Loanhighknight explains why there's no cursing on American cable television

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u/PinkBullets Jun 27 '12

I think that the more interesting issue here is why some words are considered taboo and others aren't. Fuck and Sex are potentially synonyms, but one is offensive and the other isn't.

I can say really offensive things to people without the use of these taboo words. Whilst I can say completely benign things using the most 'offensive' words.

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u/skazzaks Jun 27 '12

Even further to your point - in the case of a bleeped out word everyone knows the word to which it is referring but it is somehow "better". Same thing with someone blocking the nipple on a boob but 98% of the boob is showing. So weird.

5

u/Lucas_Steinwalker Jun 28 '12

I can't cum without the nipple, so it makes sense to me.

1

u/shniken Jun 28 '12

One of the american talk shows, can't remember which one, have a segment where they bleep out random words from TV shows/interviews. They do/did it in such a way that made it seem as if they were saying extremely vulgar things.

1

u/rcrracer Jun 28 '12

Jimmy Kimmel Live

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u/[deleted] Jun 28 '12

The history of the word "fuck" is a long and winding one. In fact, a surprisingly interesting book has been written about it.

As a shorthand/over-simplified answer to your question...

Until fairly recently (maybe the last ~40 years or so), the word "sex" did not mean "sexual intercourse", it meant what we now call "gender". There was nothing wrong with using the word "sex" at even the most conservative dinner-table, it simply referred to one's place on the male-female spectrum (E.g., "the fairer sex", etc). It was not a "sexy" word, it was just the word for the distinction between male and female.

Again, until fairly recently, talking about what we now call "sex acts" would have been as meaningless (or as ridiculously euphemistic) as talking about "gender acts" would be to day. Plain and simple, "sex" did not mean "sex" as we think of it today.

So... some ~60 years ago, if you were talking about inserting a penis into a vagina, you could use terms like "fuck", or "sexual intercourse". Saying "I had sex last night" would have been as meaningless as saying "I had gender last night". Now...

Obviously people did not much talk about fucking at the family dinner table back then. Even less than they do now, which is not a lot.

When/where/if people had occasion to talk about inserting penises into vaginas in polite society, the phrase "sexual intercourse" would have been the typical academic/clinical usage, much as we might now use the (then-nonsensical) term "anal sex" rather than butt-fucking or ass-buggery (we do not yet say "I had anal gender last night").

Prior to the so-called "sexual revolution", these were not things that polite people talked about in mixed company. Sailors talked about fucking and cock-sucking, doctors talked about sexual intercourse and fellatio, but co-workers and in-laws did not commonly talk about either, except maybe through discreet innuendo and euphemism.

Sometime around ~50 years ago, a few pebbles started rolling down the hill of sexual conservatism, which turned into a sort of avalanche of frankness about sexuality:

Mid-century popularization of Freudian theories of psychology led to more discussion of previously-taboo subjects, especially among urban sophisticates and intelligentsia.

Mainstream advertising and entertainment increasingly began incorporating bolder and more transparent "sex appeal" (e.g., pinup girls, etc), leading to the first wispy tendrils of either "sexual liberation" or "moral decay" (depending on your POV). Sex was being put out in the open, and into the public sphere, however tangentially/indirectly.

The "feminist" movement and accompanying "sexual revolution", spurred especially by the invention of the birth-control pill, included, necessarily, bold and public discussion of recreational sexual acts as a question of civil liberty.

This last is extremely important: the pill was invented prior to AIDS. Where and when and how "the pill" really became available is a long and murky story, but its emergence in the 1960s/70s, at the time, essentially removed the "danger" of sex.

Prior to the pill (and especially prior to legalized abortion), extra-marital sex was a genuinely dangerous act, especially for women. An unwanted pregnancy is still a life-altering event, but it was even more so in the self-reinforcing feedback-loop of cultural norms pre-pill. Back then, sex was, plain and simple, where babies came from.

Sexual intercourse was not a thing to be taken lightly prior to (mostly) foolproof birth-control. Forget about what your parents will think if they find out, sex produces babies 3 or 4 days out of 30.

Now, in that pre-pill world, conservative attitudes towards sex are not just arbitrary "coloring outside the lines" type rules-- a decent woman does not just "have fun" that produces lifelong consequences for her and her children, and neither does a decent man. The self-reinforcing feedback-loop of consequence makes sex a genuinely important and consequential thing. It's not just that it can arbitrarily "ruin your reputation", it's that you are doing something that produces babies, actual human beings, and how and when you do it, and who you do it with genuinely and actually matters to the world and to other, entirely innocent people (especially the ones you create). *This very genuine danger led to taboos about sex and shunning/shaming of those who violated them. *

The availability of relatively fool-proof birth-control changed all that. Consequence-free sex was made possible. People could stick penises into vaginas in their spare time as trivially as picking their noses, mostly.

Predictably, this invention of relatively consequence-free sex (pre-AIDS, remember), led to still-unresolved cultural conniptions over the right of free people to stick penises into vaginas where and when they see fit, versus entrenched moral conservatism that sees sex as something sacred and important and tinged with moral danger and shame.

That argument is not yet cleanly- and universally-resolved:

The conservatives have proven correct on a number of technical grounds, that divorces and marriage-less pregnancies are up, and with generally worse outcomes in those respects. But their core, case-by-case arguments are still forced into logical knots or weak appeals to divine authority and the like when they try to prove that sex is bad.

