Guns Are Good Tits Are Bad

Australia shows naked people on TV?

Sure. On mainstream commercial TV, no less. Heck, we've had extreme closeups of various genitalia on mainstream commercial TV in Oz. It's an enduring mystery to most of the world that Americans would find this unusual. Apparently, you're more comfortable watching grisly murders than a sweet young thing with a nice pair of tits. Can you explain that for the rest of us?

I think it is a Puritan thing. The sexy stuff might lead us into temptation. I mean, no normal person watches a murder and thinks, "Yeah! I want to do that!" Not so the sweet young thing.

Still mystified. Tempted to do what?

To "do" the sweet young thing, or at least lust after her. Lust is one of the seven deadly sins, you know. Can't be tempting people to fall into sin.

So ... aren't all those guns being waved around really encouraging people to murder each other? It's pretty well documented that wherever in the world American TV content is introduced, murder rates go up. Which means I'm still mystified - surely inciting murder is a more deadly thing to do than inciting lust?

I know I used some pretty subtle logic when I said "... no normal person watches a murder and thinks, 'Yeah! I want to do that!' ". Which part do you need for me to explain?

Also, I'll leave it to you to battle centuries of Catholic theology in determining what really constitute the seven deadly sins.

Religion has no rational justification behind it, hence it is an entirely psychological phenomenon. Indeed, psychology treats it as a mental illness and that's why religious psychologists practically don't exist.

According to some, Americans are afraid of their own sexuality, which is why they repress it so strenuously. But since sexuality is such a potent force, and since Americans haven't adjusted to it, it leaks through like a sieve. The result is a schizoid culture, hyper-sexualized but repressed all at the same time. Meanwhile, violence has the same stimulating effect as sexuality, which is why the media obsess about guns ... because they're not allowed to obsess over sexuality.

The same phenomenon occurs in Japan, another culture where healthy sexuality, and its depiction, are deeply repressed.

The sexual repression issue couldn't be clearer than in Canada. The exact same advertisement for beer runs in both Quebec and Ontario, in both French and English versions. But the French version for Quebec (a culture with European values) ends with a bare-chested girl covering her breasts with her arms. The English version for Anglos ends right before that, only suggesting that the girl would take off her t-shirt.

So, you're saying that "healthy sexuality" consists of pimping some girl's boobs to sell beer?

Compared to pimping the idea of her boobs to sell beer, but being too frightened to show them, it may well be.

Note that the Anglos aren't Puritans. On the contrary! The Puritans were earthy, sex is good, types compared to the Victorian culture they came from. The puritans did not come from the Victorian culture! The Victorians culture spanned the last half of the 19th century; the puritans emigrated to the US during the late 17th and early 18th centuries, during which England had a very licentious culture.

First, back up your assertion that psychology treats religion as a mental illness.

Second, there's something a little weird about denigrating religion as being "entirely psychological", and then using psychology itself to pass judgment upon it.

[I'm not the original poster. While the profession of psychology doesn't recognize religion per se as a mental illness; many in the profession consider themselves Enlightened FreeThinker?s above such silliness. (Their opinion, not mine). You won't find "catholicism" in the DSM, at any rate.]

[At one point, homosexuality was considered a mental illness by psychologists; that stance has long been abandoned (fortunately).] Yep, which just shows how weak his claim is. Even if psychology did define religion as mental illness, such a definition is itself not based on any objective criteria, thus it has "no rational justification", making the definition spurious by his own logic.

There's more to his claim than that. It's discussed in many other places on this wiki, though, so there should be no need to debate it here. The relevant point is the one about repressed sexuality.

A discussion of what constitutes mental health, how religious episodes are schizophrenic states, and how any psychologist who took a religious experience or belief at face value would destroy his professional reputation (see OfficialScientificPosition), is beyond the scope of this page.

My guess is that it is "tempted to do what seemingly everyone is doing all day long on Australian TV", but perhaps this is becoming more a discussion of *oLiTa and that is definitely OffTopic.

Huh? What they do all day long on Australian TV, like on any TV, is act like nattering morons. The tits are more a refreshing relief from such tedious twaddle than a regular feature of it. But this is beside the point. How come GunsAreGoodTitsAreBad?

So, I hadn't been to the USA for a while, but happened to be there the week of the Superbowl, 2004. I didn't see the game, of course, being European it had no interest fo me. But I did hear the national outcry on the radio, I did read the horrified end of civilization op-ed pieces in the newspapers, all because Janet Jackson flashed a tit at half-time. The op-ed pieces were particularly interesting, most following the line that this abhorrent sexual intrusion into the sanctity of Superbowl half-time would "wake America up" to the sink of depravity that the nation had become. Well!

