posted
This is a spinoff of T_Smith's thread about (in part) the computer game The Punisher, which he describes as being incredibly graphically violent, complete with table saws and wood chippers for feeding your enemies through. One of the things that he said he specifically enjoyed about the game was the explicit gore (although this wasn't the only element of the game that appealed).
Knowing that Nathan is LDS, I got to thinking about the LDS tendency to frown on viewing R rated movies, which led me to post the following in that thread:
quote: I asked this over on Sakeriver, but I may as well bring it up here too. I know that while watching R rated movies isn't strictly against the LDS faith, it is frowned upon by a pretty large number of Mormons. I'd always assumed that this was due to both the sex and the violence in R rated movies, but I realize that I may be mistaken in that. Assuming that I'm not, though, I'm curious--do you watch R movies? If you don't, how do you reconcile your enjoyment of, say, running a guy through a table saw in a computer game with your refusal to watch the same thing being done on the big screen?
If I'm wrong in my assumptions about the reason many LDS avoid R rated movies, I'd love to know the true reason--I'm a big fan of replacing assumption with solid fact whenever possible.
Nate requested that a new thread be created for the discussion of this, as he wants to keep his thread on target. Good luck with that--I'm not sure it's possible to prevent a thread from derailing without killing it in the process, but I'm willing to move the discussion to a new thread, in any case.
posted
As I understand it, many Mormons take a somewhat self-serving approach towards avoiding sexual content while drowning in violent content. The logic is that they would never personally want to send someone through a woodchipper, so a game which permits them to enjoy that sensation is not actually a temptation -- while they could imagine sleeping with, say, Kirsten Dunst without marrying her, so a game that portrayed Kirsten Dunst in compromising, pre-marital situations might well tempt them to sin.
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posted
I personally eschew most R rated movies, even if it is "just for violence". And violence is listed in the new guidelines (for church members) that don't specify R rating but tell people to be selective in what they view.
I mentioned not too long ago that violence is the cause named in the Bible for the great flood. Many forms of idol worship involved violence. I don't know, maybe we should get rid of Halo. It seems to be really addictive, and I don't think its for a reason other than the violence.
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posted
The phrase "it is only rated R for violence" can frequently be heard in conversations before and after Sunday School. But murder is a worse sin than adultery.
What about Erin Brokovich, where the rating is mainly for crimes against fashion?
P.S. My mom once justified her small collection of R rated movies as all being movies that are too non-conformist to be shown to minors. Enemy of the State, The Matrix, Conspiracy Theory. She also thought Sleeping with the enemy told an important story. And she took her teen daughters to Thelma and Louise. But then she repented and gave all her R rated videos to me.
Other R rated movies that I thought were important: Men of Honor. Um, thats about it.
Mom did get The Passion, which I still haven't watched.
Is it more likely that a movie will tempt sin through sex or violence? Is a person more likely to have sex or kill someone?
Posts: 14745 | Registered: Dec 1999
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We did go through a phase right after we got married that we would watch R rated movies, since we could now... well anyway, I think we quit after a while. I forget why.
The "guidelines" (For the Strength of Youth booklet)
quote: Whatever you read, listen to, or look at has an effect on you. Therefore, choose only entertainment and media that uplift you. Good entertainment will help you to have good thoughts and make righteous choices. It will allow you to enjoy yourself without losing the Spirit of the Lord.
While much entertainment is good, some of it can lead you away from righteous living. Offensive material is often found in web sites, concerts, movies, music, videocassettes, DVDs, books, magazines, pictures, and other media. Satan uses such entertainment to deceive you by making what is wrong and evil look normal and exciting. It can mislead you into thinking that everyone is doing things that are wrong.
Do not attend, view, or participate in entertainment that is vulgar, immoral, violent, or pornographic in any way. Do not participate in entertainment that in any way presents immorality or violent behavior as acceptable.
emphasis added.
Huh, I never noticed that before.
Posts: 2010 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
The main reason R rated movies are ill advised is the idea that it makes the spirit go away. Speaking of the Passion, my Bishop went to go see that, and that was a pretty gorey movie in and of itself. However, it was something to focus on the spirit. So for me, it's essentially just a personal choice, though I do try to stay away from heavy sexual movies mainly because of my comfort zone. I'm more comfortable watching violence than I am sexual situations, and whether that proves Tom statement or not, I don't know.
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posted
"However, it was something to focus on the spirit."
