The Upside Down World Where Boobs are Worse than Murder
Obi Wan getting sliced in half? Fine. Princess Leia in a bikini? TURN IT OFFFFF!!!!!!
A few weekends ago, Rich and I were engaging in our usual Friday night challenge ritual called “finding a movie we both want to watch.”
Eventually we landed on one neither of us had seen since high school: Chicago.
The 2002 movie musical depicting murderesses (Catherine Zeta Jones and Renee Zellweger) and the lawyer trying to get them out of jail (Richard Gere).
About 20 minutes in, during the cellblock tango number, Rich turns to me and says, “This is weird. For some reason my teenage feelings while watching this movie are coming back to me. I feel squeamish? Vaguely guilty?”
“Oh my gosh- I’m feeling that too! It’s like I’m back in that theater sitting next to Christina Burns looking away and wondering if we should leave.”
We tell our eerily similar tales of watching the film for the first time, and together reflect on this weird discomfort visiting us now like the unwelcome ghost of good-kid past.1
What was it about this cellblock tango number that made us uncomfortable?
Was it because these women had murdered their husbands with guns and knives and were now singing about it un-remorsefully?
Decidedly not, no.
It was because these women were shaking their hips and chests wearing ‘nere but their skinnies.
The murdering was perfectly fine.
No biggie.
Murder didn’t make us sweat or feel like we were wrong for watching it.
Boobs did.
Murder was old hat in all our favorite family movies: Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Iron Man, Independence Day.
I watched the shooting/stabbing death scenes from these movies with my parents many times without so much as a whiff of discomfort.
But when Eric from Boy Meets World kissed his girlfriend and they laid down? My mom shot off her seat like a rocket to turn it off saying, “That’s bad. We don’t do that.”
In 2005, Sheryl Glaser of Albion, California was arrested for indecent exposure.
She was protesting the Iraq War and the policies of then California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Glaser was part of the protest group Breasts Not Bombs which claims that “breasts are not indecent, wars are.”
The group—comprised of both men and women—protested topless at the California State Capital in an effort to highlight the absurdity of laws that sexualize and criminalize female bodies, but normalize violence.
Their central message is that we have obscenity backwards—we consider women’s chests obscene, but killing children in the Gulf War as not obscene. Showing bare breasts is illegal, but killing 14,000 people is not illegal.
Glaser was arrested for showing her chest, but presidents, senators and governors have statues, medals and streets named after them as they kill thousands.
What a funny uworld we live in.
Another memory: it’s 2007 and I am sitting in a room in Ljubljana, Slovenia watching The Testaments with my fellow Mormon missionaries and about 15 Slovene women.
My companion and I were in charge of the church activity tonight, and our lack of preparation led to the watching one of the two movies in our possession. Ensign to the Nations is a little dry, so The Testaments it is.
Once we get to part where a crown of thorns gets put on Christ’s head, blood running down and the whip comes out, several of the women leave the room. Others look down.
I assume everyone is feeling the Spirit, moved that Christ must atone for our sins.
But then the woman next to me clicks her tongue in disapproval and says, “I’ll never understand why Americans like watching violence so much.”
I’m taken back by her remarks. What does America and violence have to do with anything?
I look around the room and notice that the only people still looking at the screen are the six American missionaries.
Earlier that day at lunch, my companion and I warned the other missionaries to avoid a certain street because of a new large advertisement with “immodest women” on it.
………………………
When I dragged myself through the questioning-everything-I’ve-ever-believed process when I left the religion I was raised in, I found the task of discovering what it is I actually think about a thing to be surprisingly difficult.
This is because my curated, logical thoughts don’t arise first. My conditioned thoughts do. Before I can unearth my real feelings, I first must dig past what I’ve been always been taught. I’ve found these two guiding questions to be exceptionally helpful in this process of discovering what I believe to be good:
Does it feel like love?
What are its fruits?
I applied these questions to all of my former religious rules. Does not wearing tank tops feel like love? Not particularly. What are its fruits? Shame. Judgment.
Does believing in original sin feel like love? No. What are its fruits? Guilt. Shame.
Does gratitude feel like love? Yes. What are its fruits? Abundance.
Let’s apply them now to violence and sex.
Violence.
Does it feel like love? Decidedly not, no.
What are its fruits? Pain, destruction, devastation, harm, cruelty.
Sex.
Does it feel like love? So long as it is consensual and non-violent, yes, sex feels like love.
What are its fruits? Again, given consent and non-violence, the fruits of sex can be connection, intimacy, dopamine, serotonin, joy, pleasure, fun.
Also me. Also you. All of us and our lives are the fruit of ……… sex.
Hm.
How interesting.
Why then, when it comes to the popular culture I consume via movies, TV, and books has it gone unquestioned that depictions of murder are acceptable, but sex is not?
Given their fruits- should it not be the exact opposite? Shouldn’t consensual sex be acceptable and violence be not acceptable?
What kind of trippy upside down world is this?
……………………….
