can I have another?". My parents explained to me what sex was as soon as they figured I was old enough to ask about it and understand what they said, which for me was around 7 or 8 I think.

Why do I tell you this? Because I find it interesting that these days I have little interest in porn, have never bought a magazine, and don't watch much of it, whereas people I know who didn't read the things when little have huge collections. I also don't understand the obsession some people have with stopping kids from seeing naked bodies. What do you think they see when they look down in the bath?

And no, I'm not some sort of nudist/weird fetishist. I have a girlfriend, a healthy sex life, and still harbour my own inhibitions like I'm not particularly happy with how I look naked so I don't tend to show myself off. That's my choice though, not because I don't think people shouldn't see naked people.
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Old 09-16-2007, 03:41 PM   #23
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Re: Sex & Violence

My mother's BF said I can look at porno that friends own but I can't have my own
Thats why I go to 89.com every morning when nobody is awake!
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Old 09-16-2007, 03:46 PM   #24
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Re: Sex & Violence

See. There are two serious problems here. The first is, its not a sudden prevalence of child predators that is a problem, its that they are now so obvious. Bear with me, I will explain what I mean by that. My uncle was one, and he was molesting his daughter ***way*** before the news media was babbling about how many there are, or for that matter, well before we supposedly "lost our way", according to some others. There are two fundamental problems here. The first is a shift in views about predation, which has actually gotten more conservative imho, the other is a willingness of various clueless "family values" groups to harp on how much better the world was. Well.. 200 years ago you could marry and/or sleep with someone that was 12-13 and no one would bat an eye. Arranged marriages often happened as far back as when they where 7-8, and they only waited until menstruation happened before making it "official". The rules about age limits where not imposed until like 1885 in England, and then it was "10", the US had a defacto standard of 10, but not legal rule for it, until roughly the same time period, the *end* of the 19th century. Sorry I can't give a clearer date, but trying to Google the right article would take me ages, since most pages involve "current" ages of consent, which can range from 13 in Hawaii, to 19+ if you are the wrong sex and gay (loved that one. Women could have lesbian sex at like 17, but gay men had to be at least 19, or something like that...), in other places.

In any case, 90% of what we call pedophilia today was nothing of the sort until near the start of the 1900s, and it wasn't until the advent of TV that it become something that could be dumped on the news, in the homes of every single person in the country, the moment some wacko, in some obscure neighborhood or town, chased some 14 year olds.

Like many things, its not an *increase* of these things that is at issue, its a distorted view of history and what people cared about in the first place, combined with easy access to information. Same with the stuff like school shootings. The happen about once a century, followed by a few copycats. The only thing that has changed is the excuses people come up with to absolve the parents and school, and the number of other nuts that hear about it, and become tempted to try the same thing.

Its as Lasher says. We have this fictitious view of what "innocence" means, and some people, who have a lot of money, free time, and influential organizations, want to propagate that silly definition, and all the bad, incorrect, mangled or just made up history they spout to defend it (i.e. "golden age" when these things didn't happen gibberish), in the delusional belief that ignoring real history, failing to provide kids with real facts, and demonizing everyone/thing that they don't personally like, will "fix" the problem. Usually, it just makes it easier for the predators to hide (like some priests I can name), leads people to consider useless solutions (which assume the made up utopian history is true) and exaggerate any and all real problems. And of course, being as this is dogma to them, the single worst thing in the universe isn't the predators they inadvertently protect/enable through this ignorance by doing this, its the people that call them fools and tell them they got it all backwards.
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Old 09-16-2007, 05:35 PM   #25
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Re: Sex & Violence

The funny thing is, that while Sweden and the other Nordic countries - (Denmark in particular) - practically invented nude or scantily clad women adverts, lately there has been a huge backlash, and that type of material in adverts almost inevitably raises an outcry. This has however got nothing to do with qualms about nudity and moral issues, it is all about feminism and what is 'politically correct' at the moment.

Now, I'm a woman too, so I'm somewhat torn here. I too get a bit offended by the exploitation of naive teenage girls, who don't realize what they are getting themselves into, when they expose everything they have in men's magazines or on the internet. But the ultra feminists are a bit like the fundamentalist lunatics of Christianity and Islam, they give the sane, balanced and legitimate parts of a movement bad karma and a twisted image.

