As two examples of this, Darkwing Duck was banned since people believed it would cause children to kill other children in the play ground. However during similar prime time hours on TV, a other show called "Bullen" (euphemism for female genitalia) was on, and was about teenage relationships with a large focus on sex education. They address topics like masturbation, homosexuality, and relationship advice in the form of viewer mails being illustrated by actors.
Now days, the Swedish taboo culture has changed to mimic the American one, but one notice remnants always pop up when people suddenly feels that Astrid Lindgren movie adaptations should suddenly be censored since they got naked scenes in them.
Bhutan is covered in dick paintings for example and the kids seem fine
Or maybe it would incite people to want to kill Darkwing Duck...
This social taboo is pretty much exclusively limited to the US. The rest of the world is a lot less freaked out about genitalia in general.
In fact now that I think about it, when that Picasso painting was in the news a week or two back for setting a record price at auction, some channels blurred out part of it in case their viewers got offended by cubist depictions of the female breasts: http://metro.co.uk/2015/05/14/fox-news-blurred-out-the-breas...
You can show all sorts of atrocious acts of violence on network TV, but display a penis for 3 seconds and it's a $325,000 fine: https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-15-32A1.pd...
No word yet on how this horror will affect the fine children of Roanoake, VA - no doubt the monies collected for the fine will be channeled to treating their post-traumatic stress disorders.
http://jezebel.com/fox-news-blurs-the-boobs-on-a-picasso-pai...
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?377387-The-Etiquette-of-...
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/jsgeq/would_the_f...
http://techliberation.com/2006/11/07/nipple-indecency-is-com...
If someone could dig up a youtube, that would be great.
I may well get burned for this, but I'm going to quote a friend's quip from years back. I think he made a good, if caustic, point. (Your choice of term "puritan" is the operative word here.)
"It's cultural baggage. The country was colonised by Puritans. You know, the segment of British population whom even then Victorians considered uncomfortably prude."
I do believe there is a kernel of truth in that. As to why it has remained such a dominant feature in the collective US psychology, now that'd be an interesting study.
If it helps at all, remember that the US was founded in large part by the Puritans.
You answered the question. This country's first moral code came from puritans who were trying to get away from England because the other religions there had too much frivolity.
Fox News displayed the entire video of the Jordanian pilot being burned alive by ISIS, yet censored the buttocks of a man featured in a segment on nude beaches.
As far as I can tell, it's generally extremely rape-y for cultural reasons -- from a Western POV I'd describe it as very misogynistic. Yet the genitalia are censored, implying the genitalia are somehow more obscene than the acts that involve them.
More and more I see America having a lot of Puritan values, which is spreading. Even countries who wouldn't have freaked about penis or saying fuck on tv, suddenly find themselves adding pixelation and muted audio to their native language
Compare American television from even the late 90s to now. It's absolutely night and day. We have a long way to go on chilling out about sex (it's a weird line to draw given our fetish for violence), but the trend is definitely in that direction. The problem with America is that we are really eight or nine different nations stitched together, and it shows not only in our divisions on family values in different parts of the country but also our growing inability to agree.
It was weird.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24608499
> Facebook is allowing videos showing people being decapitated to be posted and shared on its site once again.
> The social network had introduced a temporary ban in May following complaints that the clips could cause long-term psychological damage.
[...]
> Its terms and conditions now state that it will remove photos or videos that "glorify violence" in addition to other banned material, including a woman's "fully exposed breast".
So,(in 2013) they allow beheading videos so long as you're not glorifying violence.
http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/facebook-actually-sorry-for-bann...
And in 2013 breastfeeding mothers were banned from Facebook.
The breast feeding policy changed in 2014 http://huffpost.com/us/entry/5473467
The reason that kids are building dongs is because they know it's a taboo. If the reaction of others upon seeing it was not shock but a mere "Oh, a penis. So what?", I doubt they would be doing it.
How is that a fact? Is there evidence to support it? Looking at less prudish countries, it doesn't seem to be the case.
