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Comment by fpgaminer | Hacker News Reader

Call me crazy, but are there any studies that show exposure to genitalia during childhood leads to psychological damage of any kind? I suspect there isn't, and that this social taboo is, to some degree, absurd. Seems like this social taboo leads to a lot of damage and cost, while likely being unwarranted.

I mean, I suspect people in general don't want to see dongs in Lego Universe or really any non-sexual game, so efforts should be taken to prevent it. But it shouldn't need to go beyond normal moderation. The only reason Lego feels the need to go beyond that is because of the social taboo. In what I imagine a "normal" society to be, dongs in LU would just be laughed off as a joke, and the builder banned for breaking the rules. Nothing more.

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The first thing about social taboos is that they are culture specific. Sweden for example in the late 90s had a strong censorship regarding violence, while nudity was mostly ignored and quite common in movies made for kids and on family prime time on TV.

As two examples of this, Darkwing Duck was banned since people believed it would cause children to kill other children in the play ground. However during similar prime time hours on TV, a other show called "Bullen" (euphemism for female genitalia) was on, and was about teenage relationships with a large focus on sex education. They address topics like masturbation, homosexuality, and relationship advice in the form of viewer mails being illustrated by actors.

Now days, the Swedish taboo culture has changed to mimic the American one, but one notice remnants always pop up when people suddenly feels that Astrid Lindgren movie adaptations should suddenly be censored since they got naked scenes in them.

I, too, would ban Darkwing Duck; but for simply being terminally irritating, rather than any supposed incitement to kill.

Or maybe it would incite people to want to kill Darkwing Duck...

>culture specific

Bhutan is covered in dick paintings for example and the kids seem fine

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phallus_paintings_in_Bhutan

Recently there was a children's cartoon about penises and vaginas in sweden: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nx08UWxXJkI (contains cartoon gentilia).

Sweden sounds so sane

In the Netherlands something similar, who remembers the cartoon "Purno de Purno"? :-) It was glorious, made on a pixelated Amiga, many boobs and sexual innuendo (that went straight past me as a kid), and pretty absurd plotlines (which is why I loved it).

> this social taboo is, to some degree, absurd

This social taboo is pretty much exclusively limited to the US. The rest of the world is a lot less freaked out about genitalia in general.

And breast feeding, nudity. But then I guess other countries have their own weird little taboo's.

More and more I see America having a lot of Puritan values, which is spreading. Even countries who wouldn't have freaked about penis or saying fuck on tv, suddenly find themselves adding pixelation and muted audio to their native language

We are getting far more socially liberal in general. I've noticed a shift even in the last decade. Those of us in America who would identify as socially liberal know where the puritanical values are, and those places are becoming less and less able to generate a national uproar over family values as time goes on and liberal youth get older.

Compare American television from even the late 90s to now. It's absolutely night and day. We have a long way to go on chilling out about sex (it's a weird line to draw given our fetish for violence), but the trend is definitely in that direction. The problem with America is that we are really eight or nine different nations stitched together, and it shows not only in our divisions on family values in different parts of the country but also our growing inability to agree.

Just in the last few years the word "shit" started to be acceptable on television. A single usage on TV in the 1990s or 2000s would have been a local news segment. Now, no one cares. It's changing, but slowly.

would love to know more about how tv changed during past few decades. There is definitely a change but hard to put in to words.

For a while there was really confusing Facebook blocks of any images of mothers breast feeding their children but no blocks of beheading videos.

It was weird.

Facebook also doesn't allow violent content so I assume you meant selective enforcement?

From Dec 2013

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24608499

> Facebook is allowing videos showing people being decapitated to be posted and shared on its site once again.

> The social network had introduced a temporary ban in May following complaints that the clips could cause long-term psychological damage.

[...]

> Its terms and conditions now state that it will remove photos or videos that "glorify violence" in addition to other banned material, including a woman's "fully exposed breast".

