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Old 09-14-2007, 09:49 AM   #1
Xerihae
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Sex & Violence

Ok, this could fit in MUD Administration but as it's also a very general topic I decided this would be a better place for it.

Why is it, exactly, that we deem it perfectly acceptable for a child to play a game that involves maiming, killing, dismembering, or possibly all of the above, yet a huge amount of fuss is kicked up if there's the slightest hint of nudity? This mainly seems prevalent in the US but applies elsewhere too. How come we're happy for our children to see the inside of someones body, but not the outside? Why are we so averse to letting people see a natural body? In a graphical game you don't put clothes on a wolf, so why do people get all incensed when you don't put clothes on a humanoid?

I've seen it in MUDs too. Games that allow you to run around wantonly slaughtering things are considered child-friendly, but if a description mentions breasts, nipples, vaginas, or penises it suddenly becomes adult-oriented. Are we really that hypocritical? Is it some weird consequence of the strange prohibition many religions seem to place on sex that has filtered down over the centuries?

Could it even be that putting such things in games would HELP the world in general? The vast majority of children who play violent video games do not go out and commit violence, except for those rare cases that are blown up by the media. I'd be willing to postulate that the vast majority of children DO end up experimenting with sex at an earlier age than we'd like precisely because they haven't come across it so much.

For the record I'm not a nudist, just curious! I'm also talking about descriptions of the human body being naked in general, not necessarily MUDsex/cybering (is it possible to separate the two?).
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Old 09-14-2007, 10:46 AM   #2
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Re: Sex & Violence

I believe it's because that way is safe. There's violence everywhere, even directly targeted at children - most superhero comics and TV shows are often excessively violent or in some way glorify violence as having good outcomes, such as fighting crime. Like you said, society is desensitized towards violence. People, for the most part, are very clear about the distinction between game and reality, as far as violence goes (there are exceptions of course). I would say that it's a given that a teenager would play a violent game with friends and know that it's unacceptable to act out something similar in real life - society has drawn the line very clearly. Would "but I can do it on CounterStrike!" be a useful defense in a murder trial? Could the makers of that game get dragged to court over it? Of course not, and society as a whole would laugh at that kind of thing. People are expected to know the difference.

Sex, on the other hand, is much less clear. Like you said, society doesn't want to talk about it. In many cases, society just doesn't want to know - "don't ask, don't tell". It is only a recent phenomenon that people have been able to be more open about it, generally. Maybe it is something that will take time. In the meantime, is it possible that a game that allows or encourages nudity or sexual contact get into trouble if one or more of its players took it "beyond the game"? I'd say that's more likely.

So, could games help society by changing? It's possible. But they don't want to. They don't want to take the risk and anger a still somewhat-conservative society, or even land themselves in court. It's safe to glorify violence because the average joe knows that you're not trying to challenge society's views. Even a very detailed and controversial game like Grand Theft Auto - the vast majority of people don't believe that the game designers are trying to encourage crime. When the topic shifts to something a lot more blurry, I don't think many developers would want to put their reputation on the line and risk being accused of supporting something that they really don't.
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Old 09-14-2007, 10:56 AM   #3
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Re: Sex & Violence

I've often made the same reflexion myself. Nobody even bats an eyebrow over the most explicit violence, but any implication about sex and nudity in the zones requires a disclaimer in the log-in sequence.

It always amazes me how totally bigoted some people can be about it too. I once made a joke in a zone about a virgin and a unicorn in the first Mud I built in, and very nearly got banned as a result. The same imm that got her knickers in a knot over my rather innocent quip used to cyber male players in her private quarters and quite frequently advanced them to imm level in return for their... umm... services.

Which is one reason of course why mudsex is not always a good idea.

Personally I've always found cybersex really cheesy, but my Mud permits it, as long as they are reasonably discreet about it and keep it to confined quarters. It would be hard to stop it really, unless it's in one of those Muds that constantly snoops their players. To me player privacy is important, so we don't meddle in private affairs.