Well it’s important to note, that not everyone is living in the world where violence is fine to view and sex is inappropriate.
In fact, this seems to be a uniquely American phenomenon.
Betsy Bozdech, an editor who helps give movies their ratings claims, “In general, the US does tend to rate sexuality more harshly than violence, and that is pretty much flipped everywhere else in the world.”2
For example, the 2013 film Blue is the Warmest Color was rated NC-17 in the United States due to its sexual content.
However, in France, it was rated as appropriate for ages 12 and older to watch and was shown in theaters.
What’s more, when a Catholic group tried to sue to get the movie’s rating changed, the equivalent of the French Supreme Court ruled in favor of the original rating. Their reason? That the sex scenes were “free from all violence and filmed without degrading content.”3
Sex? Fine. Violence? Not fine.
Fascinating.
Meanwhile, back in the states, the Supreme Court was summoned when Justin Timberlake accidentally ripped off a piece of Janet Jackson’s costume during the Superbowl Halftime show, resulting in a fraction of a second of nipple exposure and the suing of the television station CBS.
And a national uproar.
One more fitting example: the video game Grand Theft Auto (banned or censored for violence in many other countries) found itself in a controversial bruh-ha-ha when a mod of the game depicted pixelated sex between the main character and his girlfriend.4
Keep in mind this is Grand Theft Auto. Slashing innocent people on the street with a knife? That’s fine.
Bombing streets lined with pedestrians? Totally acceptable.
Murdering prostitutes with assault rifles? A-ok.
Consensual sex? Absolutely unacceptable.
This article in Salon magazine reports that the movie Frida with Selma Hayek was rated R in the US because of nudity, but in Holland it was rated appropriate for ages 6 and up, whereas The Avengers was the exact opposite.
Causing a Dutch teen to ask in confusion,
“Why are boobs worse than death?! How do boobs affect people negatively? Are they scary? Do they make people do bad things? I don’t get it.”5
Such good questions Dutch teen.
Allow me to ask one more:
What are the consequences of believing that depictions of boobs are worse than depictions of death?
Well I don’t know, I’m just an American mom trying to un-do the damage from my purity culture brain.
But perhaps these stats can help paint part of the picture:
And from the US Department of Justice’s Website:
“The U.S. homicide rate was 10.5-7.9 per 100,000 population compared to Europe's less than 2 per 100,000. The U.S. rate for rape was approximately seven times higher than the average for Europe. United States robbery rates were approximately four times higher than those in Europe. Theft and auto theft in the United States were approximately twice as high as in Europe. The U.S. rates for violent crime were also higher than those for Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.”
Well, that’s violence but perhaps because we are censoring all the boobs and sex, surely we have less teen pregnancies?
Alas, no.
Not by a long shot.
The US teen pregnancy rate is 41.5 per 1000 people. Germany by contrast is a mere 9.8 per 1000, The Netherlands is 5.3, Switzerland is 4.3, . Europeans also have lower STI rates and far lower HIV/AIDS rates.6
……………………….
What are the fruits of living in a country that fears boobs more than violence?
Being able to easily purchase an assault weapon, but arrested for seeking control over what happens to the tissue in your uterus, has got to be one of them.
Unfortunately, I am not in charge of my country, but I am in charge of parenting my four kids. And my own influence on what they think is normal or inappropriate is something I think about. A lot.
Something I keep noticing: even though I want to teach my kids that boobs are a normal, morally-neutral, lovely part of the female body and not something to be feared, even though I want to teach my kids that violence and murder is not fine, still………..still it’s shocking how often my knee-jerk reaction to bodies and sexuality is: “that isn’t appropriate.”
Recently my 13 year old daughter asked if she could read the fantasy series I just finished- a series that happens to include very specific details of sexual encounters. My gut reaction was absolutely not. It’s too graphic. She’s too young.
But then I had to question myself. Why was this my reaction? Was this actually my reaction, or just the reaction conditioned into me from 30+ years of sex-phobic messaging?
Is the sex in the book violent? No. Is it consensual? Yes. Would I even think twice about letting my daughter read it if I were raised in Sweden? Definitely not.
Since Sweden seems to be doing better than my country in just about every area and since I don’t want her to be sitting with her partner in 30 years watching a movie with “inappropriate” dancing and sweating with the ghost of her good-girl past,
perhaps I should reconsider my gut reaction.
………………………
What about you? How’s purity culture detox going? Do you notice ghosts of purity culture past paying a visit when bodies are depicted on screen? How’s parenting going in this mess?
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Fun fact! Readers later informed me that our guilt likely stemmed from the Mormon prophet expressly speaking out against the movie Chicago the year it came out. Thanks readers!
Patriarchy is about control, dominance, and ownership of others, especially females.
Religions are in place to uphold patriarchy.
Violence is needed to control, dominate, and own others.
The control of female bodies is a top priority.
That is why violence is celebrated, and female bodies are controlled.
Thank you for expressing this so clearly. I have often wondered why we think violence is entertainment and glad to know other countries think differently.