Most of us want our children to grow up to have a positive, healthy sexuality. That means developing certain attitudes and emotions. Sexual content in media tends to distort or completely lack those emotions and attitudes; the same is true of decontextualized nudity.
Most of us don't want our children to grow up to have the attitudes that come from a life of violence. Adults who train to do violence (soldiers, police, etc.) often need help to deal with the emotional scars. That's not something we want to expose our children to. But "graphic violence" in movies and games tends to distort or completely lack that emotional content.
The unrealistic or disconnected nature of media violence makes it more acceptable, while the unrealistic or disconnected nature of media sexuality makes it less so.
That makes no sense. None at all.
Either your kids can distinguish reality from fiction. Or they can't. Right?
As a culture, we generally criticize real life violence. The message is fairly clear (ok in fiction, not ok in reality). However, sex is celebrated in real life, meaning it's a lot less black and white deciding what's ok.
Not sure what else to say other than: Huh?
That doesn't remotely make sense to me. We are talking about kids, not about mental retards in the medical sense, are we?
As a culture, we generally criticize real life violence. The message is fairly clear (ok in fiction, not ok in reality). However, sex is celebrated in real life, meaning it's a lot less black and white deciding what's ok.
Again: Huh?
When reading such arguments I can only wonder what kind of kids the author is around, and whether he has lost all memory of his own youth (sorry, not meant as personal attack).
Obviously a minor below a certain age should not be exposed to either. However, by the teen years, when boys commonly gain access to both and consume large quantities of both, most seem to handle it really well.
Making an artificial distinction there just doesn't make sense to me.
If a kid develops behavioral patterns based on "because that's what studs like me do" (either in a sexual or a violent way) then that kid has deeper problems entirely unrelated to the kind of content that he prefers.
Some fictional violence, even very graphic, simply has no emotional content of note. This means many parents are OK with it.
Other forms of fictional violence, as well as most real violence, has possibly traumatic emotional content (even for adults) and therefore parents are cautious about exposing their children to it.
Both fictional and real depictions of sexuality can carry emotional content which is likely to be inaccurate or unhealthy, often in very subtle ways. Therefore, parents are cautious about exposing their children to it (even if they have no particular sexual hangups.)
Quote (emphasis mine):
You say: Some fictional violence [...] has no emotional content of note
You say: Both fictional and real depictions of sexuality can carry emotional content
I'll assume you're trying to make the point that fictional sex is worse than fictional violence. I further assume you don't really know why (hence your imprecise wording) but have this diffuse belly-feeling that this is how it must be, because that has always been your belly-feeling.
These "belly-opinions" are very widespread, a more verbose description would have been: "I can't give exact reasons for my opinion but it feels like that's what my parents|peer-group|church|society|... would agree with".
I felt that the verbose version would have been even less polite.. but oh well.
I don't mean to be harsh, but perhaps you could explain, in clear, concrete terms, why depictions of sexuality in media are of special concern compared to other depictions in media, unrealistic or not.
We form our expectations about sex partly from our own experiences and partly from exposure to others' real or fictional experiences. We may not even realize we've formed an expectation; we may simply think that we're responding in the "natural" way and our partner is responding in an "unnatural" way. Consider how you interpret your partner undressing before bed -- to what degree does that signal desire or readiness for sex? Is it an invitation to a particular level of foreplay? If there's a small disconnect in expectation between you and your partner, that can cascade into an attitude of "he always wants sex when I want to talk first" or "she's always leading me on and then turning me down".
Every couple is going to have issues, disagreements, and disconnects large and small, which they will have to work through over the course of their relationship. Parents have the ability to make this better or worse for their children depending on what content they expose them to, under what circumstances, and what context they provide.
(For the record, my parents started teaching me about sex at around age 3 and were fairly explicit as I got older. I plan to do the same with my son.)
I can tell you though, that back in the 90's when there was a string of shooting crimes by middle class kids, there was a big outcry against violent cinema. Tarantino films, which were seen to glorify violence and some of the kids imitated to some degree, took an especially big backlash. For the most part though, that was just a passing panic.
I wonder if it's because violence doesn't provoke the same copycat response as sexuality does. After all, the whole existence of porn is based on it being a stimulant for sexuality. However seeing a violent scene doesn't stimulate you to go beat something up. Or at least any human that I know of ;)
Luckily, he only fights bad guys. =)