V-Chip, ClearPlay, and their ilk First of all, I like nudity. Profanity. Explosions. Fighting. Car chases. And combinations of all the above, especially if involving either pirates, chimps, or jive-talking robots.
In college, I had a shirt that said, "F*CK" - without the asterisks. (I try to keep the robot from being flagged on any corporate web filter thingees)
For my birthday one year, I made a flyer for my party that had an illustration of a condom being rolled onto a penis (remember that one, college pals?). Just wanted to get that all out in the open and on the table.
SF-Gate I read the SF-Gate website quite often and always find it interesting and fun and all that. I like that San Francisco town quite a bit.
There is a recent column about ClearPlay, which is a Utah-based company that sells DVD players and DVDs that have all the naughty bits edited out - so you can walk Cannonball Run II with the language and cleavage edited out if you so desire.
"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."
...Companies that will, without anyone asking them to, protect us from media evildoers and exposed flesh and scary exploding things... ...Something is dangerously wrong when this sort of casual, screechy censorship becomes the norm..."
"screechy". Ha.
My issues with this column, as well as the debate about the V-Chip we had years ago, is: So what? Last I checked, if I wanted to watch a ClearPlay DVD, I had to go out and buy the stupid special player at Wal-Mart and then find the ClearPlay version of the stupid movie I wanted to see in the first place.
If I have a bunch of kids and I don't want them to see a breast or some sort of violence I believe that is my right as a freedom loving crazy-ass American. If I want to show the kids movies that only star Judge Reinhold... last I checked, I would have that right. If I want to show them just the rejected clips from ClearPlay consisting of hour after hour of clips of nipples exploding and fighting with profanity, I believe I can also do that, although Social Services may step in. So, actually, I guess there is a chance I can't do that. But, still.
V The V-chip is the same way. If I don't want the kids to watch MTV, well, it's my TV and my cable subscription: No MTV. If I want to set the V-Chip to only allow them to watch CSPAN, so be it. They will grow up to be savvy in regards to the legislative framework in the Senate.
The Fear I suppose the fear is that this all will become some sort of nation-wide, dubya sponsored law - when the UN troops fly down in their black helicopters and forcefully attach censorship devices to our TVs and radios and computer machines. ("Crap! I can't watch my stories on TV!")
To sum up I suppose my whole point is that however crazy-ass way you want to raise your kids is fine with me (as long as it's legal yadda yadda yadda). Nutty fundamentalist should be able to have their children watch 'Ghostbusters' and have the "darns" and "dammits" censored out if they so desire - no matter how stupid that concept seems.