However, there are times when I believe that mudsex is at the root of most player conflicts in a Mud. There is always that type of player - (usually female, I regret to say) - who cannot separate RL from the game, and will start getting hysteric or downright nasty when their partner breaks up the relationship or shows some interest in others.

Also mudsex in any form is something that imms should avoid, since it will always cast a doubt on their impartiality. Their intentions may be honest and their judgement flawless, but fact remains: If there is a conflict between a male and a female player, and it is commonly known that the imm who has to judge in the conflict cybers the female - (or of course the opposite) - would anyone really trust him/her to be totally unbiased?

Anyhow - here's a link to my favorite cybersex file: It had me in convulsions on the floor the first time I saw it. I doubt that cybersex will be the same to anyone who's read it.
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Old 09-14-2007, 12:27 PM   #4
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Re: Sex & Violence

Actually, something that really jumped out at me when I first moved to Germany (from the UK) was the differences in censorship; excessive violence gets chopped out of movies and computer games, while sex and nudity are mostly ignored.

I bought an imported version of GTA3 at great expensive, because the version here had no blood, no rewards for killing pedestrians and several death animations had been removed. Perhaps a more interesting example is Carmageddon - in the UK the pedestrians were replaced with zombies, while the German version replaced them with robots.

On the other hand, nobody over here bats an eyelid about nudity. One of my favourite Cinema adverts here was for a gym - they showed a naked woman walking into her living room and cracking a walnut between her buttocks (the idea being that she was in very good physical shape). It was funny rather than crude, but still a bit of a shock when I first saw it (there's no way they'd get away with something like that back in the UK).


To stay a bit more on-topic, has anyone else had trouble trying to decide what rating to give their mud? I went for "Game Rating Adults only - strong language, sexuality or violence" based on the graphic nature of my combat system, but it was more of a guess than anything.
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Old 09-14-2007, 01:24 PM   #5
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Re: Sex & Violence

While my MUD isn't adult orientated I list it as such because I hate little kids.

It's a poor imitation of the originals:
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Old 09-14-2007, 01:29 PM   #6
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Re: Sex & Violence

While we're on funny fake logs, this is pretty old now but still one of the funniest things I've ever read. Called "If World War II was an MMORPG":

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Old 09-14-2007, 01:50 PM   #7
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Re: Sex & Violence

stfu u n00bs b4 i mod u

Xerihae will return with his regularly scheduled reply shortly...
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Old 09-14-2007, 03:03 PM   #8
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Re: Sex & Violence

I believe that the aversion to sex and not violence is a very, very old standby. It's definitely not a new idea, think about the Middle Ages, if you were a soldier it was fine with the church but being sexually promiscuous would cause you to burn in a thousand hells. I think that these values are simply imprinted into the Western mindset.

Now certain places in Europe (Germany as mentioned earlier) certainly do seem to have recently (I.E. mid to late last century) changed their views, I'm not sure what the cause would be, but they definitely have an almost reversed view of these concepts than we have in America.
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Old 09-14-2007, 04:10 PM   #9
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Re: Sex & Violence

Heh, those were some funny links, Scandum and Lasher. Thanks a heap, I'll add them to my collection.

What's also funny is that I tried to read up on this thread while visiting my uncle a couple of hours ago, and was stopped by a filter, claiming the link to be unfit for minors due to the content of sex and violence. That never happened to me before while browsing a Mud related discussion board. Guess it must have been the title of the thread.
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Old 09-14-2007, 09:06 PM   #10
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Re: Sex & Violence

There are places in the US like that too. They are called Nudist Colonies, or Naturist camps. The fundgelicals get their panties in a wad over them so much that, in Texas at least, and probably other places, they have actually passed laws "prohibiting" camps for children that involve Naturism preemptively, just in case someone **might** one day consider opening one there. Though why any one would, given that the reaction of people in those places is one step away from calling for a lynching due to a persons ankles showing.