I'm not sure why a slasher movie starring Jesus is more focused on the spirit than, say, Nightmare on Elm Street.Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
I don't know what I am and my journey continues.
I do know that I can't follow those guidelines, because...it takes enjoyment out of my life, when I'd have to do away with anything that could portray immorality. I mean...I can't seem to explain it correctl.
I guess it comes down to me hating to be restricted in ways that seem overly heavy handed.
posted
The moral meaning behind the sex and violence in a film or a game is my primary determining factor in whether or not I consider the content "good" or "bad".
In Halo, for instance, you are playing a noble, self-sacrificing soldier who takes responsibility for the lives of hundreds — millions — of his fellow humans by protecting them from a genocidal alien crusade.
In Halo 2, you also take the role of one of these aliens — but again, you are a noble alien soldier who starts out with humble faith in his cause, then learns that his own leaders are exploiting and destroying his people, and fights back against them.
In multiplayer Halo, the violence is mitigated by the fact that the setting involves completely painless, reversible death — the violence is only the medium for a test of skill with few ill consequences, much like a football game.
Given that context, I have zero problem with Halo.
Also, games which give you the freedom to choose good or evil behaviors are fine with me. At that point, the game is only a depiction of life, and the responsibility to make moral choices still rests on the player. It also can provide an opportunity to see and feel the role and definition of evil — a perfectly healthy and necessary pursuit — within a fictional context.
Games that require you to do obnoxious evil things, however, such as a Grand Theft Auto game, in which you play a gangster, and your entire career is built on crime and murder ... those games make me stop and think. The good ones I still check out, and explore for an understanding of their mechanics (I am a professional, after all), but the stories I cannot truly enjoy for long. I think that reaction is a good measure of whether a game meets my moral standard.
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posted
"It also can provide an opportunity to see and feel the role and definition of evil — a perfectly healthy and necessary pursuit — within a fictional context."
Do you feel that it would be necessary to see and feel various sex roles and their definition, Geoff, if a game made explicit sex one of its options?
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posted
mack, that was a tricky way to get me to go post at madowl :smirk:.
I guess there is the Word of Wisdom approach. There are some definite "shall nots" like the coffee, tobacco, alcohol. And there are the "shalls" like lots of veggies and whole grain and little meat, that most people know about but don't beat themselves up over.
So I guess nudity is more the "shall not" and the virtuous, lovely, of good report and praiseworthy is the "shall".
Anyway, I don't want to make your life harder, Mack, I was just trying to satisfy Noemon's curiosity.
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posted
I can't stand looking at violence in movies. It sort of hurts to watch... I'd much rather see sex than violence. Yet, oddly I like the nauseatingly violent graphic novels Kabuki and Sandman... Makes no sense.
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posted
Tom, I think that sex presents a bit of a unique situation. It's hard to draw a one-to-one equivalence between violence and sex for a couple of related reasons.
First of all, if the typical human being felt the same way about violence that he does about sex (ie, a consistent desire to achieve the ultimate expression of the act, mitigated only by periodic releases or strong, conscious self-control, accompanied by a near-obsessive attraction to images of potential subjects for the act, or of the act itself) then we would all be classified as serial killers.
Second, the fact that our absorption of sexual imagery is such a key part of our sexual identity and development, particularly among adolescent males, makes it important for a person to exercise some degree of control over what images he chooses to pursue and incorporate into his own sexuality. This is because most people are expected, at some point in their lives, to enjoy sex (as is not the case with violence), and pursue it actively with another person within some kind of committed relationship, and these relationships are some of the few occasions that human beings have to inflict the most emotional harm on one another if they are so inclined.
If you accept these basic premises (that sex is a subject with which humans have a much stronger obsession with than violence, that sexual images form a major part of our sexual development, and that humans are reasonably expected to flee from violence but embrace sex during the normal course of their lives, and enter a situation in which their own sexual development affects the emotional well-being of another person), then it's easy to see why I come to the conclusion that the two are not equivalent when determining how they should be treated in media.
quote: First of all, if the typical human being felt the same way about violence that he does about sex (ie, a consistent desire to achieve the ultimate expression of the act, mitigated only by periodic releases or strong, conscious self-control, accompanied by a near-obsessive attraction to images of potential subjects for the act, or of the act itself) then we would all be classified as serial killers.
I know at least one person that does feel this way about violence. But I also admit that he is very unique.
