News Flash: Virgin Ears of America's Youth Threatened
Sigh:
High court conservatives favor indecency rule
Given the current composition of the Supreme Court, I shouldn't be surprised to see them taking such a position. Nor should I be surprised to see a Bush-appointed Solicitor General acting as flag-bearer for such a ridiculous cause. But I am disappointed, nonetheless.
Ever watch an HBO program? They don't shy away from the language issue on that channel. If the story calls for use of the word "fuck" or "shit", then that's the word they use. The really nice thing about this is that it allows for a level of realism that just isn't possible on normal TV networks. Ever see The Wire? It was the most realistic cop and drug-dealer show ever made, easily. The three broadcast networks, and all the various cable channels who insist on emulating the standards that the broadcast networks are forced to obey, could never have come up with a program like that in a million years. It would have been impossible. They would have had to obey the rules and water down the language, and the effect of that would have been to diminish the realism of the show. Everyone knows that cops and drug dealers use whatever kind of language they want. They don't censor themselves to meet broadcast television standards.
It's not just a matter of pure realism, either. Sometimes an injection of gritty realism allows a fantasy to be explored in a much more satisfying way. There's a newer show on HBO that I've been enjoying, called True Blood, which is a perfect example of this. The show is rife with foul language and has its fair share of raunchy, almost-pornographic sex scenes as well. It's not that I watch the show specifically to enjoy those things. But they are like bonus features. They enrich the experience of watching the show, and by quite a lot. It would be interesting to see a version of True Blood rewritten and re-edited for broadcast televison. They'd have to chop a lot of stuff out. Probably it would still be worth watching, since raunchy sex can be implied rather than shown directly, and they could use the standard euphemisms instead of "fuck", "shit" and so forth. They'd also have to dial back the blood a little bit, probably, and I wouldn't mind that very much. But the sum total of all those missing elements would have a fairly drastic effect on the quality of the program. Not that it would be worse, but it would surely be different. It would just be a regular TV show. Part of the viewing experience would involve having to fill in the blanks where the "offensive" stuff was left out, just like with other TV shows. And that's a bother. It's also annoying, it's childish, and it's so much nicer when we don't have to do it.
Getting back to the article, here is a key excerpt:
Who the hell is he kidding, anyway?
Is it even necessary to point out that a typical fourth grader is quite familiar with this word, and probably uses it with his buddies on a regular basis? That is certainly my recollection, having gone through the fourth grade myself. As for girls that age, I can't claim firsthand knowledge, since I didn't hang out with girls very much in the fourth grade. But in the sixth grade? Yes. In fact, the school I went to had the wisdom to arrange student lockers in a mixed-sex arrangement, none of this crap of putting boys in one wing and girls in the other, we were all mixed together. So my locker was next to the locker of a couple of girls, and I can attest that both of them were pretty fluent in the full variety of obscenities in the English language. (They also had an amusing fascination with penises, but that's kind of another topic.)
Sixth grade. Since they were already so familiar and comfortable with all of this language, it can only be assumed that they learned it when they were younger.
So who the hell are we protecting, anyway?
Are we protecting the small number of sheltered innocents who somehow manage to reach the sixth grade without ever hearing the word "shit"? And, if that's what we are really doing, I have to ask WHY????????? I mean, are we really doing them a favor by continuing to shelter them from the cultural reality that they are going to have to live in when they get older?
Honestly, I don't think those very few overly-sheltered children are the reason the government insists on putting its full weight behind these broadcast decency regulations. I don't really know why they do it. Perhaps they do it just because that's what they've always done. Beyond that, there's only speculation.
I can speculate, for instance, that perhaps the reason is not to protect the innocence of children, but to protect the innocence of adults, who, for some reason I utterly fail to understand, need to believe that children are pure and uncorrupt.
It's a reasonable idea, and I think it's probably correct. However, it does raise even deeper questions, such as why our culture has so much energy invested in such a questionable concept as childhood innocence in the first place. But I can speculate about that one too: I think the answer has to do with wanting to control people. Getting back to the girls in my sixth grade class, there were plenty of them who did not engage in the potty-mouth thing. However, just because they didn't talk that way doesn't mean they were unfamiliar with that way of talking. They had just already decided that that wasn't how they wanted to talk. It was their choice, and adult attempts to shelter them from the corrupting influence of profanity had nothing to do with it. I think that may be the center of the issue: Young people, especially young girls, taking control and making their own decisions. People get really nervous about that.
Anyway, if you happen to be interested in this sort of subject, I have a book recommendation: Harmful to Minors, by Judith Levine. The book deals more with the question of sex and pornography than with profanity, but in many ways, it's the same question.
High court conservatives favor indecency rule
Given the current composition of the Supreme Court, I shouldn't be surprised to see them taking such a position. Nor should I be surprised to see a Bush-appointed Solicitor General acting as flag-bearer for such a ridiculous cause. But I am disappointed, nonetheless.
