Sex and Violence

The “children’s hour” on television has been purged of “sex and violence” by a form of internal censorship. Unorganized censorship, of course, goes on most of the time in most societies, as the words “seemly,” “fitting,” and “decent” in our language show. Every community of men has a need to protect its commitment to the good, however precarious it may be, by maintaining certain limits on all varieties of expression. All the more remarkable, then, that during the long centuries in which children have been reared on fairy tales and stories of brave men overcoming evil, stories replete with chopped-off heads and cruel punishments (just think of Hansel pushing the witch into the flames), nobody felt it necessary to keep fairy tales from children on account of such violent incidents.

So the problem of “sex and violence” we have today must be new and different, and one wonders whether censorship can solve it. Where standards are generally respected, occasional grossness or pornography may indeed be the suitable business of some watchdog. But the trouble today is that our literary and media production practically centers on “sex” and “violence” (both words in quotation marks because they have today a standing apparently independent of morality).

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Gerhart Niemeyer

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The “children’s hour” on television has been purged of “sex and violence” by a form of internal censorship. Unorganized censorship, of course, goes on most of the time in most societies, as the words “seemly,” “fitting,” and “decent” in our language show. Every community of men has a need to protect its commitment to the good, however precarious it may be, by maintaining certain limits on all varieties of expression. All the more remarkable, then, that during the long centuries in which children have been reared on fairy tales and stories of brave men overcoming evil, stories replete with chopped-off heads and cruel punishments (just think of Hansel pushing the witch into the flames), nobody felt it necessary to keep fairy tales from children on account of such violent incidents.

So the problem of “sex and violence” we have today must be new and different, and one wonders whether censorship can solve it. Where standards are generally respected, occasional grossness or pornography may indeed be the suitable business of some watchdog. But the trouble today is that our literary and media production practically centers on “sex” and “violence” (both words in quotation marks because they have today a standing apparently independent of morality).