I do mean stuff like removed scenes from international airings, replacing objects like cigarettes or vine with any other objects.
It’s just different values. I could ask the same about the US and nudity. In German media, blood and violence is fine, but it’s considered a topic that you need to be able to handle, so you need to have a certain age, depending on how gruesome that is.
Tbh, I’m European and therefore biased, but the way the united states have no problem with people harming other in media but being offended by something like “bodies” or “sex” does seem a little weird. Like, if my kids normalised harming others I’d be much more concerned than if they normalised making love.
Watching TV:
Here in the EU it is offensive/inappropriate to kill people.
There in the US it is offensive/inappropriate to make people.
So the difference is whether to make love or to make war. Personally I’d rather be a bononbo than a chimpanzee.
Little story to that point: In 2000 I flew NWA from Europe to the states. That time they still showed the movie on a big screen in the front of the cabin. The movie that day was Gladiator.
The airline did not censor gore and violence even though children were also flying.
But of course there was no nudity to speak of in that movie at all.
Some of us here think it’s backwards as well. The thing is that it’s a hard cycle to break. Because nudity is so taboo here and pretty universally related to sex rather than art or nature it ends up with any place it show up being taken as scandalous ‘uh oh, they showed the naughty bits’.
Nudes in art are viewed as high-brow, guns and violent sport as more low-brow, but we"re also a place who make icons of the blue collar ‘Joe Sixpack’ sort and for a large part treat intellectualism is snobby elitist shit.
Maybe one day we’ll unga bunga our way out of the caves, but nobody knows when.
