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Comment by zak_mc_kracken | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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

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