For a culture that places so much emphasis on sex and sexual appeal, you would think that America would have a more “European” view on how sex should be expressed in this country’s media. We have programs such as Girls Gone Wild, where girls will publicly display their “assets” in an attempt to have their fifteen seconds of fame, yet most of this country functions on a narrow-minded view that sex is sacred and should be an act pursued with the purest intentions. At the end of the day, sex is sex. It’s something that both males and females should enjoy without the fear of being judged by their peers—or their country for that matter.
In Great Britain, citizens are brought up with a more liberal view about sex and nudity. Even the television companies managed to shed light on this when they introduced the nine o’clock watershed, allowing public broadcasting agents such as BBC and ITV to show nudity, sex, and violence after 9pm without blurring or cutting scenes. Why can’t America learn from these liberal terms and allow a bit more freedom—a freedom we are all so keen to preach about?
As a country that chooses to watch violence and crime so frequently on television and in films, you would think that nudity would fall somewhere along the same line. In light of this, I question why is it acceptable for America to show gory movies like Saw and Machete Kills? These movies express graphic violence filled with intense scenes of blood splattering wounds, broken bones, chopped off limbs, and the romantic images of pulsing brains. It’s perplexing to imagine that showing illegal, inhumane acts of incredible violence is acceptable, but the naked body is an absolute no-no. America seems to have made the decision that our children seeing grotesque murders and decapitations is more appropriate than the unfettered image of the neighbor’s breasts next door. Interestingly enough, Great Britain puts the same restrictions on gore-filled movies that America puts on nudity in its television.
By definition, humans are animals. Animals are put on this earth to procreate. Our most basic, innate instincts come from our animalistic tendencies to engage in the world’s most natural process: sex. We come into this world programmed with a desire to satiate our sexual needs; it’s these sexual needs that continue the process of natural selection as men and women look for certain desirable traits in their partners. It could even be argued that personal advancement in society, both in physical prowess and economic stability, are driven by our deep-seated sexual desires to appear as having been blessed with the highest pickings of the gene pool.
With all of this in mind, it’s amazing that the most natural process in all living species is viewed with such dirty contempt in a progressive nation like the United States. Perhaps it’s time we start to view sex as something fun and liberating, instead of a sacred ritual to be shared between two emotionally bonded individuals. After all, sex is like game night. It should be relaxed, fun, and between friends.