Sure, there are some basic injustices in the fact the women generally get paid less for the same work than men, or that less than 10% of the top jobs or posts on the boards of big companies are occupied by women. But when almost all male politicians declare themselves as being 'feminists'. probably out of fear of being ripped apart by the harpies, things begin to look slightly ridiculous. And when things get driven to the extreme by fanatic demagogues, some of these apparent injustices get drowned by stupid statements like; 'All men are animals!' - (sure, but so are all women!) - or 'Swedish men are as bad as Talibans!' - (umm, so far I haven't noticed that wearing a burkha is a requirement in Sweden) - or even wild accusations about groups of pedophile males who allegedly habitually kidnap, abuse and ritually slaughter children in the forests of Norway and Sweden - (excuse me, but why aren't any of all these kids even reported missing then?)... then the feminist movement loses most of its credibility. To these extremist feminists, almost anything can be traced back to what they in some 'scientific' papers have labeled 'The gender-power-order' - (not sure what the correct translation of that term would be in English, if there even is one).

However, this is usually the reason why lately all ads that can be even remotely perceived as disparaging for women are jumped at ferociously in Sweden and other Nordic countries. Moral has very little to do with it.
Goes to show how complex the causes and effects usually are.
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Old 09-16-2007, 07:18 PM   #26
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Re: Sex & Violence

In my opinion, being scantily dressed is okay, and so is prostitution. I however, have a neutral attitude about scantily dressed women and prostitution because I DON'T GIVE A F***!
This was MEANT to be off topic in reply to Molly's post.
No rudeness or insult was directed to Molly in the making of this post (lol).
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Old 09-16-2007, 08:36 PM   #27
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Re: Sex & Violence

I don't dispute the premise of your question, yet I do point out that there are some very big MUSHes/MUCKs out there that are basically just for sex (I read in the vicinity of 600 connected characters or so). So it seems like the genre is alive and well and not being oppressed
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Old 09-17-2007, 02:20 AM   #28
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Re: Sex & Violence

That leads to another question that has bothered me for years:
Why are all sex Mu*s furry?

Side note;
Bet this will lead to Omera exclaiming;
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Old 09-17-2007, 08:48 AM   #29
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Re: Sex & Violence

awwww you said it for me
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Old 09-17-2007, 09:03 AM   #30
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Re: Sex & Violence

So they can call it a furr and purr mud?
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Old 09-17-2007, 12:16 PM   #31
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Re: Sex & Violence

No offense intended but Omera has shown in this thread why I think it is not a good idea, in general, to include explicit sex/sexual references in MUDs whose main topic is not explicit sex/sexual exchanges.

He has declared himself to be 13 years old, and he has approached the subject as I would guess most 13 year olds would, making fun of it, using words like 'boob' mockingly etc. It is not that there is something wrong about it, or that it is immoral that a "poor 13 year old" is being exposed to this immorality, it is just that when explicit sex is added to the equation, it tends to become the focus of what happens.

I think the argument about causes is valid, but in a more practical sense, knowing that MUDs in general do not have enough voice/impact to change the way society sees things, I do believe that because of the existing social rules in most cases restricting the language to a less explicit one would do the overall player population more good than bad. At the end of the day, we all belong to a society and when we bring ourselves to a text game we bring with ourselves part of that baggage we carry from our social rules and experience.
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Old 09-17-2007, 01:06 PM   #32
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Re: Sex & Violence

I wasn't making fun of it. I even offered my opinion (sp?) in a previous post, although the opinion wasn't as long of a post as most of these posts.
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Old 09-17-2007, 03:49 PM   #33
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Re: Sex & Violence

**Practicality** is why until people like Richard Dawkins started to publish some real seriously, "Why the heck do you people believe this BS?", type books, in the US, 90% of the agnostics and atheists hid under desks or pandered to the religious. Appeasement doesn't work. If a social concept is wrong, its wrong, and the consequence of telling people, "Oh, well, yeah... I supposed that since, for now, society can't handle it, I will bow to your wishes.", is how we got in this mess in the first place, not the cure for it. 13 year old stupidity on the subject is just a) a symptom of how scared to death some people are (especially kids) to talk about it, and b) the usual teen angst, where everything from boobs to dirt has to be joked about, for no rational reason or purpose, if it makes them the least bit confused or uncomfortable.

But seriously, look at just the history of curse words and bad language:

1. First case said ***very clearly*** in the Hebrew that only trying to coerce their god into giving them stuff, or punishing others, was "cursing". There was no such thing as "bad language" otherwise.

2. Some fool translated that stuff into Latin and some other languages, which lost the original meaning of the terms. Lots of English words, for example, can have 3-4 different meanings, some of them bent off at a 90 degree angle (and some really odd one, 180 degrees the opposite) of the "intent" of the writer. Context isn't always sufficient to figure out which of those meanings was intended.

3. A lot of, "You can't say this, or that, etc.", followed, but most of it was acts against authority, or especially the church (which in a lot of cases was the same thing).