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posted
When someone feels about violence the way normal people feel about sex, we believe there is something abnormal or wrong with that person. And I think we're right. If a violent video game affects you the same way pornography affects a typical horny person, then seek help.
For most people, a violent video game is quite similar to playing baseball, or shooting skeet. It's a test of dexterity and skill conducted by performing violent acts on inanimate objects. The point where it becomes questionable is in the story context of the violence, not in the depiction of violent imagery itself.
posted
I participate in a sport that involves swords and stabbing your opponent.
I think I see this point, that you see it as a sport, and not "stabbing" anyone. I couldn't imagine stabbing anyone IRL, even out of fear or anger. When I fence, I don't see it as stabbing, I see it as my sport, where I'm trying to outmanuver and out strategy you so I win.
Videogames, in Geoff's reasoning, work the same way. Makes sense.
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posted
"And I think we're right. If a violent video game affects you the same way pornography affects a typical horny person, then seek help."
Isn't this precisely because sexual sins are immeasurably less important than violent sins? In other words, we don't particularly care as a society if someone's tempted to masturbate regularly, but we do care if they're tempted to kill their neighbors.
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posted
The google ads are a constant source of entertainment for me - now they're for a woodworking catalog and wood chipper. Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
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Tom: I think it's because if you kill someone you take away thier choices about life, however if you masturbate it isn't removing someones existance. Murder directly removes someones choices; whereas masturbation can only indirectly cause problems in relationships.
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posted
Tom, I think from your last statement, you're definitely having trouble establishing equivalencies
Sins relating to sex may not end lives, but they can have a similar destructive effect on emotions. Rape, adultery, child molestation, family abandonment, illegitimacy, teen pregnancy — all of these consequences are closer to the "murder" end of the scale than occasional masturbation.
Either way, when we are dealing with the question of depicting sex or violence in art, the relative severity of comparable sexual or violent acts is not the only factor that should we should weigh in our decisions. In fact, it is only worth considering after we determine the relative psychological effects of sex and violence in media. We have to ask the question, "Do depictions of violence have the same effect on the observer that depictions of sex have? If not, what are the differences?" Only after you have established that the two are both equally dangerous in that regard is there a reason to start doing cost-risk analyses of the results of such depictions.
Let's imagine a hypothetical society made up of sentient sharks. Unlike humans, sharks have a reaction to depictions of violence that is comparable to — and possibly more intense than — human reactions to depictions of sex. Specifically, when a shark smells blood in the water and sees thrashing legs, it enters a frenzy of bloodlust, a thrill of desire, and feels compelled to attack.
In a society of sharks, media forms that involved blood smells and thrashing legs would naturally appear as what we might call pornography. A sentient shark who eats processed fish sticks in his home might find his meal more enjoyable if he popped in a tape of "Bleeding Humans Gone Wild" right before dinner and worked himself into a frenzy.
But if taken too far, that kind of artificial overstimulation could become addictive. It could dull a shark's instincts, make him an ineffective hunter because normal prey no longer excites him. It could cause some sharks to hunt inappropriate prey for the thrill, abandon proper nutrition, even victimize other sharks.
The analogy can't be extended forever, but you catch my point. For sharks, violent porn would be a major concern, because it sets off some deep, hard-wired instincts that involve strong emotions and psychological urges which, if abused carelessly, could lead to serious problems.
Humans have no analogous lust instinct when it comes to violence. Humans often must actively overcome their instinct to run from danger in order to fight. In other situations, humans driven by anger or greed may commit violent acts, but in those cases, it is the inciting emotion — the anger or the greed — which inspires their action. Not some instinctive, otherwise unmotivated, shark-like lust for blood. Typical humans simply don't get "turned on" by violence the way sharks do. Those few of us that do are usually damaged in some way, or otherwise depart from normal, instinctive human psychology to do so.
Our only human instinct that is analogous to a shark's bloodlust (in that it is caused by sensory input, alters our frame of mind, fills us with desire, and demands satisfaction) is our desire to mate.
Because of this, I consider sexual imagery to be a more serious issue for humans than violent imagery. Because violent imagery is not tied into the same kind of lust instinct that sexual imagery is, we are much better equipped to look at violence in its context, and appreciate its meaning within the bounds of a story. We can enjoy violence as a part of fiction and drama and high adventure, and keep it restricted to the realm of fantasy. We can base competitive challenges on violence, and think of it solely as a test of skill, and not as a simulation of murder.
