| Comment | re #95: Hmm, it must have been too long since I saw 'Life of Brian'; I don't even remember anything risqué. (-:
In the US, (old, third-rate) movies shown on broadcast TV are usually G or PG and are generally shortened to fit the time available anyway. Anything non-PG is edited, with bad words bleeped out or redubbed, and nude scenes either cut or blurred. Full nudity and explicit sex aren't shown at all on broadcast TV, at any hour -- and for the most part, neither are commercially successful movies.
These days, over 90% of the viewing audience now subscribes to cable or satellite TV. I don't have cable or want it, but I believe (better-quality, recent) movies are typically shown uncut and unedited on premium channels, and some subscription channels do show pornography. So I would assume that parents who have cable simply have to set it up from the start with certain channels blocked, or passcodes or something. Apparently there are also services you can buy or request, like a 'V-chip' (whatever that is), that will do it to some degree automatically.
That is, parents who are educated and responsible and tech-savvy, and care enough and have time and energy enough, to monitor what their children watch. Since there are many parents who don't fall in those categories, you could probably say that the ascendancy of subscription media and the resulting decline in quality broadcast television, both of which are directly attributable to deregulation by the FCC and cutbacks in funding for public broadcasting since the 1980s, in the name of 'free-market competition,' have made the viewing environment much less child-friendly, more use-at-your-own-risk.
Though still probably not as blatant as in Germany, where apparently there's hard-core porn at all hours? That would bother me too, if I were a parent, not because sex or nudity is bad or shameful per se, but because pornography is based on false ideas about sex (namely, male fantasies) that I would not want children to use as a source of education.
Now that video is beginning to migrate to wireless devices, I would imagine the same holds true to an even greater extent for tablet computers and the like. There could be a lot of advantages for children, like interactive books and educational apps, but I would hope parents would install very good firewall and content-blocking software, and go over the settings, before handing over any video-enabled device.
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