4. Enter the Protestant Revolution. Some good ideas, lots of really stupid ones. One of the stupidest was that their priest looked around at all the various definitions of "cursing" or "taking gods name in vein" and reached two 100% dead wrong conclusions. 1. It meant you couldn't even use his name at all, except in prayer, and especially not as an invective to express frustration or anger. 2. There was no reason why one couldn't tack on words considered "vulgar" due to their use in context of describing other people, actions or ideas, instead of merely naming body parts/functions, as they did originally.

The situation has imho been going down hill ever since, even going so far that some nuts today would like to expand the "official" list to 3-4 times its size, and then replace all of it with "nice words, so you can express your frustration without saying the bad ones!" But seriously, what the frack is the different between saying the F word, for Frack(ed/ing), Frell(ed/ing), or just making up some random nonsense like, "Fizzlebop you!"? The Protestants missed to point that banning language doesn't really alter, fundamentally, what people feel, their intent, or what they might do after screaming some made up word at you. All it does is make anger, fear, hate, or rage **sound** better.

Frankly, I would love to see the news report, if these sort of people got their way, where someone told the reporter, "He kept saying shazbot over and over in an angry sounding way, then just attacked me!" Insert any one of the "normal" bad words in there and what, suddenly its not the same thing? No, but its certainly a whole lot damn funnier when bad things happen *despite* the fact that no "bad words" where exchanged imho (even if one does otherwise sympathize with the victim).

Yeah, to some extent we do bring the baggage with us. Part of the point of muds though is to **try** to leave some of it at home. The people that can't, and need to whine about things that they don't like, in a context where they are "not" supposed to include all the stupid baggage, shouldn't be playing there.
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Old 09-19-2007, 12:32 AM   #34
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Re: Sex & Violence

Unfortunately it isn't as simple as that. Well before the advent of muds, well meaning groups of people have always objected to the immorality of free speech, whether it was in print or audio-visual format, and have insisted on trying to protect the young and the innocent, whether or not they wanted or even needed protecting.

No matter how much you point out to someone that doesn't like the theme of the mud, "they can quite simply not play there and find a more fluffy mud", they insist that they have a right to be there. In fact they do have a right to be there, as do other people. In effect, a mud is a virtual society, and in a society people have to get on with each other. In a virtual society everyone is effectively anonymous and as such we can say what we like to whom we like and not have to live with the consequences.

The irony of all this is that it leads to a rise in the freedom of speech.

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Old 09-19-2007, 04:31 PM   #35
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Re: Sex & Violence

I don't want to deride any of our members who partake in that pastime, but that particular branch of sexual deviancy is one of the few remaining things in this world that makes me uncomfortable.

I'm perfectly fine with gay people, inter-racial couples, what have you, but people in costume animal suits practicing some sort of "human bestiality" is disturbing. That's one of the reasons I prefer MUDs with VERY limited races, because it eliminates the occurrences of players who are attracted to ANYTHING OTHER than human beings.

I don't want to drag this post off-topic, so PLEASE nobody start an argument here, just throwing in my two cents.
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Old 09-19-2007, 04:54 PM   #36
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Re: Sex & Violence

Now see I think that the issue of childhood nudity (unless there's an adult getting enjoyment out of it) has never really been that big of an issue, but what I'm really getting at here is adult nudity and sexual perversion

You're held to different standards when you're a child than when you're an adult. At Woodstock, it was a very prominent example to the GI Generation of just how depraved their children could be.

There you had an entire generation of adults and teenagers tripping out on acid and busting out to some crazy music. Some didn't wear clothes and others didn't really see an abject reason to bathe. They opposed the war, but they also opposed society in general. They were virtual opposites of everything their parents had tried to instill in them.

I think this can teach us a lesson in all of this:
No matter WHAT you teach your kids, or how good a person you are, they could turn out to be the COMPLETE OPPOSITE of what you wanted them to be. You've got to find a middle ground. My father was a Vietnam veteran, he was opposed to his drafting into what he thought of as a "white man's war" and raised me to distrust and function almost completely seperately from white culture.

However, now that I'm an adult, I realize how ridiculous this was. I have a few white friends, and I've been known to listen to rock music every once in a while. I mean, here I am on a MUD discussion board!

My point is that ultimately you really don't know how much an influence you'll have over your children. You can try to keep these things out of sight and out of mind, but it's their choice whether they do it or not. They're probably gonna hear about it somewhere, and at that point, it's all on them.
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Old 09-19-2007, 10:00 PM   #37
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Re: Sex & Violence

While I don't completely agree with you on some points (not the least being that furry is somehow worse than being gay.. Its just the same, and why it would be a surprise that humans have such fantasies, when you can find interspecies stuff happening in other animals too, however rare, is just a matter of social perspective, not realistic views of the subjects). However, I do agree on on point absolutely. Kids **will** find out about things. There are only two solutions:

1. Stop them from making choices. Indoctrinate them into a system of fear, hate, anger and delusion, so deep, that only the truly brilliant among them can ever hope to escape from it. This is what fundigelical types try to do, and what they **want** to see everyone else do. That it never works is, to them, just a sign of how much harder they need to try. Its the same mind set as the people that show up some place, insist they *deserve* to be there, but that since they do, everyone else needs to bow to their nonsensical standards. The only thing you get by bowing to "any" of those standards is some worse nut, with an even crazier standard, who insists that since you catered to the last delusional half wit, you should cater to them too.

