At 18, we have the liberty to vote, smoke, join the army, and attend college out of state or even the country.
And regardless of these liberties, I am still subject to my teacher fast forwarding through a masturbation scene in a movie.
I’m a legal adult, but I can’t see an allusion to a man touching himself?
Censorship of sexuality and profanity was expected in elementary, sensical in middle school, comical but tolerable in high school, but in college? It’s almost insulting.
“World changers shaped here” is the SMU motto . How can I begin to shape the world if I’m given a sheltered view of it?
There were two instances this week at school in which the morality of viewing nudity, sexuality, and vulgarity was questioned. In one instance I was treated like an adult, and in another, like a child.
In Shakespeare class we watched three renditions of a certain act in “ The Merchant of Venice”. In the Al Pacino version, he chose to portray one scene within a brothel. Women in the background were scantily clad and a man in the foreground was briefly show nestling against a woman’s breast. Before viewing the scene, my professor mentioned that there would be nudity in the scene, and we could interpret for ourselves whether the nudity enhanced or detracted from the scene. And that was all that was said.
In English class, we watched the film adaptation of the Broadway show “Hedwig and the Angry Inch”, in which the protagonist is a transvestite suffering from a failed sex change surgery. Hedwig is fairly promiscuous, and in one scene it is alluded that she “assists” a teen with masturbation after she walks in on him in the bathroom. Was this scene necessarily essential to furthering the plot? No, but it would have furthered understanding of Hedwig’s character and her brazenness about her sexuality if my teacher had allowed us to view this scene.
Context is everything, and my English teacher neglected this truth. In the case of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, overt sexuality is not extraneous, but necessary. Hedwig’s primary tribulation is self identity, and with that comes visual accounts of her expression of her sexuality.
I’m not asking to see porn in class. But should I be allowed to see nudity in a film if it's in an academic context?
As an adult, yes. I should.