So,(in 2013) they allow beheading videos so long as you're not glorifying violence.

http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/facebook-actually-sorry-for-bann...

And in 2013 breastfeeding mothers were banned from Facebook.

The breast feeding policy changed in 2014 http://huffpost.com/us/entry/5473467

I don't understand why the US is so puritan. They even blur out footage of babies' bottoms on broadcast TV here. I was watching a documentary about some artist on PBS one evening with an interview scene that took place on a beach. I didn't notice there was a baby in the background until my eye was drawn to the floating blur oval concealing his or her precious little butt cheeks.

In fact now that I think about it, when that Picasso painting was in the news a week or two back for setting a record price at auction, some channels blurred out part of it in case their viewers got offended by cubist depictions of the female breasts: http://metro.co.uk/2015/05/14/fox-news-blurred-out-the-breas...

You can show all sorts of atrocious acts of violence on network TV, but display a penis for 3 seconds and it's a $325,000 fine: https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-15-32A1.pd...

No word yet on how this horror will affect the fine children of Roanoake, VA - no doubt the monies collected for the fine will be channeled to treating their post-traumatic stress disorders.

I don't understand why the US is so puritan

If it helps at all, remember that the US was founded in large part by the Puritans.

My favorite is when they showed a gender reassignment surgery on TV and, at the precise point the editors determined she had transitioned from a man to a woman, they blurred out her nipples.

That's just gold!

That is hilarious. Source, or were you kidding? (I legitimately can't tell.)

Doing some googling, it appears independently in a number of places but generally apocryphally.

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?377387-The-Etiquette-of-...

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/jsgeq/would_the_f...

http://techliberation.com/2006/11/07/nipple-indecency-is-com...

If someone could dig up a youtube, that would be great.

I once saw a segment on a US chat show about a man who get breast implants, as a bet. (Not gay, not trans.) When he took his shirt off on camera they commented on the fact that he had to have two little round stickers over his nipples for censorship reasons.

Stupid sexy manboobs.

Fox also blurred a Picasso painting.

http://jezebel.com/fox-news-blurs-the-boobs-on-a-picasso-pai...

yet Fox have no problems showing cleavage, legs, super attractive women throwing suggestions as to how we can combat ISIS.

Well, the nation was founded by a bunch of Puritans. I believe that much of their fundamentalist worldview has persisted, largely unchanged, through the centuries since.

>I don't understand why the US is so puritan.

You answered the question. This country's first moral code came from puritans who were trying to get away from England because the other religions there had too much frivolity.

> I don't understand why the US is so puritan.

I may well get burned for this, but I'm going to quote a friend's quip from years back. I think he made a good, if caustic, point. (Your choice of term "puritan" is the operative word here.)

"It's cultural baggage. The country was colonised by Puritans. You know, the segment of British population whom even then Victorians considered uncomfortably prude."

I do believe there is a kernel of truth in that. As to why it has remained such a dominant feature in the collective US psychology, now that'd be an interesting study.

The absurdity is highlighted extremely well by Charlie Brooker, a UK news commentator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYXbWuJ7jnU#t=2m34s

Fox News displayed the entire video of the Jordanian pilot being burned alive by ISIS, yet censored the buttocks of a man featured in a segment on nude beaches.

I hear they censor genitals in Japan too. ;)

I find the Japanese porn censorship particularly strange.

As far as I can tell, it's generally extremely rape-y for cultural reasons -- from a Western POV I'd describe it as very misogynistic. Yet the genitalia are censored, implying the genitalia are somehow more obscene than the acts that involve them.

I have a feeling that the sort of "psychological damage" they're worrying about is precisely the fact that "exposure to genitalia" makes kids more likely to violate the social taboo and show their own genitalia, and that makes the anti-pedophile groups (and others of prudish nature) horrified.

The reason that kids are building dongs is because they know it's a taboo. If the reaction of others upon seeing it was not shock but a mere "Oh, a penis. So what?", I doubt they would be doing it.

