Why ask Why? The Double Standard of Censorship

Why Ask Why? The Double Standard of Censorship

It occurred to me while watching a rented Almodovar video, Bad Education, that censorship in this country is all screwed up. There I was, watching a video/DVD of a film, not on television, and two of the scenes were fuzzed out. Blurred! Both scenes were depicting one man giving head to the other. I was speechless. Curiosity got the best of me, so, I purchased this film ‘uncut’ from Amazon. I watched it once more. The scenes that were censored did not show a male organ in a man’s mouth. They showed a head of hair, bobbing up and down. No visual sexuality was even portrayed to begin with.

Again, it got me thinking.

Why?

Why did they blur a rented video of two scenes that didn’t show anything but a head of hair?

Lately on the non-pay cable television channels, they are playing movies, during the day, mind you, not after ten pm, of horror films. I’m not talking about Hitchcock here, I’m talking slasher/bloody/violent films, that never should be aired on regular television at all. I hate to endorse them by name but will to prove my point. Movies like Saw, for which I have no clue why they even make money or draw so many viewers.

Advertisements flood my television, more now than I have ever seen in my life. Some channels, every four or five minutes of show is interrupted by four or five minutes of commercials, but that’s for another debate. The movies I was being bombarded with make me cringe. Sorority Row? Showing young girls being tortured and murdered? And of course wonderfully child-friendly-wholesome Saw IV shows a severed head in a scale on the video cover. Let’s not forget the Hostel series. (Yes, series! Loads of them!) Young women hanging upside down naked and gagged on conveyer belts headed to slaughter. Need I go on?

Seth Rogen appeared on Jay Leno’s show to promote his new film at the time, Zack and Miri Make a Porno. His stick-figure promotion billboard was banned in Utah, yet they showed the Saw promo with an old man’s face peeled off and used as a mask on another person.

Am I the only one who thinks something is seriously wrong here?

I can’t buy, beg, borrow or steal a video, (other than real porn) that shows a man full frontally nude for more than a split second, if at all. When two men kiss on TV they either cut it or rant and rave with picket signs at the studio. I heard Brokeback Mountain was cut so much in Italy it was virtually lost in translation.

Which brings me to the censors themselves. Who are they? Are they the religious right? Conservative republicans? Closet homophobes? What message are they sending to young people? No. Change that. What message are they sending to ALL people?

I’ll tell you what message! Murder and rape young women, eviscerate, behead, skin alive, torture in any way you desire to give perverted sociopaths the biggest hard-on, and for GOD’S SAKE DON’T MAKE PEOPLE GAY!

Gay Love is banned. BANNED. Same sex couples on television are portrayed either as sterile, a-sexual, or comic parody stereo-types, that quite frankly make me ill. What’s happened to our freedom of speech, our sexual rights when it comes to representing physical love between healthy consensual adults? Where has it gone?

Are we surprised when we dig up women’s bodies in a house that homed a sex offender? We promote that behavior. We encourage it. In an interview, infamous murderer Ted Bundy revealed how much he loved those sex/gore/torture films of young women. My! Aren’t we making Ted Bundy happy in hell? We are encouraging the connection between sexual gratification and extreme violence.

Why?

Why are we allowing uncensored gore, and censored love? I’ll never stop asking that question.

Every day men and women are denied sexual freedom to love, marry, and enjoy a life together without persecution, while sexual predators are not locked up permanently because THEY have rights. I will ask it every day. Why? Do we value sexual deviants’ rights more than GLBT rights? It seems so. Yes. At least on the big screen, big money issues.

Perhaps there is a place for gory horror films. (In my opinion, the trash) but there is a mega-market, which begs the question yet again, why? Who are these gore-fest addicts, but that’s for a shrink to figure out, not I.

What I want to know is, why I can’t see men having sex together on film in a gay romance movie? Why is my rented video blurred out? Why when two men kiss is it a scandal? (or two women, for that matter.)

I’ll tell you why. The people making the decisions have a warped sense of right and wrong. And there seems to be no way to stop them.

I’m trying. One book at a time. But I cannot fix the severely ignorant; The censors who place violence above all for money. No GA Hauser romance novel will ever correct that nightmare.

After seeing those horror scenes in reality in my career as a police officer, I can only wish you all peace and love in your lifetime and may none of the events promoted and encouraged in the above horrific films ever happen to you or the ones you love.

--GA Hauser

(this blog was originally posted on Book Wenches Dec 2009)