It takes a lot more maturity and detachment to do the same thing with sexual imagery. It can be done, especially if the sex is depicted tastefully and deliberately to keep the focus on the story or the context or the meaning, and not just on "Hey look, BREASTS! Wow, I'm getting so turned on!" But particularly with adolescents, this can be very hard to achieve. So we are more careful with the way sex is depicted, because we know our own psychology — what excites our particular human lusts, and what does not.
[ January 27, 2005, 02:51 AM: Message edited by: A Rat Named Dog ]
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Although, to many, if a sex scene in a movie arouses lust, that's not really a bad thing, even if it causes the viewer to want to masturbate. I think that many people would view it as fairly inconsequential. When someone is aroused, they're not in the same position to hurt anybody as a shark in a frenzy would be. The same sort of self-control is involved stopping somebody from going out and committing sexual crimes that is involved when somebody's really mad and wants so badly to go out and punch somebody.
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posted
The relative harm of various sexual acts hasn't entered my argument yet, entirely because I want to show that this false equivalence to violence that people keep bringing up doesn't actually hold water before I move on to anything else.
I note that you cited an example of an angry man who just wants to punch someone. In cases like that, is the man in question feeling this rage because he saw an image of a man punching another man, and it excited an involuntary instinct for bloodlust, free of context or meaning? Or is he feeling this rage because of something else that angered him, unrelated to any depiction of violence?
I submit that a frustratingly difficult puzzle game is much more likely to incite players to violence than a boringly easy game filled with murder, blood, and guts, because the former inspires anger (one of the actual causes of human violence) while the latter doesn't really inspire anything at all.
Once we have established that images of sex and violence are not equivalent in their effects on the human psyche, then we can address the potential consequences of inundating a human society with sexual imagery. Though I'll say this — I am less concerned that it will lead to rape or other violent crimes, and much less concerned that it will lead to [gasp] masturbation, and more concerned that it will, if unchecked, promote unhealthy attitudes toward sex and relationships that will contribute to broken homes, illegitimate children, widespread abortion, sexually active young teenagers, etc. It is general, subtle social ills that concern me — not a sexual version of that fantasy image promoted by video game opponents, of a player setting down his controller and picking up a gun because his game magically inspired him to commit a crime.
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quote:I want to show that this false equivalence to violence that people keep bringing up doesn't actually hold water before I move on to anything else.
I don't see why killing has to be the necessary result of viewing violence any more than rape is the necessary result of violence. People get off on cutting themselves. They may smack their spouse or kids around just a bit. And those kids may harbor a desperate wish to kill the abusive parents over the years.
But to confess my own sins, I struggle with compulsive spending and indebtedness, which the church also directly counsels against. That may seem irrelevant, but the love of money is apparently the root of all evil. As we were discussing a week or two ago, evil may not even exist. Since money doesn't really exist, to love it may actually be creating the perfect environment for evil. It is investing your soul into a void.
P.S. I also thing debt demonstrates the way sins really affect us. You start out thinking this indulgence is giving you greater freedom, but with the $#!t hits the fan, you find you're actually in bondage.
posted
It’s funny Geoff, because I see the relative harms of sex and violence in exactly the opposite way.
quote: of a player setting down his controller and picking up a gun because his game magically inspired him to commit a crime
I’m not at all worried about such an event. What does worry me about violence in movies and video games is much more subtle. What if they encourage people to be more likely to look to violence as a solution to problems? What if even “good guy” games that let the user play a hero make the player more likely to think of heroes as people with guns and less likely to see people who excel at mediation and diplomacy as heroic?
What if they encourage, not crime, but just a generally more hostile attitude toward others? Making someone more likely to cut another person off in traffic, or less likely to smile at a stranger?
Sexual arousal is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s a very good thing. And (contrary to what teenage boys have tried to claim for hundreds of years) unfulfilled arousal causes no permanent harm. Hostility is not a good thing. While I’m not a fan of gratuitous sex scenes, I don’t have a problem with scenes that are integral to the story just because they’re arousing. I’d much rather see people stimulated by affection than by hostility.
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posted
I guess what occurs to me at this point is that Tom doesn't struggle with violent or sexual imaginings to the degree that others do. (I haven't been able to get Kirsten Dunst off my mind )
Not everyone is an alcoholic. Some can imbibe in a controlled and sane way. Some can't. I guess I'd say I have trouble with sex and violence. Geoff apparently only has a problem with sex. Tom has a problem with neither. There is a funny old saying that the church is a hospital for sinners and not a museum of saints.
