Americans have some very confusing ideas about the power of images and how to use them positively. While I don't think that pornographic depictions of sex are necessarily healthy, instructive, or entertaining, neither are pornographic depictions of violence. The latter are, of course, much more prevalent on TV and in movies in the US. The problem with these types of images is that they tend to be a spectacle for its own sake, removed from a story, any ordinary, lifelike flow. Sex is hidden and usually shameful, or gratuitous and transactional; violence is cartoonish, fun, inconsequential, or else it must be too mature for teh kidz.
I grew up watching a whole lot of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Watching that with my parents and their friends certainly gave me some good nudges towards a liberal, humanist worldview, and considering the effect that show had on my development later gave me pause and an opportunity for reflection on the values I nicked from it.
I saw Pulp Fiction when I was 10 or something, Akira when I was six. I didn't understand everything that happened in those movies, nor were they necessarily explained by my parents. I enjoyed some bits, found others incomrehensible or scary, forgot about others. Quite like how I consume such images nowadays, although now I have a larger vocabulary to articulate my own experience of them.
I saw and used porn well after I became interested in sex, sometime before I did it myself. I suspect my own experience with "forbidden" images as a youngster is not all that uncommon, especially with the widespread access to the internet you find today. I learned more about sex and love from literary explorations. Porn is always about masturbation, which is laden with guilt in this culture. Perhaps that explains the separation of porn from other types of programming on television - if one could openly watch porn, they'd probably begin to openly talk about masturbation.
I recently rented John Waters' A Dirty Shame with my partner and we chatted and guffawed for some 95 minutes straight. This prompted us to rent This Film Has Not Yet Been Rated, which, while far from a perfect film, certainly put a spotlight on the flaws in the current film rating system. While I generally ignore movie ratings and encourage the underage to sneak into any flick they can (movies are so overpriced!), I realize that many people's viewing habits are actually restricted by this secret organization's edicts. It's frustrating. Rather than engage this stuff critically, people are encouraged to narrow their own worldview to fit what they see on the tube. Anything else is unmentionable. |
