Imagine you’re a dad. Or mom, depending on your gender. Let’s say, in this parental life, you have a son or daughter who brightly flings their school backpack on the couch and approaches you with a question that will give you a choice of whether or not to spoil your child’s innocence.
“Where do babies come from?”
Whoa there. Okay. You’d blink. Quickly spin the Wheel of Fortune in your mind and decide to spit out the answer the little pointer thing lands on.
“The stork.”
Oh, yes, now you’ve gotten to save yourself from explaining the horrible, horrible truth of child-birth by spinning the tale of a white bird merrily dropping off your screaming infant child at your window in a wicker basket. However, since your child now thinks you’ve adopted them, they then start to think: “Hey. Maybe this means I’m part stork and can fly.” Next thing you know, you have your child splayed out on the edge of the pavement.
Don’t you get it? Censorship kills kids.
Okay, well, maybe it doesn’t go to that extreme, and maybe that’s a little melodramatic, but you get the idea. Censorship makes no sense.
In society, censorship has been utilized in order to “protect” and keep from offending other people. First of all, you are going to offend people no matter what you do (such offenses include flipping the bird or wiping someone’s projectile saliva off of you as they’re spreading their amaaaazing anecdotes). And protecting people? Well, there’s a difference in protecting people and just keeping them completely ignorant.
I imagine that when the day comes where my curious and sparkly-eyed child asks me about where babies come from and how they’re even made in the first place, I’m going to be honest with them. Yeah, okay, they may be disgusted, but how does knowing about how they were born harm them? If anything, now they’re smarter than the kid next to them in class shoving letter blocks in their mouth and Crayola up their nose. What is so wrong with educating your child, so long as what they learn doesn’t harm them in any way?
That brings me to media censorship. Please, enlighten me on why it is okay for children and young adults to play video games where you can blow a Nazi’s head off and why it is okay for us to watch a movie where teenagers murder each other to win a contest. Why is that okay, but everybody’s all excited and shocked over nudity and [please insert term I am required to censor here]? Essentially, isn’t watching other humans brutally fight to death—even if it’s fiction—much worse than seeing the human body for what it is and the “activities” it partakes in? And as for said “activities”, why do we even care? Every animal in the animal partakes in the “activities” in order to reproduce—it’s old news, so why is it so bad if we watch a movie with that kind of content? If you’re mature enough to see that sort of thing, then what’s the harm done? And if you’re not mature enough to handle it, don’t watch it.
Finally, I guess that what I really don’t understand is the censorship of “strong language”. Hi, hello—you have words like “hate” and “kill” and “rape” that people just casually throw around every say. But as soon as someone says the “F” or “S” words—whoa nelly—everybody’s panties are getting all twisted into a slipknot. (See, I can’t even use those words out of context because I’ll be reprimanded for trying to make my point!)
I know what you’re thinking. (Whining, actually.) “It’s because it means something bad!” Okay, wait a second. If we’re talking about the meanings of words being offense, then essentially, saying “kill” or “rape” should actually be considered far more taboo than saying simple words that you scream when you forget to pay the phone bill or when someone cuts you off in traffic. Also, please explain to me how profanity words are offensive. All words are are sound with meaning attached. And when you’re a little kid, you’re going to be more offended over whether or not somebody calls you ugly and says they don’t want to play with you. You’ll be more offended over that than you will ever be over someone screaming the “F” word. In fact, I bet you’ll be laughing.
Aren’t we also taught “sticks and stones may break your bones, but words may never hurt you” when we’re kids anyways?
Censorship makes no sense because of what is being censored. Do I think censorship is needed? Of course. I don’t want my children to think it’s okay to say “dude, you raped me” on xBox Live, but I don’t want my children watching people kill one another. I just think censorship should be utilized in a proper way because the wrong things are being censored.