2. Come of some reasonable agreement on what is dangerous or abnormal, based on real evidence that its harmful, then set some sort of rules that curtail those things when they happen, along with some means to "correct" the problem people, in an equally socially acceptable way, when they behave that way.

The problem is, we have people from category #1, claiming they are doing what category #2 requires, while really acting only on dogmatic assertions (half of them often contradicted by what they claim they are based on). There are also people that are in category #2, in principle, but who have founded some ideas of what is normal, based on the some sort of emotional appeal in category #1, and thus not only can't prove harm, they can't addequately describe what "problem" they think they are solving, let alone how anything they are trying to do "will" solve anything.

The silliest thing about someone starting in *either* category, then stumbling into the other to justify it, is that they *usually* use the same arguments, the same ideas and the same methods that have been tried 5000 times before, and always failed to fix anything. Most people react to things they don't like by either a) making some emotional leap to an invalid conclusion, or b) looking for an authority to tell them what to do. Its quite literally impossible for the average person to say, "I don't know anything at all about this, so I guess I need to look at what is **really** going on, then figure it out." Its either - "I don't need to know nothin!" or "So and so in smart and claims to have all the answers, so being dumb, I am going to go with so and so."

There are many paths of both right and wrong answers. Problem is, most people are poor map readers, and even more of them, won't, mentally or physically, go farther than the edge of their own town to look for them. Worse, they are distrustful of people that *have* gone farther. In that respect, humanity hasn't changed much since 90% of it lived in one room thatch roof huts and never left the village their entire lives. Its depressing sometimes, being one of the people that actually wanders the dark woods. lol
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Old 09-20-2007, 09:15 AM   #38
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Re: Sex & Violence

There was a time, when I was still a little guppy, when it was alright to display your disgust toward homosexuality, and inter-racial relations were considered a form of bestiality.

However, times are changing and it shan't be long till people realize ones love for little ponies is as real as the love between a husband and wife, and misguided people will measure up their company twice, and probably look over their shoulder, before displaying their prejudice toward inter-special erotica.

Once that day has come moderators will swiftly remove hate speech toward those that go beyond the restrictive boundaries drawn by long dead bigots and embrace diversity wholeheartedly.
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Old 09-20-2007, 10:58 AM   #39
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Re: Sex & Violence

I'll take the bait and get graphic, heh. See, when daddy punches Junior in the face, it's -obvious- that there's "hurt" going on. Blood, bruises, broken bones - all UNfun and obvious and common consequences of violence. They're obvious, so they can be learned easier. Gee, pouring battery acid on Billy's sister was probably a REALLY BAD THING TO DO because she started screaming until her tongue blistered up and fell out of her mouth. I guess my lesson is, violence hurts, violence bad, violence no. I don't really need someone to explain that - I can see it myself - every time someone gets shot in the head, the fall down dead. Every time someone breaks someone else's arm, there is crying and excruciating pain. It's an immediate consequence of an action.

Now with sex - hm. Not quite so obvious. When daddy says "here son, play with Mr. Snake, it's fun." you do want to have fun, right? And you do love your daddy, don't you? And no one is crying, and no bones are sticking out of skin, and there's no blood, and no pain. It isn't obvious that playing with daddy's snake is probably not a good idea, even if daddy promises ice cream when you're done. It isn't obvious that sex can create disease or babies. This has to be taught, because those consequences aren't *obviously* immediate.

So in society, we leave it up to the parents to determine when their kid is ready to hear certain lessons. We can only hope the parents know their kids, understand and appreciate childhood curiosity, and have a healthy attitude themselves toward the subject matter.

A child doesn't need to be taught that violence = pain. He only need observe it once, and he knows. Sex = potential for serious consequences is not readily observable, therefore society has placed a different set of values on the approach to teaching about it.
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Old 09-20-2007, 09:46 PM   #40
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Re: Sex & Violence

That's a really interesting way of looking at his issue. I had never thought about this, but it does make sense.

It still shocks me sometimes how people seem more offended by nudity than violence, but in the context of what is appropriate for children I think you make an excellent point.

Perhaps that is why even children's shows (like many Disney movies) have death or violence and yet children seem to handle it just fine.
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