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Don't underestimate the difficulty of filtering human-generated data.
Also, I can't believe I just spent 5 minutes making ASCII penises.
To posit an alternate hypothesis children find squirting water innately amusing; hence the whole activity of urinating, particularly with the apparent extra control a boy has over direction, is a point of fascination and so too the organ of this action. Beyond that children realise the differences between themselves and others. A primary difference that is noticeable between boys and girls is genitalia and so they become more fascinating still.
One thing that tends away from your perspective is the apparent Roman fascination with dicks [eg the Greek's Priapus / Roman Mutinus; the fascinus (from which our word fascinate comes)] in a comparatively sexually liberal society.
I guess data from anthropological studies would help to flesh this out; are children brought up in societies where genitals are often displayed less fascinated with them?
A further thought:
>'But the penis grants man "immortality." [...] It is the perpetuator of human existence.' (A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis, by David M. Friedman, p.70)
are there any studies that show exposure to genitalia
during childhood leads to psychological damage of any kind
and that this social taboo is, to some degree, absurd
If I remember correctly, the kids where not reacting in any special way to the porn, and thought it was nonsensical or plain boring, except the humorous segments (think Benny Hill but naked, typical of danish pornography of that era) which they laughed at.
However, a large percentage of the kids in the control group reported nightmares from Bambi, and many children reacted badly to the death of Bambi's mother and other dramatic events, and it occupied their mind for a long time after they watched the movie.
Edit: On the other hand, 95% of the internet porn of today is probably not good for anyone to watch, and especially young people seems to have a rather bent view of sexuality and especially women's sexuality. But seeing naked people, can't possibly be damaging for anyone.
for instance, if user of age shows a pornographic picture to a minor in minecraft, what are the legal implications?
edit: another comment suggests minecraft handles exactly this by not running their own servers. let's say for the sake of argument they didn't.
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/42/section/12
If you are over 18 and if you show an image of sexual activity to a child (someone under 16 that you don't believe is over 16; or someone under 13) then you've committed an offence.
Running a server in which other people show children images of sexual activity doesn't count.
It's unlikely that Minecraft dong-towers would count.
I'm also a bit wary of removing parental responsibility. Depending on the age and maturity of the child you should probably be monitoring their first interactions and giving calm safety advice. Suggesting that the providing company takes all that responsibility is odd.
Porn is something different.
The OP mentions COPPA and brand trust with parents, so I think there's more to it. Less "protect the kids", more "don't get sued" and "don't lose customers".
The vast majority of convicted murderers and pedophiles have seen genitalia at least once during childhood.
Do we need to ban water?! More at 7.
That is a brilliant question, we could actually find out: substantially every danish school kid has showed in communal showers after gym class. This, I think, is not nearly as common in the US.
If exposure to genitalia caused psychological damage then we should see a greater incident of this in Danes than Americans. My hunch is that such a difference, if found at all, would not pass statistical significance.
If anything, we put too much value on a woman's vagina--to the point that it's taken to be her greatest asset. Too often a woman is valued for her body parts rather than her ideas or her abilities. Virginity is overvalued and "slut shaming" is applied to women who have sex because girls are encouraged to conserve and maintain the value of their resource, while men are lauded for being able to obtain access to vaginas. Rather than being vulgar, wrong, taboo, dirty, gross, vaginas are seen as beautiful, valuable commodities. Which comes with its own set of problems, but different problems from those young boys have.
I don't see any value in this sort of one-upsmanship, where every time a boy's problem is brought up, people say, "But it's even worse for girls." That both downplays the problems of boys and misunderstands the problems of girls. I'm not saying you do this all the time, I'm just saying I see this all too frequently.
I mean, I suspect people in general don't want to see dongs in Lego Universe or really any non-sexual game, so efforts should be taken to prevent it. But it shouldn't need to go beyond normal moderation. The only reason Lego feels the need to go beyond that is because of the social taboo. In what I imagine a "normal" society to be, dongs in LU would just be laughed off as a joke, and the builder banned for breaking the rules. Nothing more.