I've found myself confronted with the conflict American and European views of sex and violence in the media recently.

I am teaching an elective this semester titled: American Culture and American Television.  It's a take on the elective I taught in the fall American Culture and American Magazines. The idea is for the Television course is simply this--why not use American Television as a lens to discuss American culture, as a medium to improve vocabulary and fluency and as a way to engage students in a discussion of class, race, religion and gender as it appears (or does not) in a variety of different programs.

But what's surprised me are how prevalent the topics of sex and violence have become in our discussions. It's not shocking but it's become notable. Moreover, my time away from the States has given me the space to recognize the fact that violence is much more acceptable in American television than sex is. In some ways this is to be expected.

I grew up in a country whose constitution guarantees its citizens the right to bear arms. This right is guaranteed to us in the Bill of Rights. <!--more-->The right to bear arms as a part of the Second Amendment is proceeded only by the First Amendment which ensures our freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom to assemble and the freedom to petition government. Yep, guns are part of our history, our culture, our ethos and for better or worse a part of our national psyche as well.  And as fate would have it, guns and violence go hand in hand.  The Second Amendment is certainly not the reason that we're a violent country--it's definitely more complex than that but it's part of it.

Violence it seems <em>is</em>. It is everywhere. It is common place. It is a given. Sex, however, isn't.

What really struck this home was the day that I was explaining the <a href="www.tvguidelines.org">TV Parental Guidelines</a> which are posted on a program on the hour and half hour in the States ostensibly for parents who want to monitor what their children are watching but don't want to watch tv with them.  My students said: Oh, just like movies. Kind of. Then we talked about the basic acronyms for suitable audiences from Y (youth) to G (general) and MA (mature audience). Next we discussed the content acronyms D for suggestive dialogue (which usually means talking about sex), L for coarse language, S for sexual  situations and V for violence.

This was the moment that shocked my kids. First off, they were interested in the fact that American parents might want monitor what their children are watching on tv--seemingly implying that their own parents don't. But mostly they were shocked by the fact that of the four content acronyms, three are concerned with sex and only one violence.  I tried to explain that coarse language could be either swearing or maybe something sexual but my students were having none of that.  And frankly, I get it.

On a whole, we are much more concerned with monitoring, limiting and controlling sex than we are violence.  But how do you explain this to students?

Maybe it's our Puritan past or maybe it's that we still don't have a decent amendment protecting the sexual rights and freedoms of all Americans.  But what ever it is-- sex is scarier than violence.

Yes. I just wrote: for Americans sex is scarier than violence. As a whole we spend a lot of time hiding sex, pretending that it doesn't happen and trying to protect our children (but also ourselves) from it. But at the same time we're obsessed by it. We fight about about abortion rights, about gay rights and even abstinence only education. We're obsessed by the kind of sex that everyone else is having but at the same time we want to relegate it to backrooms or bedrooms and R or MA audiences.

How I am supposed to distill something like this for my students? Frankly, I am not sure that this is a problem I can explain with a  white board, a marker and some American television programs.

For my students this whole thing was problematic.  They didn't get it.  It didn't seem possible to them that America--this country that they see as fairly liberal would be more concerned with protecting its children and teenagers from sex rather than violence.  <em>I know, Right? </em>