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Yeah.

Another excellent example of this: Police Academy(1984). This was a comedy about anti-discrimination laws forcing the NYPD to open up its recruitment to "just anybody", and it was considered a "family movie". You can tell it was a "family movie" because they made a Weekday Cartoon Series based on the series(I forget if it was before or after-school), because they knew lots of kids loved it and such a cartoon would draw a decent audience. It's ALSO a movie with a running gag about "pranking" ppl by hiding a prostitute beneath a lectern they have to stand at to blow them while they're giving a speech :|

I've been saying this for years now and lots of folks refuse to believe it: We are NOT in some age where you can show "Anything" in movies or television; that idea is conservative rhetoric meant to increase the censorship in US media even more by portraying it as a "small" and "sensible" correction to an "epidemic" of smut and moral-decay. Rather, what is considered "acceptable" in media in the US has actually been SHRINKING since the 70s. We are living in the middle of a now 50-year-old conservative backlash against free speech, sex, queerness, and racial inclusion(60 if you argue this movement started in response to the 1960s, and that's def an argument you can make), and the US in 2020 is more heavily censored, and has INTERNALIZED that censorship more thoroughly, than at any point in its history(the Plymouth colony not included because, obvsl, that was before the Union).

One of those insidious little things I notice sometimes is how much the window of 'appropriate for children' content has shrunk within the past 20 years. The range of things it is socially acceptable to show a 10-year-old has never been more limited, and it's happened incredibly quickly.

Take, for instance, Star Trek: TNG. I grew up watching TNG. I was a little young for it as it was airing, but it got syndicated almost immediately and they would show an episode most weekday evenings on the Space Channel, and I'd watch it with my lifelong Trekkie mom. This was a very common thing. I was by no means unusual for watching Star Trek as a child.

Star Trek: TNG has lots of sex in it! It's never explicit (unless you have a particularly niche interpretation of some of the borg stuff) but on many an occasion you'll have a few characters doing a bit of making out followed by a closing door or fade to black, and then they wake up in bed together. If you know what sex is, you know that is what is being implied here. Even my 8-year-old self, whose understanding of the subject mostly came from books of ancient mythology that used words like 'ravish' and 'the pleasures of the couch' a whole bunch, could tell that what was happening was sex.

And I am not bringing this up as a 'see, I watched all this inappropriate stuff and I turned out just fine!'. I'm bringing it up to argue that TNG's level of sexual content is not inappropriate for children (I'm not using the legalese 'minors', because I think that lumping children and teenagers together in this conversation would make it nonsense. Star Trek is obviously appropriate for teenagers. Don't use 'minors' when you mean either children or teens, it just muddies the waters).

The point is that Star Trek: TNG was very obviously designed to be watched by children and teenagers. There's a whole character in the main cast whose role in the show is to be an audience insert for children and teenagers. The moral tone of TNG, its occasional dips into 'don't do drugs, kids' type messaging, and its general avoidance of graphic violence all scream 'we are designing this with an audience of children - but not just children - in mind'. It's a family show. It's supposed to be watched by the whole family.

Which means that, until at least the end of the 90s, this amount of sexual content was generally considered appropriate for kids to see. It's not pornographic - it's not even graphic. Maybe the very most conservative parents wouldn't let their kids watch TNG, but that might have had more to do with all the socialism and atheism.

So, why did that change? Why do we now have such a strong bullwark between 'things kids are allowed to know about' and 'things for GROWN UPS ONLY 18+ Minors DNI', and why have we relegated even the most discreet references to sex to the second category only?

And the next time you find yourself experiencing that knee-jerk 'think of the children' reaction, consider: would what you're looking at have been ok on Star Trek: TNG in the 90s?

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#poor suzanne collins#she keeps making her books more obvious#as if they weren't obvious to begin with#and so many people are determined not to get it(via @arrows-for-pens)

This really gets it. Ppl will always be different so there will always been different interpretations of art, but our culture tends to ignore how the ideologies we grow up in and accept shape how we interpret art. That's how you get Paul Ryan being a Rage Against the Machine fan despite their lyrics being VERY direct; Ryan grew up being taught that egalitarianism and humanism were tyrannical, and so interpreted the anti-authoritarianism of their music to be opposing THAT.

Art can be an expression of ideas for the artist, but it can't convey those ideas because ideas aren't physical; it must be interpreted by the audience, and the audience will interpret it through their own context(political, educational, philosophical, religious, economic, etc etc etc etc).

i think eventually we're all just gonna have to come to terms with the fact that it's impossible to tell a story with any degree of subtlety or nuance without risking a portion of the audience taking the "wrong message", and that's ok. art isn't meant to be strictly a teaching tool, and if you're goal is just to convince people or critique an idea, just write an essay or a polemic

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Visa and Mastercard may be getting a lot of calls about their adult content policies, but I just called in to PayPal and not only was there no wait, the customer service rep I got had never had one of these calls before (they were very nice about it.)

Don't overlook the online processors - even more than Visa and Mastercard they are the ones pressuring online retailers. PayPal is the one that's been pressuring Patreon over the last year or so.

I've had no luck reaching Stripe, all of the numbers people have dug up ring through as disconnected.

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Fields of Mistria's 3rd Major Update is out now! 🧡 Experience 8 Heart Events 💐 New Dating Mechanic 🍂 Enjoy the Harvest Festival (Fall 10th) 🌱 Greenhouses ✨ And much more!

For more details, see the full patch notes here.

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POV: The last thing you ever saw

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Bonus Comic #38 Written and Drawn by floralmarsupial

To see more bonus material as it's released https://www.patreon.com/homestuck

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#i contain multitudes(via @arrows-for-pens)

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joseph: hermit purple..!! we have to take a picture of dio..!!!!

dio in his stupid mansion:

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He's our king

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In the club

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hashtag animashun

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Unmute !

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In the club