Rod Dreher posts a note from a friend who notices that network TV has a habit of mixing sex with murder:
Why can’t they show a good-looking woman without showing her in a pool of blood 30 seconds later, then cyanotic on the autopsy table with her heart and lungs being weighed? Are that many people aroused by dead girls?
Rod surmises it’s the old “loose woman gets what she deserves” syndrome, which is one of Hollywood’s weirder memes, especially since it goes against the industry’s libertine ethic.
But I want to go back to his friend’s question because it does perplex. Why is it okay to display gaping and graphic wounds—bloody impalements or even explicit autopsies—or even hearts and lungs and brains being excised from a corpse, but it’s not okay to show certain sexual organs? Not that I’m saying that it should be okay for either, but what is the reasoning behind the double standard?
Perhaps desensitization of one is a preparation for the other.
