Wanted to add this RE the shower scene in Starship Troopers:
"Two nude scenes were kept in the original version (the co-ed shower and a bedroom scene with Rico and Dizzy), although these were modified in the broadcast version. The cast agreed to do the co-ed shower scene only if Verhoeven agreed to direct the scene naked, which he did. Verhoeven found it strange "Americans get more upset about nudity than ultra-violence. I am constantly amazed about that. I mean, I haven't seen any sex scenes in American film that are anything other than completely boring. A bare breast is more difficult to get through the censors than a body riddled with bullets."
The 1999 South Park movie (“Bigger, Longer, Uncut”), did a bit of a send up on this point, and several interviews with Stone and Parker get into the topic.
“Just remember what the MPAA says: Horrific, deplorable violence is OK, as long as you don't say any naughty words!”
> A bare breast is more difficult to get through the censors than a body riddled with bullets.
I see this point a lot and I think it is a good one but I have some theories on it too.
I think that violence (at least to a point) is part of our natural play instincts, think cops and robbers as a kid. We aren’t disturbed when young children mimic violence, we even see it in nature fairly ubiquitously. Animals play fight with each other. When we see violence in a movie we see it as play, not as reality.
As for why Americans are hung up on sex I’m not sure, but I think there is good reason we may see violence as less of a big deal than it would be in reality.
WRT sex? Yeah that seems like a reasonable conjecture- but there are counter examples I can’t really figure.
Even atheistic American liberals are totally backwards on sex/bodies. Everything sexual is offensive, or gross. I feel it used to be the religious right in the USA that held those beliefs... now it’s everyone?
I think it has become cultural. It's just what people are used to. We adopt norms from the society around us rather than starting from minimal apriori assumptions or at least questioning every little thing.
EDIT> It doesn't make sense to lump murder in with generic violent crime. The US is an outlier among developed countries for murder. This is much worse than having comparable levels of generic violent crime.
What point is being made here, exactly? The OP was talking about American culture in general terms, not relative to “first-world nations” specifically, so shouldn’t the US’s murder rate relative to the median of all societies be more germane?
Yes, the US ranks worse on some measures of development than similarly rich countries, including murder rate. This is not news to anyone. I don’t see the relevance to the present discussion and suspect it was just an opportunity to sneer at the US for no reason.
You're wrong. I have great respect for my country and its traditions, and would never sneer at it. I'm also not for any additional gun legislation.
But for a variety of reasons (some of them not "politically correct" by some measures, such as inner-city gang-related crime), the US has a high murder rate vis-a-vis other developed countries. It's a fact. And why wouldn't you compare a country to similar countries? Or OK, we could say, the US has a comparable murder rate to poor countries and war zones. Or compared to the median of all countries? Well, once again, much higher than the median (~3.5 vs ~5.0). Quantitatively, there's a great deal of support for saying we're "fairly violent". Not "really violent", but "fairly violent".
We were discussing sex and violence in American movies, and tieing it to real-life phenomena, so it seems like an appropriate topic.
I understand why you're disdainful of people who hate their own country, but you're picking the wrong target.
"Two nude scenes were kept in the original version (the co-ed shower and a bedroom scene with Rico and Dizzy), although these were modified in the broadcast version. The cast agreed to do the co-ed shower scene only if Verhoeven agreed to direct the scene naked, which he did. Verhoeven found it strange "Americans get more upset about nudity than ultra-violence. I am constantly amazed about that. I mean, I haven't seen any sex scenes in American film that are anything other than completely boring. A bare breast is more difficult to get through the censors than a body riddled with bullets."