FreedomOfArt
To have true FreedomOfExpression, you must have FreedomOfArt. The reason is simple... Art is Expression.
By examining the bounds of an society's Art, you can determine what that society's limits of FreedomOfExpression are. No society, no matter what its claims, believes in unfettered FreedomOfExpression. In some societies, such as mainstream America, the bounds of people's expression is embarrassment or pain. People are not allowed to display old style artwork (classical Greek, for instance) due to parents wishing to avoid the embarrassment of explaining why that naked man has a dangly bit there, or that naked woman doesn't. Because of the embarrassment of some 10% of the nation, there is no open expression of classical forms. Quite ironic, when one looks at the buildings artwork on our government buildings. Classical Greek sculptures depicting various naked beings in various unabashed poses. The very same classic statue of blind-folded, naked Justice, holding her scales and sword, for instance, placed in a mall center courtyard would be illegal. But it's okay in another public building because its part of the government.
If a society truly wants FreedomOfExpression, the free flow of ideas and information, it cannot censor its own Art.
---StarPilot
Parents don't want to be embarassed
The main reason concerned parents don't wish to have their children view statues with "a dangly bit there" is because they are young, impressionable, however you look at it. The child does not understand society yet, and most likely could walk into the class next day and describe "What he saw on the statue" to a group of his peers, and it would spread. Why do you think the educational system has it set up that you will learn about the Body/Health when you're physically and mentally mature, usually during the stages of puberty. America, as a society, has deemed that if children were to learn about things such at a time when they are not ready, it would cause a degenerative impact on future generations. Just look at some cases of teenagers: They are dating at ages too young, and in more serious instances having intercourse and concieving.
Not showing things in specific places is not censoring. You can easily go to a museum for statues, art, and expression. If there was a paper bag over a head, that might be censoring. Protection is not. --KenSchry
Sex ed is now long before the body gets there
I believe you are mistaken, Ken.
Look at all the uproar about Miss Janet Jackson showing her bejeweled nipple on National Television for less then one second. Look at it. Over what? A single female human breast. An item that has zero appeal in communities that have open nursing. If you grew up surrounded by women who openly nursed, or live in such a community, then it wasn't even interesting.
As for education... you realize that they are teaching sexual education in many school systems across the USA now in SECOND grade. And there is a major crusade to move it to FIRST grade and even to PRE-SCHOOL. Do you know why? Because they want to educate the kids before they start having sex. Fun facts: If you teach it, the younger kids will "learn" it from the older, taught kids. And then some of the younger kids will engage in the act, to be part of the cooler, older crowd.
You can look at the history of Sexual Education. It started out as a senior year hygiene ordeal as a service to prepare students about to graduate into the "real world" because their parents wouldn't or couldn't due to their own embarassment or issues. Every so often, it's moved down a few years, because some of the younger kids are doing it already, and that means obviously they need to educate children sooner about how to do it, and the dangers associated with doing it. However, teaching children has only been shown to encourage them to engage in the act sooner, and do so completely unprotected. Because the children walk away with the knowledge of exactly what goes where, and the fact that the odds of the woman-child getting pregnant in one act is less then getting hit by a car when crossing the street (and they haven't been hit, have they?), or simply impossible because she has not started being womanly in that way yet.
Children don't know shame. They learn shame from their elders (parents, older siblings, etc). A child doesn't know a breast is a "naughty bit" unless it is impressed that it is. That's what all this censorship about bodies does... introduces and reinforces conflicting ideas and body/shame issues.
Specifying that a rated R movie can only be played in a controlled circumstance is censorship. We as a Society have decided that it is ok. Not being able to have a classical Greek fresco on the exterior of your house is censorship. We accept censorship constantly, and most of it is because we as a people don't want to take responsibility for educating our children. We'd rather someone else does it. So we should not get on a high horse and complain that others are teaching our daughters that they are only a walking pleasure machine for males. Nor should we complain that other people are teaching our sons that they are merely mad killing machines spreading their genes into every possible female receptacle.
We've created a situation in our society where we artificially seperate our children from their parents during their formative years. Our species evolved with our children learning by watching us. But we stopped that practice in the Industrialized World when we evolved the modern concepts of childhood (children should be allowed to "play" until they reach the age of majority, and then enter the work force as a responsible adult). This removes parents direct involvement in overseeing their children's life, and removes their main influence onto what concepts they learn, when they learn it, and how. We are too busy working 8 to 12 hours a day, and then trying to maintain and look after our family in the few hours left that we are not sleeping, and then you start all over again. We are trusting the education system and the children's peer groups (which includes their entertainment media) to teach them how to act, how to look after themselves, and how to become responsible adults.