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posted
Hmm...I try not to watch R-rated movies, for either sex or violence, but I admit I do sometimes. Violence isn't a problem because I hate it anyway - I can't and don't watch it. I don't like seeing it, and I don't like how it makes me feel.
Language is another thing that I just hate hearing. I turned off Donnie Darko 20 minutes into it because the marginally entertaining storyline wasn't worth the crap I was being forced to endure to get to it.
Sex falls into the category of things I think I should turn away from, not that I necessarily want to.
However, Taal says none of the above bother him, and I believe him.
[ January 27, 2005, 01:04 PM: Message edited by: Lady Jane ]
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posted
Um. . . what exactly were the studies defining as 'violent' that 60% of the programs viewed contained it? Pratfalls?
:shrug:
Methodology aside-- after all, anyone can debate a study-- the point that I take away from this is that watching gratuitous or trivialized violence, either in a video game or on the silver screen, drives away the Spirit.
quote:I’m not at all worried about such an event. What does worry me about violence in movies and video games is much more subtle. What if they encourage people to be more likely to look to violence as a solution to problems?
There is another issue at play here, too. If, for some reason, a person does develop an unhealthy attitude toward violence, there is a safety net to catch him. It's called the police. Most people rein in their unhealthy violent tendencies because acting them out is against the law.
We don't have laws or police to govern any but the most extreme violent or exploitative sexual behaviors. And we shouldn't, there is a lot that should be left up to the individual or to the unenforced culture that an individual subscribes to. But that means that, especially as we strip away from our culture every sexual more and standard for fear of making anyone feel marinalized, once someone does develop an unhealthy attitude toward sexuality, there is very little available to help them recognize their problems and correct them.
In any case, I think I've established pretty well the fact that whatever psychological impact you think violent images might have on humans (and I reserve the right to disagree with you here), the impact of sexual imagery will be much stronger because of the way our brains are wired to interpret sexual images.
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posted
I don’t actually think you’ve established it at all. You’ve thrown out a lot of unsupported hypotheses. Do you have any proof that any of it is more than "hey this sounds logical to me"?
I also don’t think that we stop unhealthy attitudes toward violence until they also reach “extreme or exploitative” levels. There is a lot of what I consider undesirably hostile behavior that isn’t crime.
I think that the objections to both violence and sex come down to what memes we choose to promote. I find the promotion of the idea that violence is heroic much more disturbing than the promotion of the idea that sex is fun. You obviously disagree.
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posted
Humans react strongly to sexual imagery because of a very simple stimulus-response system in the brain. We see an image, and it triggers a physical response that involves a desire for release. We achieve release, and it causes a euphoria. We enjoy the euphoria and seek out more imagery to start the cycle over again.
Or, minus the release, we might simply enjoy the thrill of that unfulfilled desire and the hormones pumping through our system, in very much the way we might enjoy a drug.
What similar effect does violence have on a human? Well, I've established that blood, killing, and murder don't invoke a hunter's bloodlust response like that we see in sharks. So what is it that we're enjoying?
When humans face danger, instead of being filled with hunger or desire, we are filled with a thrill of fear, energy, and a desire to MOVE. We call it an adrenaline rush, and it is what allowed our ancestors to perform beyond their normal abilities when fleeing a predator or defending their young. The payoff for this isn't anything like sexual release, but is rather the thrill of relief at having survived, and having overcome a threat that could have killed you.
There are two kinds of violent imagery that a human can experience, with different reactions — static violence and kinetic violence. (I coined these terms in college while I was studying and writing about the effects of film violence, but it applies equally well to all media.)
Static violence involves images of sadism, flayed bodies, blood spatters, spasming corpses ... the stuff that would turn on a shark. This kind of imagery fills humans with revulsion, though sometimes we conquer that revulsion with a desire to appear brave, or with a curious fascination with the macabre. Humans who have a shark-like desire to kill might get some strange satisfaction from these images, but most humans react with fear, disgust, or with a defense mechanism against fear and disgust.
Kinetic violence is what you see in The Matrix, and in most video games. Instead of depending on images of gore and death, it depends mostly on suspense and danger. There are humans in jeopardy who MIGHT be killed, and they have to fight to survive. Again and again, the characters are threatened with violence, and either respond with violence, barely survive by hiding, or dramatically escape, all of which evoke instinctive reactions based on our ancestors' survivial strategy.