> the fact that "exposure to genitalia" makes kids more likely to violate the social taboo and show their own genitalia

How is that a fact? Is there evidence to support it? Looking at less prudish countries, it doesn't seem to be the case.

She/He never said it was. It is being suggested that, er, enthusiastic anti pedophile groups think that. I think that its implied that its a dubious argument at best. None of us can answer for the flawed logic of campaigners with tunnel vision.

Funny thing us that I bet the kids probably wouldn't really comprehend what they were seeing in most Lego-dong cases. I remember walking past some fairly prominent "8===D" style graffitti each day in my school when I was a kid (I was <10yrs) and thinking it was someone's hasty attempt at a "flipping the bird" gesture :D

Great, now you've posted that Lego will have to ban any text messaging features.

They won't ban it, they'll have to hire more people to form Second Penis Prevention Brigade to monitor and censor all the messages in real-time.

Surely this is a solvable AI/computer vision problem. And in text, just search for the regular expression "8=+D".

Your regular expression catches very few penises. A very simple case:

    8------>

But you can easily solve that one. A much harder case would be catching stuff like this:

     _
    / \_________
                |\
                | |
       _________|/
    \_/

And even if you could do some image recognition, I think you'd have a hard time differentiating between stuff like this:

    O
   -|-
    |
   / \

And this:

    O
   -|-
    |_
   / \

...because what makes it a penis is not the shape, but the context, which is very hard to recognize.

Don't underestimate the difficulty of filtering human-generated data.

Also, I can't believe I just spent 5 minutes making ASCII penises.

Conflating opposition to child abuse with mere prudishness is very wrong.

>The reason that kids are building dongs is because they know it's a taboo. If the reaction of others upon seeing it was not shock but a mere "Oh, a penis. So what?", I doubt they would be doing it. //

To posit an alternate hypothesis children find squirting water innately amusing; hence the whole activity of urinating, particularly with the apparent extra control a boy has over direction, is a point of fascination and so too the organ of this action. Beyond that children realise the differences between themselves and others. A primary difference that is noticeable between boys and girls is genitalia and so they become more fascinating still.

One thing that tends away from your perspective is the apparent Roman fascination with dicks [eg the Greek's Priapus / Roman Mutinus; the fascinus (from which our word fascinate comes)] in a comparatively sexually liberal society.

I guess data from anthropological studies would help to flesh this out; are children brought up in societies where genitals are often displayed less fascinated with them?

A further thought:

>'But the penis grants man "immortality." [...] It is the perpetuator of human existence.' (A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis, by David M. Friedman, p.70)

  are there any studies that show exposure to genitalia 
  during childhood leads to psychological damage of any kind

No, none at all. If that were so, many generations before us, and most European generations, would be quite damaged. The epidemiological evidence speaks for itself.

  and that this social taboo is, to some degree, absurd

Completely absurd, period. It's confusing genitalia with sexual activity, completely disregarding context.

There are some studies done in Denmark in the seventies, where small children were shown danish soft-porn movies, and a control group were shown 'Bambi'

If I remember correctly, the kids where not reacting in any special way to the porn, and thought it was nonsensical or plain boring, except the humorous segments (think Benny Hill but naked, typical of danish pornography of that era) which they laughed at.

However, a large percentage of the kids in the control group reported nightmares from Bambi, and many children reacted badly to the death of Bambi's mother and other dramatic events, and it occupied their mind for a long time after they watched the movie.

Edit: On the other hand, 95% of the internet porn of today is probably not good for anyone to watch, and especially young people seems to have a rather bent view of sexuality and especially women's sexuality. But seeing naked people, can't possibly be damaging for anyone.

Add a spoiler warning please! (Seriously, I didn't know this would happen)

Bambi is 73 years old. If you haven't seen it yet, you aren't going to.

New people are born every day. The age of the movie is irrelevant.