This split is responsible for the continual rising rate of violence among the youth. When social beings such as ourselves grow up without the wisdom, supervision, and growing introduction to the adult world/society under our elders direct lead, then the adolescents grow wilder and more violent in displays to be the SocietalLeadDog of their pack... both in males and females. Any examination of our related animal kin will show plenty of documented studies. For instance, elephants are incredibly social animals. When adolescent males and females have no elders to show them how to behave, they jockey for alpha position and eventually become extreme dangers to everything around them (including other elephants). They sexualize very early, and the jockeying over what will become breeding rights/ranks leads to most of the animals having to be put to death if more mature males and females are not introduced into their environment (herd) to beat them down (for breeding rights/ranks) and literally teach them manners (how to behave maturely). This behavior is not limited to elephants. It's across the board for socialized mammals, and easily been observed and studied in everything from humans to our closest genetic kin (bamboons and chimpanzees), and all the way through to even the smaller of grass grazing mammals (antelope, zebras, deer, etc). This effect has even been studied in several of our ocean living cousins (orca, dolphins, porpoises).
But I've gone a bit far afield. Back to Censorship... It's the half assed censoring of trying to prevent your six year old from seeing a man or woman's private bits while they get bombarded by our culture about how great those bits are (advertising, movies, shows, songs, peers talking about how others look/are shaped, etc), that creates a conflict nexus that helps them key onto the fact that something is going on involving those locations. Kids are blank computing slates. WE teach them everything they ever learn. WE shape them. But we of the modern world let them learn their knowledge from others, rather them ourselves. And most of what they learn is either from each other, and thus wrong, or they learn what someone else wants them to think, rather then the facts. But again, we aren't involved in the day to day details of teaching them to become their own individual person and educating them, and then we wonder why they think even more weirdly then we did at that age. For matters we don't want to deal directly with them, we throw up a tissue thin shield of censorship around those issues. And then, all the people that make money off of our children go around that shield easily... and are made that much more attractive to our children because they do go around, or just ignore, the censorship.
When a Society insists that a woman always wears clothing covering her body down to her shoes, then the merest, briefest sight of a shapely/attractive woman's ankle, wrapped in her hose, twinkling out from her covering for less then a second is enough to enflame the men of that society. In societies where a woman's face is always covered, then the mere hint of her nose will "empassion wicked thoughts in men". Whatever is chosen to be covered will automatically become the tantalizing, the erotic. That's what censoring gets you... you heighten the importance (and people's awareness) of what is censored. But what happens in societies when nothing is censored?
Censorship has it's place. That place is the protection of the Society. And that is what censorship is about. Society trying to control information and protect itself. However, when you are talking security (that's what protection of Society is), you cannot be half-assed about security and still be effective. It's an all or nothing deal. If our Society is trying to protect our children from learning about human sexuality until they are of sufficent maturity to handle it, then we are failing horribly.
But keep in mind, that censorship of any form is about control of "harmful" information. True, allowing the displaying of naked statues in a museum does not eradicate the information of how one particular naked human body appears. But it does restrict access to that information. And once a Society has accepted restrictions on the access of information, each new restriction is that much easier to be accepted by that Society.
Do you know why Catholic Mass is in English? It is because of Gutenberg's Bible. Before that, it was Heresy (a burning or hanging offense) to teach the non-ordained in anything other then Latin. Only the Catholic Church was empowered by God to read and ponder His Holy Words. However, Gutenberg's Bibles put the Biblical Word into everyone's hands... and it was such a flood of the Biblical information that the Church was unable to censor it, once the elders of the Church understand the implications of what having a bible in every significant home might mean. However, to keep its control on the masses, the Church changed its policies once many people could read the Bible for themselves. That lead to all the changes that we know of the modern Catholic Church today. I mention this here, as this is an example of the past that I think has bearing on our current situation with the easy access (via the Internet) our Society now has to information that used to be highly censored. Either we need to improve our censoring, destroy everything digital (impossible at this stage), or change our attitudes. The very similar situation that the Catholic Church faced after the "information explosion" following Gotenburg's Bible (and press).
In the vein of censoring Art and how the Church coped with the change in information availability... the Church, as guardians of all Knowledge, kept a "good", and very often censoring eye on the Artists. When it couldn't outright destroy the Artist, the Church found that simply hiring the Artists allowed it to gain censoring control. But during it all, it was all about the Church maintaining control of the Society... not about protecting their beliefs (protecting information).
Censorship is ultimately about control. So what's that say about our Society? That we don't want to have to explain to our children what those two dogs are doing, or why the cat is acting so strangely, or what that dangly bit of flesh is for on Mommy or Daddy or Britney Spears or Miss Guess What I'm Not Wearing or Mister Sexy Stripping Cop-o-gram. What's the other things we censor? Not shouting fire in a crowded theater (life safety issue) and not giving out National Security issues. So, we don't want to see our Societial members slain... and we don't want to be embarassed by any questions related to sex. But nothing else is important. That's what our censorship says about us. Is that the Society we want for the WE?
---StarPilot
See Also
See Also: LimitsToFreedomOfExpression