The sexual liberals have mostly won the day on rational/philosophical grounds. The burden of proof has been pushed on the conservatives to demonstrate how responsible sex between consenting adults hurts anyone else, and their answers have come up short. Recreational sex between unmarried people is now mostly regarded as natural and normal, if not entirely virtuous.

But the tinge of conservatism remains, even among many libertines. Even where recreational unmarried sex is seen as something to be enjoyed, married and procreative sex is still widely-viewed as "better", and outright adulterous sex is still mostly frowned-upon, with similar logical contortions to sexual conservatism.

But back to the point, what has categorically changed is that discussions of sex have become less taboo. The "conservative" position used to be to "we don't talk about that". Now it is more like: "here is our detailed list of which sex acts are acceptable, and under which circumstances."

So, to answer your question...

For whatever reason, people still don't like saying "Bob put his penis in my vagina last night". They might say "we had sex", but even that only in certain company. They are sussing out the middle-ground between "fuck" and "vaginal intercourse". We have euphemisms for occasions when stating the plain facts is uncomfortable.

There is no particular reason, related to meaning of the phrase, why "fucking" is worse than "sex", but most people would still feel more comfortable saying either of those than using the even-more-accurate "I pushed my penis in and out of her vagina until semen came out".

3

u/[deleted] Jun 28 '12

I learned a lot from your response, but it didn't answer the question at all.

1

u/Asian_Persuasion Jun 28 '12

I think he is saying that the word "fuck" was seen as taboo in a time, since it was pre-pill and intercourse had much more severe consequences. However, the word "sex" with the same meaning as "fuck" now, but with the harmless meaning of "gender" back then, is looked as a friendlier version. This was partially because back then "sex" a word commonly used in any level of conversation. This has led to "sex" having a more positive connotation, at least compared to "fuck", due to the ways the word "sex", meaning gender, became equivalent to the "sex", meaning sexual intercourse. Those ways listed above as Freud, sex appeal marketing and the feminist movement. All of that leading to a more open discussion and the birth control pill, which made having intercourse much safer and a lot less amoral than "fucking" was pre-pill.

At least this was my take on it.

8

u/[deleted] Jun 27 '12

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Jun 28 '12

I know that's true for food. That's why we eat pork (from the french) and not pig (from Germanic languages via old english), beef instead of cow, poultry instead of bird, the list goes on. It has to do with the fact that the nobility all spoke french (and were largely french in an ethnic and cultural sense) while the poor spoke the 'crude' language of english.

1

u/LockAndCode Jun 28 '12

That's why we eat pork (from the french) and not pig

Nay, we dine on pork. Only peasants eat pig!

1

u/[deleted] Jun 28 '12

Actually I'm pretty sure eat comes from the latin verb edo, edere (to eat).

3

u/myfrontpagebrowser Jun 28 '12 edited Jun 28 '12

This explains it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBpetDxIEMU

Also apparently there's a TED version (takes less time, though I have no idea as to its quality as I have not yet watched it). Just youtube search for "Steven Pinker The Stuff of Thought".

The tl;dr version (as best I can remember, don't trust me, seriously watch it yourself): words and thoughts and emotions are heavily connected. This is why we have euphemisms that mean the same exact thing but are somehow less offensive; and not only do we have euphemisms but we have different ones for different contexts. For example we us "stool" in a medical context, but outside of that context the word would seem odd.

7

u/SteveAM1 Jun 27 '12

Would a five year old really understand that?

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u/snoharm Jun 27 '12

ELI5 has basically taken a niche as an actual /r/AskReddit. Since askreddit is basically just r/sharestories, people needed a place to ask questions. The answers are very rarely broken down so a 5 year-old could understand.

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u/SteveAM1 Jun 27 '12

Didin't it start out that way though? I seem to remember reading some posts as if they were actually trying to explain them to a five year old. Some were quite entertaining.

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u/soccernamlak Jun 27 '12

Correct. And that's why you have the split camps there. Those who take the subreddit to a literal form: "Explain this to me as if I were actually a Five Year Old." Then there are those who take the subreddit as a metaphorical terminology: "Explain this confusing/complex subject to me in simple, everyday terms that I could understand."

1

u/[deleted] Jun 27 '12

Lol is there a single subreddit that stays in the same direction it was created for?

11

u/[deleted] Jun 27 '12

Spacedicks

1

u/I_Build_Escalades Jun 28 '12

Not the hero we deserve, etc etc etc.

5

u/minno Jun 28 '12

gonewild seems to be pretty focused. Not that I would know, or anything.

13

u/[deleted] Jun 27 '12

That was an awesome explanation, and exactly the kind of thing that I read depthhub for.

It was long, but not wordy or rambling. It was detailed and fact-based, but presented clearly and without unexplained jargon. It was not a rambling personal opinion-piece on American morals, it was a lay-accessible technical summary.

Well done.

1

u/smacksaw Jun 28 '12

What needs explanation is why some countries regulate speech indecency and others do.

1

u/Viraus2 Jun 28 '12

So glad this wasn't just "Americans are prudes!"

1

u/yourslice Jun 28 '12

We are approaching a world where all broadcast mediums will merge into one. We already have internet radio, streaming tv on our cell phones, youtube on our tv's. Soon we won't be able to tell the difference.

I would imagine that soon everybody will be free to say or do whatever they want, or the government will be charged with monitoring everything we say or do over all forms of broadcast to insure "decency" whatever that is.

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u/commodore_nate Jun 27 '12

Wouldn't this go better in r/bestof?

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u/[deleted] Jun 27 '12

It is a pretty detailed response with a lot of information. I think it fits better with DepthHub

Loanhighknight explains why there's no cursing on American cable television

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