*Ø* Blogmanac | Where's My (Bleeping) Sex?


From Lisa:

[Clarification: In this case, we're not accusing the gummint of requiring censorship... but, rather inspiring it. –L.]


Where's My (Bleeping) Sex?
Who wants a DVD player that automatically deletes all the juicy bits of movies? One guess

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Friday, April 23, 2004


Because what the world really needs now is more uptight little companies from Utah that will help us all block out the random messy naked blood n' guts of the world.

Companies that will, without anyone asking them to, protect us from media evildoers and exposed flesh and scary exploding things and that part in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" wherein the universe is blessed, for the briefest of moments, with the joy of Kate Winslet's radiant nipples.

This is what is happening. This is the happy godlike agenda of Utah's ClearPlay, a twee and shrill little corporation that has taken it upon itself to sit around the cube farm all day and watch countless Hollywood flicks and zap out any and all icky violent suggestive material in, say, "Lost In Translation." For your protection. How kind.

ClearPlay has, thank the Lord Almighty, developed a method that automatically bleeps out and/or completely skips over words, scenes and entire sections of Hollywood films it has deemed offensive or inappropriate, and displays the rest in sanitized, defanged, nipple-free form, so you won't ever find yourself having to explain to your precious wide-eyed heavily Ritalined 8-year-old just exactly what part of Penelope Cruz Tom Cruise is sucking in that one part of "Vanilla Sky." I mean, praise Jesus.

ClearPlay is a content-filtering company. It relieves all twitchy God-fearing Americans of the horrible and brain-draining duty of actually taking a modicum of responsibility for what they see and hear and for what they allow their children to see and hear, and replaces it all with a type of hapless willful ignorance, mislabeled as "choice."

All you have to do is buy ClearPlay's cheapass scene-deleting DVD player from Wal-Mart (of course), set the level of filtering you want from 1 to 16 (1 being, presumably, "Sex is icky" and 16 being, I suppose, "Lobotomize me now"), pop in a ClearPlay-approved DVD from your local video store and, voilà! — your movie experience is pure and holy and now shows only happy bunnies and nummy butterflies and people kissing sweetly without tongue or moan or bulge. And, lo, the world is a better place.

What a fabulous idea. Dammit, if only more companies would get into the act of protecting us from the crap put out by other, more heartless companies.

And then if only someone would launch a company to protect us from the crap put out by the company that is ostensibly protecting us from crap put out by the first company. Why, you'd never have to think for yourself ever again. What a wonderful world.

I volunteer. I am hereby starting a new company called SpankThis that will not only de-ClearPlay all Mormon-sanitized DVDs but will also, in fact, actively enhance the scary icky sexy parts and will actually saturate them in hi-res surround-sound 3-D Technicolor and display them on infinite loop on a 40-foot mobile screen, which I will then drive very slowly through the parking lots of all Wal-Marts of America whilst blaring old Black Sabbath and new Rufus Wainwright. IPO forthcoming.

But why stop there? Hell, if only the U.S. government and maybe the puppets of the FCC and the sneering lizard men of the U.S. Senate would step up and crack down on corrupt American broadcasters.

If only they would enforce their snippy interpretation of God's will and ensure everyone on the goddamn planet knows that the F-word is officially the absolute scariest and worst possible utterance you can possibly scream out, next to maybe the C-word or the V-word or "masturbate," why, we'd be so much better off. Damn, if only that would happen! Oh wait.

Let us not get into overly defensive mode here. Let us not attempt to argue that all Hollywood swill is precious and perfect and wonderful and does not deserve great heaping gobs of critical scorn.

And I have to be honest: It's all too obvious that the endless barrage of sex and violence in American culture warps the living hell out of kids' perspectives, numbs them and desensitizes them and torques their burgeoning worldviews, replaces notions of humanity and calmness and divine individual sexuality with bloody ice picks and firebombs and severed limbs raining down like Skittles. Hey, it's an angry-ex-cop-takes-revenge-on-the-evil-syndicate-with-a-bazooka-for-killing-his-family world. We just live in it.

And while it is certainly no sunny picnic trying to raise a tolerable kid amidst modern America's nasty maelstrom of smut and violence, something is dangerously wrong when parents are willing to hand over their most basic, vital responsibilities — like educating their own spawn about how to process all the myriad torments and F-words of the world — to some sanctimonious company from Salt Lake City, a firm that has taken it upon itself to delete all the disturbing moments in "Ghostbusters." And "Best in Show." And "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." I mean, thank goodness.

Something is dangerously wrong when this sort of casual, screechy censorship becomes the norm. We begin to lose sight of the far, far more sinister forces now plying your innocent child and your born-again virgin Christian sister, of the considerably darker, danker forces that deign to tell you what you should and should not be offended by, who you can and cannot marry, who we should be allowed to bomb the living crap out of without apology or explanation or provocation. Forget the bombs and the blood and the gutted school system, honey — Howard Stern just said the N-word!

We forget, furthermore, that the roughly 10,000 far more lurid slogans and predatory marketing techniques and cheapass plastic landfill merchandise being hurled at your precious wee one during, say, a one-hour stroll through the florescent wasteland of Wal-Mart do much more karmic damage than 1,000 viewings of, say, "The Matrix Revolutions." This would seem obvious.

Is this all beside the point? Hardly. Because the bottom line is, the ClearPlay way is very much the BushCo way, which is very much the John Ashcroft way, which is very much the homophobic misogynistic Christian Right way, which is very much in keeping with the panicky paranoid anti-everything timbre of post-Nipplegate America.

That is to say, we have become a population that is increasingly willing to forgo its own rights and opinions and individual spiritual paths in favor of a sort of collective numbness, a general rejection of responsibility, this ridiculous, childish view that if we just let the Powers That Be cleanse the world of all the accused evildoers and drug dealers and F-words, we will be happy and pure and flowers will smile and priests will stop ogling online porn and the rivers will run strong and clear once again.

It is a polarized, absurdist view that blinks not at all as we send hundreds of disposable U.S. soldiers off to die for appalling and indefensible and very oily reasons, but the raunchy parts of "Seabiscuit" deserves immediate attention, if not scowling legislation. [All emphasis mine. –L.]

Which is why time is of the essence. My company-filtering company, SpankThis, will be launching very soon. Remember: I have only your best interests at heart. It is for your own good. Our motto: We emphasize the sticky menacing convoluted world, so you don't have to. Free nipple jewelry and copy of "Sex Tips for the Damned" with every stock option purchased. God bless America.

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Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. He also writes the Morning Fix, a deeply skewed thrice-weekly e-mail column and newsletter. Subscribe at sfgate.com/newsletters.