|
Cat Hatter posted:X was not trademarked by the MPAA, the idea being that if a company knew their film would probably get an X anyway, they could save everyone the time/effort of reviewing it and self-rate the film. Since X wasn't trademarked, porn companies would try to show off how raunchy their never-submitted-for-approval movie was by putting additional X's on the promotional material. "Hey, if Deep Throat only got one X and this has 3 Xs, it must be really explicit" was the line of thinking. Once the X rating became more associated with porn than films like Midnight Cowboy, A Clockwork Orange, and Evil Dead; (and when porn started to go out of fashion) theaters started banning X rated films. Eventually the MPAA realized their mistake and created NC-17 so you could (in theory) still have wide releases of non-pornographic films with extreme content, like the original cut of Robocop. Unfortunately, the movie theaters collectively went "oh, NC-17 is the new X? Ban them too, we don't want people thinking we're showing porn". Now its usually in a director's contract that they will turn in an R (or less) rated film. Sex is...a bizarre thing in America. We are, as a culture, getting increasingly further away from puritanical nonsense but the purity police still have an absurd amount of control and influence. The 1960's and 1970's actually completely failed to make sex totally open for a lot of reasons but were an indication of the increasing trend toward treating sex less as some icky, strange thing and more like just a natural thing that people do. It's worth nothing that it wasn't until The Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and loving Three that the SCOTUS finally ended sodomy laws entirely, once and for all. Though most states had removed their sodomy laws very few states legalized consensual butt sex between adults before 1970. Pornography is still coming under fire even though the SCOTUS also ruled that people can watch all the porn they want in the privacy of their own homes. Plus look at how much of a meltdown the nation goes into if a woman's nipple is seen on public TV. You can gun down 5,000 people on your show but you can't say gently caress or show a boob because that would be immoral.
|
#
¿
Feb 18, 2016 20:47
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 14:46 |
|
|
Practical Demon posted:Issues aren't universal, but they're apparent when you look at the whole. Female nudity is more common than male nudity, even though male nudity isn't censored as harshly. Filmmakers tend to be male, and they make movies with men in mind, for the most part. See also: "unrated" versions of movies which is code for "there are more tits now." And they don't mean in general, just any ol' boobs, but attractive women. Why does it happen? Because it sells movies. Aesop Poprock posted:Wasn't Rogue and Gambits thing that they literally couldn't touch each other because of their powers? I thought I remembered them specifically mentioning that even in the cartoon when I was a kid cause I remember even then thinking "wow that blows" Rogue and Gambit had the hots for each other but Rogue couldn't touch anybody. That was a common thread among X-Men thing that explained her personality; she kept people at a distance because she hosed up whoever she touched. It registers as "holy poo poo that sucks" because humans generally really like to touch each other. Think about how different life would be if you couldn't even high five, shake hands, or hug.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 19, 2016 23:16
|
|
|
BiggerBoat posted:I always wonder why titties and sex get so much more of a watchful eye cast over them than some person getting their brains bashed in or shot in the head. On the list of things I hope my kid never does, engaging in violence and weapons falls way below having sex or ever seeing a naked lady.  If our children grow up thinking that violence is wrong they might start to ask why we're carpet bombing everybody that we think might have looked at us funny one time. But if Junior learns that tits are awesome before he's 37 he might have premarital sex and that would be immoral. Really, that's all of it; America is a culture that glorifies violence but abhors sex.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 22, 2016 01:53
|
|
|
Your Dunkle Sans posted:The late Umberto Eco would have a few choice words on this. Kind of. The short of that was that Carlin was charged with obscenity for what he had said on the radio. It went to the SCOTUS which made decisions on what could be censored and where. Anything publicly broadcast (i.e, radio and TV you could pick up with an antenna) could be regulated by the FCC. Things privately broadcast (cable) could not be regulated as hard. Things on basic cable were often also just plain broadcast for quite a while so you had to be careful about what you showed there but things that were pay cable only (especially pay per view or premium channels) could get away with a lot more because they weren't publicly broadcast. This is what led to channels like HBO and Cinemax being able to show so much more than other channels could and why Cinemax got nicknamed Skinemax. You could show tits and violence all day every day because they weren't publicly broadcast.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 22, 2016 14:32
|
|
|
Your Dunkle Sans posted:Is that why so many of Carlin's comedy presentations were HBO specials? Part of it. Broadcast channels run by like CBS or ABC or whoever could never, ever get away with doing that. Easier to access channels that were more popular possibly could have but weren't going to risk it because while they may have been able to dodge legal troubles there were social expectations, which is part of why censorship is so bizarre on TV. The threat of "why the gently caress did you put that on TV? I'm angry and will watch other channels now" is huge. Aside from that the singular worst thing you can do to a channel is switch away from it so if parents saw something they didn't want their kids to see it was clicking to a different channel, which must be avoided at all costs. However, "family friendly" is a nebulous term at best. The legal requirements are pretty clear but the social ones are not. You also didn't want people surfing into your channel at that exact moment somebody said "gently caress" so you purged any and all times the word cropped up. Same with tits; you didn't want somebody's kids to just happen to change the channel at exactly the time a boob happened to pop on screen. You could avoid seeing the stuff that HBO or Cinemax had on by just, you know, not buying the channel. Kids can't watch it if it isn't even there. You might not think that a single, random instance of a bad word is a huge deal but there is potential for thousands or millions of people to just happen to tune in at that exact moment and go "wow, no." HBO got a reputation for having adulter content on it so it wasn't as huge of a deal if somebody swore on HBO. Same with how Comedy Central got away with South Park; it was perfectly legal but because they were Comedy Central they could just say "hey well it's a really popular funny show and that's the sort of thing we do so...are you surprised, really?" Pretty sure they were also never a broadcast thing ever, even though they came with a lot of cable subscriptions. Because HBO never bothered constructing a family friendly image in the first place so long as they never did something that was actually illegal they could just do whatever they wanted. HBO also has pretty deep pockets so they could afford to have huge names like Carlin do entire specials like that. Basically the conditions were perfect for Carlin specials to happen there and nowhere else. That's actually why you still see HBO comedian specials. Granted another side of that is HBO has been doing that for quite some time so now it's like "hey here is a thing we're good at doing that makes everybody involved money...let's just keep doing it." My understanding of the legality of it is fuzzy at best (insert "I am not a lawyer disclaimer" here) but the social pressure for censorship is actually much heavier than the legal pressure.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 22, 2016 17:18
|
|