Ever watch an HBO program? They don't shy away from the language issue on that channel. If the story calls for use of the word "fuck" or "shit", then that's the word they use. The really nice thing about this is that it allows for a level of realism that just isn't possible on normal TV networks. Ever see The Wire? It was the most realistic cop and drug-dealer show ever made, easily. The three broadcast networks, and all the various cable channels who insist on emulating the standards that the broadcast networks are forced to obey, could never have come up with a program like that in a million years. It would have been impossible. They would have had to obey the rules and water down the language, and the effect of that would have been to diminish the realism of the show. Everyone knows that cops and drug dealers use whatever kind of language they want. They don't censor themselves to meet broadcast television standards.
It's not just a matter of pure realism, either. Sometimes an injection of gritty realism allows a fantasy to be explored in a much more satisfying way. There's a newer show on HBO that I've been enjoying, called True Blood, which is a perfect example of this. The show is rife with foul language and has its fair share of raunchy, almost-pornographic sex scenes as well. It's not that I watch the show specifically to enjoy those things. But they are like bonus features. They enrich the experience of watching the show, and by quite a lot. It would be interesting to see a version of True Blood rewritten and re-edited for broadcast televison. They'd have to chop a lot of stuff out. Probably it would still be worth watching, since raunchy sex can be implied rather than shown directly, and they could use the standard euphemisms instead of "fuck", "shit" and so forth. They'd also have to dial back the blood a little bit, probably, and I wouldn't mind that very much. But the sum total of all those missing elements would have a fairly drastic effect on the quality of the program. Not that it would be worse, but it would surely be different. It would just be a regular TV show. Part of the viewing experience would involve having to fill in the blanks where the "offensive" stuff was left out, just like with other TV shows. And that's a bother. It's also annoying, it's childish, and it's so much nicer when we don't have to do it.
Getting back to the article, here is a key excerpt:
"The F-word is one of the most graphic, explicit and vulgar words in the English language for sexual activity," [U.S. Solicitor General Gregory G. Garre] said. Broadcasters can be fined more than $325,000 for a single utterance of the F-word, even if it is blurted out by a guest on a live program.Really? It's really so critical that the word "fuck" never penetrate the innocent, virgin ears of our precious children ever, that a broadcaster should be fined three-hundred twenty-five thousand dollars for one single utterance?
Who the hell is he kidding, anyway?
Is it even necessary to point out that a typical fourth grader is quite familiar with this word, and probably uses it with his buddies on a regular basis? That is certainly my recollection, having gone through the fourth grade myself. As for girls that age, I can't claim firsthand knowledge, since I didn't hang out with girls very much in the fourth grade. But in the sixth grade? Yes. In fact, the school I went to had the wisdom to arrange student lockers in a mixed-sex arrangement, none of this crap of putting boys in one wing and girls in the other, we were all mixed together. So my locker was next to the locker of a couple of girls, and I can attest that both of them were pretty fluent in the full variety of obscenities in the English language. (They also had an amusing fascination with penises, but that's kind of another topic.)
Sixth grade. Since they were already so familiar and comfortable with all of this language, it can only be assumed that they learned it when they were younger.
So who the hell are we protecting, anyway?
Are we protecting the small number of sheltered innocents who somehow manage to reach the sixth grade without ever hearing the word "shit"? And, if that's what we are really doing, I have to ask WHY????????? I mean, are we really doing them a favor by continuing to shelter them from the cultural reality that they are going to have to live in when they get older?
Honestly, I don't think those very few overly-sheltered children are the reason the government insists on putting its full weight behind these broadcast decency regulations. I don't really know why they do it. Perhaps they do it just because that's what they've always done. Beyond that, there's only speculation.
I can speculate, for instance, that perhaps the reason is not to protect the innocence of children, but to protect the innocence of adults, who, for some reason I utterly fail to understand, need to believe that children are pure and uncorrupt.
It's a reasonable idea, and I think it's probably correct. However, it does raise even deeper questions, such as why our culture has so much energy invested in such a questionable concept as childhood innocence in the first place. But I can speculate about that one too: I think the answer has to do with wanting to control people. Getting back to the girls in my sixth grade class, there were plenty of them who did not engage in the potty-mouth thing. However, just because they didn't talk that way doesn't mean they were unfamiliar with that way of talking. They had just already decided that that wasn't how they wanted to talk. It was their choice, and adult attempts to shelter them from the corrupting influence of profanity had nothing to do with it. I think that may be the center of the issue: Young people, especially young girls, taking control and making their own decisions. People get really nervous about that.
Anyway, if you happen to be interested in this sort of subject, I have a book recommendation: Harmful to Minors, by Judith Levine. The book deals more with the question of sex and pornography than with profanity, but in many ways, it's the same question.
posted by cke at 11:04 AM
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