Sex and Violence

Some sex and violence seem appropriate in works of art because they are a reality of life and they can have cathartic and escape value. But when it goes to an extreme it can do harm. It has become difficult to draw the line in our culture.

Suppose someone created violent and sexual materials in private and that these materials did not influence him to perform any illegal actions. Would we be concerned at that point? Probably not. We might think him a little sick, but if he represented no danger and he kept it to himself, it would really not be our business.

But suppose it did lead him to illegal actions. It would be the illegal actions that would concern us. But what about the materials? Did they cause the illegal actions? Could we protect ourselves better by censoring their production?

There are a couple problems here. First, did the materials really cause the illegal actions? What percentage of people consuming such materials performed those actions? And what percentage of people that performed the illegal actions consumed the same kinds of materials? Are we justified in restricting the materials if they are only loosely correlated to the behaviors?

And how do we precisely delimit the materials? When do the materials cross the line? Can we really be that precise? We do have a rating system for movies, television, and some music, but it is fairly imprecise, and it does not apply to private materials, or to books.

Consider just publicly purchased and rated materials. If someone watches a slasher movie a few times and is not really affected by it, we would not be concerned. But what if a disturbed teenager watched the same movie over and over again and they replayed scenes in their mind substituting people they know into the scenes. Is this an issue with the materials or with the teenager? Should we limit everyone's access to slasher movies in order to prevent this situation?

Movies may be less of a problem than television. Television is always available in the home. The sex and violence is toned down compared to movies, but it is more pervasive, especially sexual suggestiveness and innuendo.

Here is one view. We need good rating systems. We need good ways of limiting access to children. We need to limit exposure to higher rated materials in more public areas. Otherwise, we should err on the side of freedom of expression.

Another view is that we should only produce materials that would get lower ratings, and even if we do allow some immoral people their "right" to filth, we should not allow it to be accessible anywhere where children might see it. Furthermore, we should have the right to not have to see those materials in public places or on our televisions. For all intents and purposes, these immoral materials should be invisible to us.

If there were good rating systems and good screening systems, then we could at least partially meet the concerns of this second group of people. There may still be disagreements though on what should be in public view, for example, in museums or on advertising posters.

Another problem for these more conservative culture consumers is that they will not have as many products to choose from since the market will decide what cultural products will be produced. And it is the market that is driving many of these issues. If there were no demand for slasher movies, there would be no slasher movies made. If there were no demand for crude sexual humor, very little would be produced.

This argument may be a little flawed though because in the past there was still tremendous demand for cultural products that were much more closely censored. But wasn't that because that was all that was available? And do we want to eliminate whole parts of life from our art? Do we really want our art filtered through a particular ideology?

It seems that the best we can hope for is an uneasy compromise. There are significant improvements that could be made in rating and screening systems. This could provide more of a balance between the freedoms of the different groups. In the mean time we need to know more about the affect of media on behavior. Does a prevalence of sex and violence in media really cause an increase in sex and violence in real life? Or do people really understand the difference between media and real life?