The Anglo Saxon world has been prone to outbreaks of Puritanism. We are now suffering through a severe outbreak, particularly affecting the English speaking world. What the French call "Puritanism a la Americaine" is particularly odious in the US and UK at this time.
Author Lionel Shriver recently penned
this rather long but poignant Op Ed piece. I'm entirely in agreement on every point she makes.
I have been attuned to this for a long time, as my father many, many years ago predicted this current outbreak, and called it the "New Puritanism." I'm astonished at how accurate his predictions were.
This is something I really feel obligated to push back against and do. I can spot the purveyors of this new dreadful ideology and go out of my way to give offence to them. When I hear in drawing of breath, I know my arrow has hits its mark.
There are few articles I consider absolute mandatory reading, but the one I site is currently top of that category.
There is certainly a difference between French and English sensibilities. I can give an excellent example, based in North America and on North American media no less.
Canada has two official languages, French and English. The province of Quebec has a special place in the national space, right down to a legal system partly based on the French Civil Law instead of the English-majority and Federal Canadian system based on British Common Law. The concept is summed up by the phrase "Two Solitudes" which describes two ways of governing society.*
Now all that boring stuff brings us to the point, which is the rating systems for videos, movies, television and so on.
I won't bother with a laundry list, but basically in Quebec they have their own movie/tv etc rating system (it applies to any French-language content, so a movie with both English and French language audio available can have two very different ratings, and the Quebec rating would apply even if, for example, you are watching over-the-air content on a French language station in English Canada).
Under the Quebec/French language rating system, sexual content and crude language is more or less allowed in over-13 age ratings but violence will definitely get you an adult (18+) rating; while in English Canada it's more similar to US ratings, with violence allowed at 14+ and sexual content limited to adult 18+ ratings and coarse language allowed in a more liberal way (brief coarse language will only get you a 14+ if it's consistent with the story, while constant F-bombs might get you an 18+).
Broadly speaking things are a bit less Puritain in Canada (you can use the F-word, or any word for that matter, on over-the-air TV after 10 PM, for example, and news is not censored at all with regard to language at any time of day) but the different attitude to violent content and sexual content is striking.
Clearly if some do-gooder suggests to you that there exists a clear argument for one or against the other they are mistaken, as there is not more sexual crime in Quebec, nor less violent crime in Quebec compared to the rest of English-speaking Canada. And as a rule (stereotype warning) Canadians don't have a reputation for being impolite just because you can swear on a TV show and everyone without cable or the internet can view it.
I remember once, visiting in Arkansas and hunting (offends some people) we came across a few old grave sites. The concrete toumbstones often had the initials 'C.S.A' on them (Confederate States Army). But some had been defaced, with those letters clearly chiseled out. The local we were with at the time simply said "It offends some people". But history should not be whitewashed, it is what it is. Lessons to be learned, for sure, and not taking those lessons is the real crime, but defacing a grave stone is, in my opinion, taking it too far.
I'm Irish ancestry. The present-day Capital of the Irish Republic is Dublin. That city was founded by Vikings as a slave market about a thousand years ago,, where captured Irish were sold to the highest, typically Viking, bidder, or if lucky, were ransomed off to the family if they were wealthy enough (and some were Feudal Kings, and still ended up in Scandinavia with an iron collar on their necks, so that part wasn't exactly trivial). Should we raze Dublin and start over, or just remember what happened there? I say the latter.
* After the defeat of the French army at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, the French were offered unprecedented terms of surrender. They were allowed to keep their Catholic religion (conquering nations till then always demanded the assimilation of the victor's religion, in this case would have been to the Protestant Church of England) and their legal system, if they agree to live peacefully within a greater national society. The deal had to be approved by Queen Victoria, who graciously agreed, and so did the French.
That would form the basis of what would later become Canada, whom also were able to secure another unprecedented concession from the British Crown, that of self-government without the intervention of the Queen (Victoria again) or the British Parliament. So this stuff goes way back and is an important aspect of how Canada became to be.
I'm pretty confident that all that didn't foresee the adoption of two different movie and tv rating systems, but that's how these things work over time.