See, in their minds, **violence** is a consequence of loose rules and immorality. Sex however, and even nudity, ***lead to*** loose rules and immorality. It therefor follows that the later is more dangerous than the former, which is just a symptom. This isn't surprising thinking really, statistically 90% of murders are either a relative killing there kids, wives killing husbands, husbands killing wives, lovers killing their loved one, etc., and when you also have the statistically the highest rates of teen pregnancies, rapes, incest, and so on, in the nation, it kind of unhinges the mind. It can't ***possibly*** be the rampant bigotry and ignorance in the areas where hatred of nudity/sex, advocacy of guns and warmongering, and "abstinence/say no to <fill in blank>" programs are most prevailent, so it must be the fact that the rest of the world isn't as bigoted and ignorant. Facts also don't matter. We are dealing with cranks here, and by definition, a crank sticks with a theory, even if 50 other cranks are insisting that the real cause is everything from not enough sex to children wearing Spiderman underwear. What matters is that all the cooks agree the problems are the fault of the other 90% of the country, who don't pass preemptive laws to prevent non-existent people from mooning dukes on the shore of some lake some place.

There is no rational basis for it, and there is even one Christian group that advocates for Naturism that flat out argues, based on Biblical passages, that not only is going nude in humility OK, that nudity was **required** for baptisms until a few centuries ago, and that God **never** punishes anyone for such an offense any place in the book, including the one women in a passage who gets raped while bathing by the river. She became a major political figure, her sons the rulers of the nation, and the idiot that raped her get his head stuffed on the end of a pike in a war, soon after the act (or something like that). Trait number 2 of cranks - No matter how much history, psychology, logic, statistics or basic undeniable facts you drop in front of them, they will do what Dembski did at the Dover trial. They will look at your mountains of data, facts and evidence, turn and stare dumbly at you and say, "All that stuff is meaningless nonsense. I don't see any evidence here."

Anti-nudity and the absurd idea that what "does" work for violence (making sure the kid knows the difference, which a lot don't bother to teach them in the first place) is entirely a relatively new phenomena, less than 200-300 years old in its less extreme absurdities, and probably less than 30-40 years in its worst idiocies. Wookstock came as a real shock to a lot of people that wouldn't have had a second thought letting their kid go to a local pond, strip naked, and swim around, in mixed sex company. It sent whole segments of the US right of the deep end from general prudery into abject insanity imho. Kind of like the nut I ran into recently who just **knew** that the real danger wasn't a bunch of religious nuts in the ME that already once overran most of Europe all the way to like France or so, before being pushed back, but rather those "damn commies" in China. Times change, but some people not only can't adapt to the pace, they calcify in their thinking, like mud turning to sandstone and go completely irrational.

Worse, what they completely fail to see is that, where ever bigotry, obsession and grandiose causes abide, more than half the people defending the cause are little more than leeches, sucking on the suckers, who get drawn in by the idea that all the worlds problems can just be solved if they throw another $2,000,000 at, "getting the message out to the heathens", and passing laws designed not to "inform", but deny information. The theory being, much like security and virus protecting on all those companies that keep "losing track of" huge databases of user information or having their networks compromised, the *best* defense again bad behavior is to not tell people all the things they could do that would be bad... A theory that plays right into the vultures nibbling the edges of the carcass of their ethics and morality. The last thing a con artist wants is for people to start thinking, "You know, this really isn't working... Maybe we should try giving people real information instead?" Informed people don't send entire paychecks to some huckster that promises them that God will rid the world of gays, cure cancer and stop all abortions, if they just send enough cash to help them sell a $5 book about, "abstaining from sex", (final price $50), to every school in the country. Ignorant people will send their life savings in to such crackpots.

And, while they have always been among us, its only now that they have 3-4 national TV stations dedicated to their BS, billions of dollars in funding, and direct access to nearly every fool on the planet to dupe into handing them more. Whose biases do you think they are going to latch onto, the guy that thinks safe sex ed is the best way to solve teen pregnancies, or the half wit, who has had 11 kids, starting when the first born when she was 14, and probably by her own brother, and who just *knows* it was the pictures of women's bras in the Sears catalog that caused him to rape her at 13?

