John Podhoretz has answered a question that has baffled me for a long time. Podhoretz was reviewing a movie about the film rating system. The film is a piece of Lefty nonsense but Podhoretz dealt with the question of why sex is rated so negatively while violence isn’t. The Hollywood rating board is not out of step with America, it is made up of mostly ordinary people.
I have, for a long time, looked at non-Puritan Japan where sex and violence co-exist in manga for the answer. The sex and violence in Japanese manga has always been more extreme than anything Americans can conceive. Japanese kids read manga and so do proper ladies sitting in the lobby of a bank.
Now I understand manga versus filmed action. Quentin Tarantino used cartoon footage in Kill Bill that seemed to pass the censors even in America where Tarantino's cartoon sex and violence were way over the top.
Japan doesn’t hold the answer to my question.
Podhoretz explains it: we all know the violence in the movies is fake. That is not real blood, that is not a real brain on the floor. On the other hand, sex is real on screen. The actors are really doing it. It doesn’t matter if they have cellophane between their lips. It doesn’t matter if they actually dislike each other. The simulation is either real or might as well be.
Puritanism is the rule: nobody anywhere should be enjoying themselves. That explains why we have negative ratings for sex which is clearly real before our eyes on screen but don't have it for violence which we know is fake.