We arrived in Leipzig, having ridden nearly two hours on a bus from Berlin, checked into the very nice motel, opened the curtains and saw a partially nude and sexually explicit woman on a billboard. I then turned on the television and was shocked to see a lady begin to remove her clothes as she was trying to convince the viewer to buy a particular item. Changing the channel, I found another scene of a couple in a state of loving bliss showing more of themselves than I am accustomed to seeing on television. It all seemed blatantly prurient at the most and inappropriate at the least, and I reminded myself we were no longer in the United States of America, and subsequently began to make typical critical comments about the rampant liberalism of foreign countries, and further began to extol the virtues of our homeland with the proper mixture of arrogance and pride found in many Americans. Oh how great to live in a country where modesty and conservatism are more than ideals but are indeed practiced by most people and where the media does not force us to accept sexual themes.
Frightening, however, is the thought that there is always the likely possibility that the media simply reflects the general culture, and the values of a particular region or country are simply manifested on television. We know that there are more truck commercials displayed during football games and that Saturday morning television is geared for a younger generation, thereby demonstrating media's tendency to analyze, react, then present something new. Using this prescription, it becomes debatable whether or not a billboard is forcing a particular value acceptance on the viewer or if a billboard is more of a representation of given practices of a culture. If the latter is true, then perhaps we should examine our own emphases, our own priorities, and, yes, even our cultural values that exist in our country.
As I was arrogantly extolling the virtues of our country (which are certainly numerous), and reveling in our own self-righteous moral code, proud of our resistance to unbridled media-driven sexuality, it suddenly occurred to me that while we may not allow obvious nudity, we do, instead, frequently or even constantly accept violent images and visual human pain. We may indeed be squelching some sexual concepts at least visibly, and we may expect a kind of social protocol from our media, and we might even demand a family oriented type of visual experience, but, ironically, we are quite comfortable seeing murder, mayhem, destruction, and inflicted pain.
From animation to reality, our emphasis on our television sets is often on violence. German emphasis may be sexuality (at least from our perspective that is--I'm not convinced this is necessarily the reaction from the German people, but that is a subject for another essay!), but we replace that notion with an emphatic stress on violence. I am not prepared to state which country is wiser or which country will end up with fewer problems or which country has the higher crime rate or teen pregnancy (no doubt those statistic are available somewhere). I am prepared to question, however, our propensity for self-righteous attitudes as regards our own so-called protection of our young from nudity as opposed to violence.
Please understand I am not advocating in any sense that we allow or encourage the media to display public nudity on television or billboards. In fact, I often become uncomfortable with the extent of sexual themes encountered everyday on television and in the media. Like most parents, I fear that as cultural morals erode and as our acceptance of sexual behaviors takes on a lower standard, our society will one day suffer the consequences of unrestrained sexual action. Yet, my concern is that we have become desensitized to violent images and violent actions while remaining somewhat morally righteous in other areas. There seems to be an inconsistency in our media driven world that defies logic. So back to the question, does the media direct our value system or does it reflect it?
Whatever the answer to this question may be, there is no doubt in my mind that love in whatever form is always preferable to pain in any form.
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