Ironically, its the very separations we have, which most of Europe never implemented as strictly as the US, which led to them a) being able to do something about this kind of BS and b) figuring out, a lot faster than we have, that people mucking around in politics or law, based on ideology and dogma, should be **embarrassing**, not mandatory (as it virtually is now) for a stable country. Note, I said, ideology and dogma. Religion can, by itself be harmless, sometimes helpful, if it pushes people to do good, an occasional annoyance, where it interferes in things it doesn't apply to very well, but when you add in radical ideology and the dogmatic assertions that everything the ideology says "must" be true, even when, as in most cases, their personal source book doesn't even agree with them, it becomes **dangerous**. This is as true when some nut like Stalin warped the concepts of communism, which its author merely said was the "logical long term consequence of capitalism, not a direct replacement for it" (How much 'pure' capitalism do we really have now? Consider why the next time you pay a bill for a small sum to one of several companies, instead of one megacorporation, which owns the entire industry...), into an ideological dogma about how *his* world was going to work. Mind you, communism was naive, but bore no more resemblance to what some turned it into than fundigelical groups bear to early Christians (or just early Americans). Fact is, its is just as true when some dipstick with a Bible in one hand and a list of, "naughty things I don't think people aught to know about", in the other, insists that he needs to win more points before the end of everything, by "uncorrupting" the world using some crackpot mix of ideology and dogma that leave Biblical scholars, most Christians, biologists, geologists, heck 90% of the scientists in general, and everyone from any other religion, lacking religion, or just from a less nutty country, scratching their heads and trying to figure out what drugs they had to be taking while making it all up. lol

But yeah, in short, I sort of understand how they come up with the screwy idea that sex/nudity is worse than simulated murder, but it makes about as much sense to me as the concept that there are people dumb enough in the world to **need** labels, like, "Not for internal use.", on a bottle of shampoo. The idiocy of it is just mind boggling.
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Old 09-14-2007, 09:13 PM   #11
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Re: Sex & Violence

Wow, did you just write that? If you did, it is wasted here. It needs to be an article somewhere it will be widely read.

Then again, no point, the people that will really appreciate it don't need to read it. Catch-22.
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Old 09-14-2007, 09:28 PM   #12
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Re: Sex & Violence

Yeah, unfortunately, in the deepest dens of the liars and charletons where such information and ideas could do good, the moderators wouldn't make it past the first suggestion that nudity wasn't a negative, before deleting the entire post, then permanently banning the poster. Its strange how the "godly", who insist their faith is so strong, unshakable, inerrant and uncorruptable shrink like vampires in day light the moment "facts" as presented, and must paint over all the windows with the darkest black, to prevent the slightest hint of light from getting through. Its **almost** like they aren't actually sure their god is really out there, and they "faith" is as fragile and easilly disrupted as sugar glass in a summer heat (Sugar glass being the fake stuff they use in movies, to make breakable bottles, etc. Made of actual sugar.) lol

I can imagine a cartoon, a bunch of thugs beat on a rock wall, while someone on a glass throne tells the guy standing next to him, "We should be through any day now." Someone calmly walks up the road, stops, calls him a fool, then throws a rock at the throne. The guy on the throne screams, all the thugs run over to protect the throne with their bodies, then, when the assailent runs out of rocks, the thugs go back to hammering on the wall, while the king of cranks tells his companion, "Yep, any day now we will get through. And how dare that 'coward', who wouldn't even show his face, try to scratch my unbreakable steel throne!"
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Old 09-15-2007, 05:08 AM   #13
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Re: Sex & Violence

Amazing post, Shadowfyr. I couldn't agree more.

The really disturbing thing is of course that the people who really should will either not read it or not understand it. And - as you pointed out - also do anything in their power to prevent others from reading and understanding it.

Ignorance, stupidity and fanaticism are at the root of all evil.
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Old 09-15-2007, 05:31 AM   #14
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Re: Sex & Violence

That's very insightful.

