Boobies Are Dirty

And we won't let you forget it:

On PBS recently there was a four-hour documentary called "China From the Inside." … One part of the documentary addressed the problem of pollution in China, specifically toxins in the rivers. … One of the primary effects of river pollution is cancer. The documentary showed some cancer victims. One of them was an old woman in the final stages of esophageal cancer. She was skeletal; her skin had shrunk away from her ribs, leaving her looking like an anatomical drawing. She was suffering, hardly conscious; the narrator said the woman died a few days after the segment was shot.

But here's the thing: The woman's breasts had been digitally blurred. Because she was so thin, she didn't really have breasts, but she had nipples, and those were apparently arousing enough to cause the PBS censor to step in. See, it's not prurience that's bad; it's not sexual exploitation that's bad; it's breasts that are bad. Any breasts, even the breasts of an elderly Chinese woman dying of cancer. Your breasts are bad. Speak to them severely.

I don't think that the government had to order this documentary altered. The FCC probably didn't know anything about it before it aired. No, PBS is so terrified that it didn't need a cautionary letter; it went ahead and did it anyway, just in case someone's mother somewhere writes the FCC saying, "My son saw the breasts of a terminally ill Chinese woman, and now he's playing in a heavy-metal band."

The whole article is worth a read.

This kind of stuff drives me insane. I'm a big nerdy documentary-watcher, and I've noticed in recent years that women's naked breasts are increasingly getting blurred where they weren't before. What bothers me about it is that by responding to the demands of people who can't regard the naked human body as anything but erotic, the notion that the naked human body is always erotic is reinforced. Instead of there just being, inevitably, some infinitesimally small group of sad weirdos who are titillated by seeing the naked breasts of a dying old woman, now everyone who watched that documentary had their attention drawn to what they weren't allowed to see.

We're such puritan assholes in this country, honestly.

(Thanks to Angelos for passing that along.)