Well, now that I have a soon these things reappeared on my ToDo-List.

It's much better without a spoiler!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-wUdetAAlY

So beautiful.

It has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with perception and the damage to the brand.

this is really not my area of expertise but you pose a great question that I'm trying to justify for myself: perhaps Lego has legal responsibilities? you know, the same way I have legal responsibilities not to expose kids to genetalia.

for instance, if user of age shows a pornographic picture to a minor in minecraft, what are the legal implications?

edit: another comment suggests minecraft handles exactly this by not running their own servers. let's say for the sake of argument they didn't.

I am trying to think of an age where kids would not be exposed to genitalia. When they are little, we let them run around naked anyway. When they are older, they might take up some sports and be exposed in the changing room. What I mean is: I doubt there is a legal responsibility to prevent kids from seeing genitalia.

Porn is something different.

Have a look at the English legislation for an idea of how this is handled by criminal law.

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/42/section/12

If you are over 18 and if you show an image of sexual activity to a child (someone under 16 that you don't believe is over 16; or someone under 13) then you've committed an offence.

Running a server in which other people show children images of sexual activity doesn't count.

It's unlikely that Minecraft dong-towers would count.

I'm also a bit wary of removing parental responsibility. Depending on the age and maturity of the child you should probably be monitoring their first interactions and giving calm safety advice. Suggesting that the providing company takes all that responsibility is odd.

I suspect how society reacts to it plays a big part. Kids exposed to genitalia might be sent to therapy sessions and only considered "cured" when they accept that they have been traumatized...

>The only reason Lego feels the need to go beyond that is because of the social taboo

The OP mentions COPPA and brand trust with parents, so I think there's more to it. Less "protect the kids", more "don't get sued" and "don't lose customers".

I found it kind of silly how the poster alludes to this being an issue with the success of the game (operational costs, don't let execs try again), but really, the game was simply boring to begin with. You have something as amazing as lego, and you don't design your game around the concept of building whatever you want...

"Call me crazy, but are there any studies that show exposure to genitalia during childhood leads to psychological damage of any kind?"

The vast majority of convicted murderers and pedophiles have seen genitalia at least once during childhood.

Everyone's seen genitalia at least once during childhood.

They've also all drank water at some point during their lives.

Do we need to ban water?! More at 7.

I thought it was a funny joke :|

>Call me crazy, but are there any studies that show exposure to genitalia during childhood leads to psychological damage of any kind?

That is a brilliant question, we could actually find out: substantially every danish school kid has showed in communal showers after gym class. This, I think, is not nearly as common in the US.

If exposure to genitalia caused psychological damage then we should see a greater incident of this in Danes than Americans. My hunch is that such a difference, if found at all, would not pass statistical significance.

Hey, maybe we'd find that not seeing enough genitalia during childhood leads to psychological damage and that people damaged by it tend to reproduce the same abuse on their own progeny.

I feel like the opposite is happening: By making penises something vulgar and taboo and to be constantly protected against, we're telling boys that a very important part of their body is ugly, dirty, gross and wrong. And that they should feel gross for having one.

Even more so for small girls.

I disagree.

If anything, we put too much value on a woman's vagina--to the point that it's taken to be her greatest asset. Too often a woman is valued for her body parts rather than her ideas or her abilities. Virginity is overvalued and "slut shaming" is applied to women who have sex because girls are encouraged to conserve and maintain the value of their resource, while men are lauded for being able to obtain access to vaginas. Rather than being vulgar, wrong, taboo, dirty, gross, vaginas are seen as beautiful, valuable commodities. Which comes with its own set of problems, but different problems from those young boys have.

I don't see any value in this sort of one-upsmanship, where every time a boy's problem is brought up, people say, "But it's even worse for girls." That both downplays the problems of boys and misunderstands the problems of girls. I'm not saying you do this all the time, I'm just saying I see this all too frequently.

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