But the reaction that this kind of violence causes in humans is not a desire to kill or hurt things. It doesn't make us angry or hostile. Instead, what it causes is an adrenaline rush. A human emerging from an action movie or a thrilling video gaming experience isn't angry or lusting for blood. He is exhausted, spent, or (just as often) itching for some excitement. He is likely to drive fast, jump around with nervous energy, and run around screaming. But the only way he's going to hurt someone is by accident.
Sometimes I think that people who oppose violent imagery in movies and games may be missing some key element of human psychology. Or perhaps they have simply never watched an action movie or played a video game, to be so oblivious to the actual impact of such media on a human being.
Now, back to static violence. There are some games that use static violence in disturbing ways, Manhunt and Resident Evil most prominently among them. While Resident Evil uses it mostly to intensify the adrenaline rush by evoking the natural human fear of death (which is quite justifiable in my opinion), Manhunt really does revel in the art of murder. These games have earned their M ratings, and they should be enforced.
Halo is entirely about kinetic violence, and from this perspective, I can't see any reason to oppose it. It is about the thrill of danger, not the lust to kill, and has a completely different psychological impact from Manhunt.
quote:I don’t actually think you’ve established it at all. You’ve thrown out a lot of unsupported hypotheses. Do you have any proof that any of it is more than "hey this sounds logical to me"?
I was using arguments that seemed logical to me, yes. And it is scientifically sound to assert that humans do not share a shark's instinctive bloodlust. I mean, we just don't.
I'm not sure what else you want me to do. I'm not a research scientist. I can't go out and conduct a study for you. All I can do is appeal to logic, just as you do. Do my assertions need to fit a higher standard than yours?
quote:I find the promotion of the idea that violence is heroic much more disturbing than the promotion of the idea that sex is fun. You obviously disagree.
I disagree with your mischaracterization of the issue, yes. "Violence is heroic" is not a true statement at all, in my view, any more than "Sex is fun" is actually a true statement in yours. Obviously, many instances of sex are not fun for all parties involved, and I have already listed several such examples. Similarly, many instances of violence in the real world have little to do with heroism.
What I disagree with is your lumping of all violence into a single category, and attempting to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Violence has meaning and context, just the way sex does. You wouldn't appreciate it if I rejected all images of sex because I found Hentai tentacle-rape fantasies disturbing, would you? Similarly, I think it is silly to reject all images of violence just because there are disturbing ones out there.
So I'm not saying that violence, by its nature, is heroic. That would be a ridiculous statement. I AM saying, though, that not all images of violence are unhealthy, that many are actually good for people to watch and learn from, and that many can be used for harmless thrill and excitement without engendering violent tendencies in the consumer.
quote: There is another issue at play here, too. If, for some reason, a person does develop an unhealthy attitude toward violence, there is a safety net to catch him. It's called the police.
From the perspective of the individual, I wouldn't call it a safety net. Quite the opposite, in fact.
quote: Most people rein in their unhealthy violent tendencies because acting them out is against the law.
I think that's true for some people, but I think a lot of them rein them in because they know they're wrong.
quote: We don't have laws or police to govern any but the most extreme violent or exploitative sexual behaviors.
Depending on locale, we have laws that govern an extremely large variety of sexual behaviors, from what people can wear, to who they can sleep with, to whom they can live with, to whom they can marry.
quote: And we shouldn't, there is a lot that should be left up to the individual or to the unenforced culture that an individual subscribes to. But that means that, especially as we strip away from our culture every sexual more and standard for fear of making anyone feel marinalized, once someone does develop an unhealthy attitude toward sexuality, there is very little available to help them recognize their problems and correct them.
Our 'culture' as represented by the moral elites in power and the laws they pass and how they enforce them is not trending away from 'stripping away every sexual more and standard'. In case you don't keep up with current events, it's quite the opposite. Even the great unwashed are behaving in a way that you would call more moral.
Your belief that 'we strip away from our culture every sexual more and standard for fear of making anyone feel marinalized' is without support, as far as I know.
As to when 'someone does develop an unhealthy attitude toward sexuality, there is very little available to help them recognize their problems and correct them.', this is incorrect. There are any number of Christian/Muslim/Secular sources and people out there that would be more than happy to help with any mental problems someone might have regarding their sexuality. Do a google for 'porn recovery' some time and you'll see what I mean.
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Sorry.