If you look at the statistics it's not as clear cut as that. There's a strong indication that intelligence controls impulse control, and intelligence being roughly 80% genetic for adults (less for children) it's ridiculous to blame environmental factors alone.

Though not as ridiculous if you consider that liberals tend to believe two things about IQ:

* First, that IQ is a meaningless, utterly discredited concept.

* Second, that liberals are better than conservatives because they have
much higher IQs.

Fortunately for you I can't address this issue as my post would be deleted. It will suffice to say that there are other aspects that better explain the correlation than that gun possession, a dislike of nudity, addressing people like adults (don't do drugs, don't have promiscuous sex), somehow lead to murder, rape, and war.

Not that I disagree that jesus freaks aren't cranks, but the US has been taking the liberal course for the past 50 years and things have only gotten worse, and banning guns, clothing, and bigotry, though surprisingly successful efforts have been made in that direction, aren't going to help.
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Old 09-15-2007, 10:01 PM   #15
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Re: Sex & Violence

Umm. Sorry, but for about 30-40 years things got more liberal in the US, then the far right got panicked and in the last 10-20 they have made a concerted effort to undermine our trust in science, paint everyone on the left as immoral and blame all the problems in the world on not having enough churches. Its bull****. Europe took the opposiote approach from the US, going ultra conservative for the first few hundred years (even mandating specific religions as the official state religion), and they ****have**** gone so liberal since then that they make the most liberal areas in the US look like strict authoritarian traditionalists. Only, to recognize that fact, you have to realize how screwed up our views of what "liberal" means are, when compared to nations that actually have true liberal parties.

Point of fact, there is, in the last 15-20 years, almost *no* difference between the right and the left politically, other than a few differences on where to waste money, and the fact that both sides paint the other side as filled with nothing but the most insane self-claimed members of the other side. Sure, there are cranks and freaks on both sides. But, as a rule, the *politicians*, who make policy for the right and left are both on right of center on virtually *everything*, when compared to Europe.

There was an article a while back that presented this fairly clearly. It showed nations in terms of two axis map of where views fell on individualism vs. traditionalism on one axis, and government control vs. freedom on the other. 90% of Europe was a blob in the "individualist + freedom" zone, with some cross over into "individualism + control". Other nations tended to fall all over the place, but Middle Eastern nations tended to all cluster in the "traditionalism + control" area. The US was a fracking blob in the middle, with one huge tendrel stuck into the middle of the ME cluster like a huge scar, just barely coming short of the most extreme versions of that view. The rest **failed** to be as pro-freedom, pro-individual, or pro-control as "anyone" else. We overlapped European countries only 50% into the "invidualism" category, and half of the blob that represented the US was on the wrong side of the line from Europe, with respect to government control.

The simple truth is, the left has done three things that are unbelievably stupid:

1. They have assumed that no one listens to liberal nuts. After all, they are nuts, and anyone with half a clue should be able to tell that they are nuts. Problem - Most people don't have half a clue how to program their VCR, let alone figure out that people like Deepockets Chopra are full of it.

2. They have assumed that most people understand issues well enough to trust someone telling them the truth, over someone lying to them. Problem - This only works if people are telling them the truth in the first place. Case in point, polls have shown that 80% of the US can't answer "basic" science questions and get the answers right, and that is **using multiple choice questions**.

3. Providing information in a way that isn't confrontational and which requires others to "look for it" is sufficient, since only the people that are well enough informed to look for the information are likely to be in a position to make critical decisions. Problem - This is just wrong. One of the basic principles of management is, "Unless you are careful, most people will tend to be promoted upward, until they reach a point at which they are completely incompetent at their jobs." This is called the Peter Principle. 90% of the people making decisions don't even know the information is available, and a lot of them have been told by an endless stream of flunkies and special interests that they "can't trust" the sources in the first place.

