Any quick glance at social media over the past few days revealed (pun intended) today is Go Topless Day. There is even a website, gotopless.org.
Clearly, the sight of bare breasts and exposed nipples is cause for alarm in this country. Any link to this or any news reports of the day comes with an assortment of images. Each with the salient parts of the images blurred, covered by blacked out pixels, or in some way masked.
On the other hand, if one searches for headless corpses, beheading videos, or burning people to death, one can see these images without any such censoring.
What does that say about a society that is so afraid of images of naked breasts and yet so accepting of violence?
Hide the nipples, hype the headless.
If one has any wonder about why there is so much violence in this country, one need only look around.
Unrestricted images of murder, mayhem, torture and blood inundate the various media. Can it surprise anyone in the least that those who suffer from mental illness, after years of exposure to non-stop violence on TV, movies, and video games, come to think of it as normal, and act on it?
I grew up in an age where we all had toy automatic weapons. We hunted each other for hours trying to get that first shot in and yell, “Got you, you’re dead.”
But we knew it was make-believe. If we crossed the line into real violence there were consequences, not excuses for blaming something else.
We came to understand the difference. Of course, our pretend war came from our imagination. We were not bathed in it since birth by billions of cable channels and the 24-hour news cycle.
Therein, lies the problem. We have confused priorities.
I find this interesting. On one of the few shows that we watch on Hulu, called The Vikings, they preface the show with a viewer discretion warning.
It reads. “Viewer discretion advised. The program depicts scenes of sexuality and violence.”
Odd how we equate the risk of watching an act that creates life with one that destroys it.
And yet, here we are in the 21st century, terrified of visions of bare breasts and comfortably ignoring the epidemic portrayal of violence.
Is a bare breast that much of a threat to morality?
A society numb to violence is a threat to your mortality.
