We haven't had something for the weekend for a while but given that I have just signed up for the North Star pirates pre-order I thought I would post these sensuous pirate pictures by Australian painter Norman Lindsay.
They are on my "adults only" Legatus Wargames Ladies blog here. It's not really an adults only subject, of course, and the Legatus does not think that naked bodies are rude but some people (including a lot of Americans) do, so we have to be careful our blog isn't deemed objectionable by the puritans at Blogger and are required to flag it as adults only. I like Americans and travel to their country reasonably regularly but they do have a much less relaxed attitude to nudity than Europeans, which I find rather odd. As a pertinent example, in 1940, Lindsay's wife took 16 crates of his work out of Australia as they were worried about a potential Japanese invasion. They were on a train in the US on which there was a fire. The crates were hastily evacuated and the contents, as a result, were discovered by American officials who promptly destroyed the whole lot as "pornography". The word Philistines does not even come close.
Our (American) attitude is funny considering that we seem to be the largest producer and consumer of pornography in the world.
ReplyDeleteI suspect the two may actually be linked!
DeleteLegatus Hedlius, Ave!
ReplyDeleteI must agree completely with Sean. However, the roots of this rest in the Puritan origins of the founders of New England and the occasional surges of religiosity that mark US history. The thirty percent of Americans who profess allegiance to the Born Again movement continue to rail against what the perceive as sinfulness.
the great hypocrisy that permeates this view of humanity is that they see nothing wrong with a constant diet of violence on police procedurals and science fiction. The blood letting can be prodigious but this seems to be irrelevant. It's all right to terrorize someone, assault and kill them but it is not morally acceptable to see female or male skin or two people making love.
There are two landmark TV presentations of not small proportion in this regard. First, I, Claudius broke the nudity/sexct by showing female nudity back in the seventies. And, then there was NYPD Blue which in the 1980's actually showed nudity in the depiction of human sexuality. SHOCKING! Since then the censors have really clamped down on such things on broadcast TV considering a wardrobe malfunction such as that which occured during the Super Bowl to be somehow a horrible thing.
The redeeming aspect of American TV which somewhat negates this is the presence of cable TV where language is uncensored and movies and series can go places where broadcast TV cannot. Parents can exert control over their children's viewing activities by putting on "blocks" to halt young kiddies watching all sorts of things.
Your opinion is spot on - God forbid that things appropriate to adult audiences be shown to adults!
Salve,
Gerardus Magnus
"You can call me Magnus."
The Super Bowl thing was looked at with utter disbelief by my friends! Hilarious!
DeleteI find it odd that children are permitted to see scenes of extreme violence by American censors but not nudity and sex (which unlike violence are both perfectly natural). I always find the "adult setting" on TNP very weird! They're toy soldiers, for heaven's sake!
The British Board of Film Classification has really changed in the last decade or so. Violence is still hit with quite tough certification (some things, like head butts, for example, automatically get a "15" certificate (our equivalent of 'R' ) but nudity is not and nor is.sex.
For example I recently watched a Spanish film called The Artist and the Model about, you guessed it, an artist and a model. It has extensive female full frontal nudity in it. In the UK the film was a 12 certificate, in France a U (same as a Disney cartoon) but in the US it was an "R".
Finally, I was in t Boston's splendid Museum of Fine Arts about eighteen months ago with my particular friend Sophie, from Vancouver who, being half French, thinks that American views on nudity are quaint. She was shocked to be told by a policeman to put her bikini top back on when sunbathing on Santa Monica beach a few years ago. We were standing next to a renaissance painting of some naked cherubs in a painting of the Virgin Mary. A group of schoolchildren of about eight or nine walked past and started saying "eew that's disgusting!" To be fair the (woman) teacher replied with "no it's not, it's beautiful" but, honestly, something is going very wrong somewhere over there.
Yes we Americans still have a legacy of sexual issues left over from our Cromwellian Puritan founders. If you English had done the deceit think and killed of the lot rather than allow them to emirate we would have these issues today.
ReplyDeleteI think we were just happy to see the back of them!
DeleteMust admit I am seriously tempted the Nickstarter, but I already have a load pirates... and I still have the Foundry C18th civilians set to make a start on to populate my port... Good post btw, and I enjoyed the link to your saucy blog! ;-)
ReplyDelete