The bigger issue though, for all three mistakes, is that the cranks, especially religiously driven cranks, have no ethical qualms or moral issues with 1 - Insisting that the nuts on the left "are" the left. 2 - Doing everything they can to make sure that polls provide either a) no correct answer in the first place, or b) always include the one people are most familiar with, and thus likely to choose, even if wrong. 3 - The don't sit around going, "I have more important things to do than spend hours trying to convince people to believe me." The cranks have all the time in the world. They don't do reseach, they don't build anything, they don't create anything, they don't **do** anything, other than spend 90% of their time telling other people what, how and when to think things.


Until the last 5 years or so, the only thing anyone has *ever* heard from our side has been from politicians, who don't care any more about liberalism than the conservatives do, they just want to kiss the ass of the people that they think are going to elect them, and the nuts. The rest of us have kept quiet, ignored the loons, gone on with trying to change things slowly, all the while "sure" that the public would *eventually* wake up and figure out whose side they should be on. The result is a nations full of people that don't know something as basic as if a proton is bigger than an atom, think liberalism means a whole list of insane BS that it doesn't, actually think that the Democrats *qualify* as liberal, fail to understand that, on some levels, key aspects of the democratic and republican positions have *actually* flipped 180 degrees, making the Democrats weak, and the Republicans dangerously unstable, etc. We are a clueless, ignorant, self important, delusional, over weight nation, who once believed that, "what my neighbor believes doesn't hurt me.", but now thinks two entirely insane things:

1. We have a right to stop other people from annoying us, through censorship, declaring some ideas unamerican, or insisting that you can't be one, if you don't believe the right things.
2. The US is always right, about everything, and the entire rest of the world, when ever it manages to avoid the pitfalls, idiocies and social problems we have (while often doing 180 degrees the opposite of us, which BTW, usually means being ***more*** liberal than we are. How many cell networks in the US are dedicated to people actively finding people the sleep with, like the do in Japan, where STDs are like 20 times lower, as one example?) are all either a) lying about it, or b) are just some odd fluke, which doesn't count, because, well.... They're not Americans!

We are ripping apart because one side knows we can't *fix* problems by arbitrarilly mandating moral standards on people, which don't make sense, *especially* when there are numerous examples of it failing, and even more examples of other countries that have gone the opposite direction, with 10 times greater success, but *that* side is full of lots of people that have wacko ideas about how to really solve the problem which are, if anything, even less rational than the authoritarian stance of their opposite. On the other side, we have people that **actually** think that doing the same thing over and over again, for like... 1,000 years at least, possibly longer, and refusing to learn from their predicessors mistakes, is a sign of profound trust in moral literalism, (never mind how often you can use their own arguments to rip appart their logic), and not, as more commonly expressed, "a sign of insanity".

Its this conflict that is dragging the two sides that *need* to be working towards a common goal, of the betterment of the nation, instead into vocal opposition. The **problems** you talk about are a symptom not of liberalism, but one of the guards to the warehouse standing around a corner arguing about the meaning of "guard", while every fool, nut case, intentional thief or mobster walks in and out the front door, mostly unhindered. Bad neighborhoods get worse, because neither side wants to admit that its "partly" their fault. Neither side wants to call out the complete loons on their side, because they are all scared (probably rightly) that exposing the real dangerous nuts might open "them" to examination too. And, as a rule, the people trying to hold the whole thing together, instead of just taking advantage of all the cracks, or widdening them, are too busy to do anything else.

The ones that do? At least on the left, they get labelled "militant", "too aggressive", "as bad as the people they are challenging", and a whole list of other things, even in the worst cases, actually having prominent politicians say, "Such people shouldn't be Americans". Guess all those people that signed something called the Declaration of Independence, who tended to be **very** vocal, strident, militant and agressive about their views shouldn't have qualified either... No, according to a lot of people, the only way to "change" things is to kiss the ass of the enemy, like the "nobles" in Braveheart did, instead of, you know, being an overly loud, actively agressive, and uncompromising fool, like that William Wallace person. And you know what happened to him!