That same week, the NY Times reported a terrorist attack on the Moscow metro. The front page of the paper (above the fold) displayed a clear colour photograph of the mangled corpses within one of the bombed carriages. National outcry was there not.

This discussion has definitely been played out on wiki before. I can't seem to find the page, though.

In his comedy routine, SevenWordsYouCantSayOnTelevision, GeorgeCarlin says, "I'd rather have my son watch a movie of two people making love, than two people trying to kill each other."

Guns are Good, Tits are Bad? Actually in a certain sense they are the same. Put either one in a man's hand and he is transformed.

No no .... in sex, both sides enjoy themselves ... N.H.

Same with anything. Movies and TV are all about providing proxy experiences and emotions.

My own impression is that many Americans were deeply afraid of their own sexuality, which is why they repress it so strenuously. The repression, not the fear, became a cultural norm. This is why even though I'm not ashamed by sexuality, I still get a little surprised every time I hear about boobies on prime time tv in other countries.

Let me just make some baldfaced statements... probably non-sequiturs:

Americans (I am one) are afraid of the deviance not of themselves (of course), but of their -partners-... and their children. Unless they're homely... then we don't sweat the subject.
Speaking of attractiveness, we hide private parts on tv because they're ugly. The tease of the curves is more pleasing. Conservatives aren't allayed by this solution, because it still doesn't mitigate the following effect:
Pornography affects the viewer's mind immediately. Violence may have a cumulative effect, but at least we can remain normal when it flashes before us (isn't the nightly news totally banal?). Deny, males, that seeing a suggestive image of a woman doesn't alter your brain chemistry. Avoiding this effect is not undesirable.

: I'm not sure what you mean by "suggestive image" or "brain chemistry". I'm sure I know what happens when I'm aroused. I'm sure I know what happens when I see a beautiful woman. I think your suggestion that "Avoiding this effect is not undesirable" is total horsepucky. I hope that over time, we Americans might someday join other parts of the world in learning that beauty, arousal, sexuality, passion, and all the other things that happen between men and women (and also between men and men and women and women) are not only central to our health, happiness, and wholeness, but are one of the most important ways that we differentiate ourselves from other species. It is something to celebrate, not avoid. The bizarre need to "avoid this effect", in my view, epitomizes how frighteningly sick our society is.

This should explain the national reaction to Ms. Jackson's behavior.

: If anybody truly objected to that stunt, Mr. Timberlake would have been immediately charged with sexual assault and battery. The "national reaction" to Ms. Jackson's behavior is a joke. Do you seriously mean that the barrage of penis-hardener ads was somehow less "offensive", especially to children? I suggest that anybody who was unhappy about the episode ask themselves why they don't simply turn off the TV and disconnect the cable. I did it five years ago. The national reaction ought to be against CBS and Viacom, the corporate swine who perpetually subject us to such rubbish. Ms. Jackson and Mr. Timberlake are simply mediocre talents attempting to cash in on whatever publicity they can grab.
: Why not celebrate the rubbish? ;)

Now, that being said, we do have an enormous count of slutty women and swinish men in America. Our national schizophrenia resides in the question, How to resolve this? More or less? Being within the culture, we can't objectively answer that question. So we need other countries' help in being testbeds :) Thanks Australia.

Of course, we could also discuss the opposite phenomenon; GunsAreBadTitsAreGood? - wherein it is asserted that any media exposure to an act of violence will turn normal, peace-loving folks into raving pistol-packing lunatics.

(And it should be pointed out that in quite a few cultures, including several known for discouraging public displays of sexuality, the human female breast is simply not an issue - just like the human male chest is not an issue in the UnitedStates. Men go topless here in public all the time; no big deal.)

In any case, the question as to whether Americans should reject something harmless while accepting something dangerous is a separate one from why they do so.

Guns are good and tits are bad because you can't stop the government's jack-booted thugs from stealing your sacred God-given liberties with a pair of tits.

If you show your gun, a stranger will probably go away. If you show your tits, he will likely stay.

The Gun Is good. The Penis Is Bad. The Penis Shoots Seed! - Zardoz

I like the Copulist Party principles (see WhatIsCopulism). I think that if more men were getting good sex more often, we'd have less killing. If Bush, Rumsfield, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Perle were getting a lot more of what Clinton got from Monica, the world would be a much safer place. The same is true for Bin Laden and the Muslim extremists - if they were getting a lot more, um, "jelly roll", then a lot fewer people would be dying.

Stuff moved to AreAmericansMentallyIll? then, presumably, refactored into oblivion.

This is obviously an AmericanCulturalAssumption