SEX AND VIOLENCE
This column is guaranteed not to contain Roy Keane.
What is the mean time between gunshots then, on this television? It seems pretty damn short, and getting shorter. Here I am working late, TV on but just in the background for company. Along come the bang-bangs to get on my nerves and wake the house up. So switch to another channel where it's quiet. In what seems like five minutes, someone's shooting up this side too. Change again, a comedy, good. Back to concentrating. Don't notice that a detective serial has started till my thoughts are shattered yet again by people trying to insert bits of metal into each other. What's with this?
And what I really want to know: How come there's so much violence on TV now, and so little sex? This is has always worried me a great deal, how killing people seems to be more socially acceptable than being very, very nice to them.
You know what the sexiest thing on TV these days is? The adverts. Some of them are quite incredibly fleshly. Sad, that. Makes me think, a longstanding argument against pornography is that it's the commodification of sex; now what we're seeing is the sexualisation of commodities. They used to say you can use sex to sell anything, now it seems you can't do anything with sex except use it to sell things.
It's interesting too that the vast majority of sexy adverts, whether they feature scantily clad men or women, seem to be selling to women. Usually they're selling chocolate. Though the bikini-clad girl draped on a car is no longer acceptable as a way to sell to men, considered insulting to both parties, well-buffed beefcake to sell things to women is just fine. This is known as post-modern, which is the new term for old-fashioned. It is fascinating just how slight the changes are. Instead of using women's breasts to sell things to men, we are now - c.f. 'Hello Boys' - using women's breasts to sell things to women. I'm not sure if that's progress, but it's definitely more confusing.
I am of course talking about Irish TV, but I don't think things are all that different elsewhere. Sure, they have special late-night viewing on some British channels. From what I've seen though this seems to be pretty much the old British giggly tendency, as if the chief delight of sexual explicitness was the return to playground naughtiness. Not of course that sex can't be hilariously funny, especially with the right partner, and some string, but TV comedy can hardly masquerade as genuinely erotic.
Okay, the subject has to be settled while we're here, what is the difference between the erotic and the pornographic? I believe this can be simply solved. It depends on what time of day it is. Also, whether you've had breakfast. In other words, if it turns you on it's erotica and if it turns your stomach it's porn. The trouble is, the very same thing can do both, depending on your mood.
(Another and perhaps more useful definition: It's pornography if you're enjoying it by yourself and erotica if you're enjoying it with someone else.)
Another oddity is that it seems to me that television was raunchier twenty years ago. Of course, twenty years ago I was an adolescent, I could even find the RTE guide pornographic. (Which is better mind you than my pre-pubescence, back then I could get an erotic charge out of the Ireland's Own.) So perhaps it's just that now I am jaded with all the possibilities of the television, and must turn instead to some new solace. Such as the toasted sandwich maker.
Too much violence and too little sex. Isn't that the problem not just with TV, but with the whole world?