You want to impress me. Don't tell me that my side is the only one steering us into the fracking walls, and therefor its all our fault. It isn't. At best, both sides often overcorrect, slamming society, unintentionally into the opposite wall. Only problem is, both sides also have way to many backseat drivers, who think, "Ooooh! I liked the sound we made when we hit the wall, lets do it again!", which is why we are constantly overcorrecting in the first place.
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Old 09-16-2007, 08:00 AM   #16
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Re: Sex & Violence

I know it had very little to do with the original topic (especially since it mainly deals with the US) but...

Dayum...

Now for the original topic!

I've seen what KaVir mentioned regarding the reversal of censorship in Germany, as most of us who follow the game industry probably have. Continental Europe has always been a bit more relaxed about things like sex and nudity compared to the traditional British "stiff upper lip", but we're gradually getting more relaxed about it too. I see adverts for shampoo that feature naked women who are just turned to a slight angle and cover their nipples that are considered perfectly acceptable these days, whereas 20 years ago they would have been decried as indecent. I guess it's just societal conditioning (regardless of source) as we've been watching violence as entertainment since the gladiatorial days of Rome and no doubt before, but why did sex and nudity become so "immoral" in comparison? Yes, promiscuous sex can lead to problems with unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, but you could also argue that trying to hide the facts just means everyone is ignorant of the dangers. Plus, are we not by very nature somewhat promiscuous? We have evolved from other creatures over the millenia, some of which formed partnerships like we tend to do now, some of which didn't. The genetic imperative for males to "spread their seed" is still in existence even if society right now frowns on it, just as the genetic imperative for women to get pregnant (we call it being broody these days) is still in force.

People will then argue that we should fight our baser desires and nature, like we restrain our urge for killing (although not very well it seems), but to that I counter WHY is sex and nudity so base and immoral? Who are you to decide that? Where's the evidence that having lots of sex and enjoying looking at naked bodies makes people extra bad/evil?

And shadowfyr, I'd love to see you go up against the likes of Ann Coulter! The only thing I'd say is be careful of your audience, because I believe the "right/left" terms you use are reversed in Europe so the article might not make so much sense to someone not familiar with US politics.
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Old 09-16-2007, 10:00 AM   #17
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Re: Sex & Violence

wow... those are some long ass posts...
back on topic!
Being what some retards would describe as a "corrupted 13 year old" (when in reality my parents don't hide every bit of nudity or violence from my eyes which leads me to be more open minded and unbrainwashed (was that a word?) ), I agree with everybody on this forum unless there was a post that said something like "Bu-bu-bu-bu-but nudity is bad mmkay?".
I support boobs.
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Old 09-16-2007, 11:08 AM   #18
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Re: Sex & Violence

I think we need our children to be exposed to less violence, not more nudity.

-Also, I don't think the issue is really nudity, but a sudden seeming prevalence of child predetors. By saying don't show our kids nakedness, I think what we're really saying is it's not ok to think of our children as sexual beings. We are trying to safeguard their innocence. -Maybe not in a way that makes rational sense, but I don't know that we're always rational beings.
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Old 09-16-2007, 02:25 PM   #19
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Re: Sex & Violence

People... Don't protect your kids from ANYTHING except from people like Michael Jackson... or Jason Vorhees.
But yes it is more retarded to shield your kid's eyes from nudity, yet let them see all of the violence they can handle.
Once again...
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Old 09-16-2007, 03:09 PM   #20
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Re: Sex & Violence

On a more serious note, it's interesting that the idea of "losing innocence" is somewhat linked to learning about (vs being active in) sexual issues.

My daugther is 3 years old. Every stranger is a friend and as she never does anything without us, someone we trust or her school we're fine with that. Every animal is a friend too. She believes everything you tell her.

Losing her "innocence", the way I see her innocence, will take place when we have to start teaching her that every stranger isn't a friend, every stranger is a potential pedophile/child abductor. It will happen the first time someone steals something from her, the first time a dog bites her, the first time someone tries to pick on her at school, the first time she learns about lying beyond "No I didnt eat that cookie", the first time someone she loves dies, when she realizes we lied to her about Santa Clause (what else did they lie to me about?) and a multitude of other things. It will not happen because she sees someone naked in a movie.
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