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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

Why is MTV not censored like everything else on TV?

87 replies

AlisonDubois · 13/08/2010 20:31

My DH watching(drooling) over MTV about 6ish this evening.
DS(8) and DH(3) come downstairs and start watching. Then they both start dancing and singing 'This sex is on fire'. Feel a bit wrong about this but DH just laughs.
Then a song I've never even heard before comes on...some disco pop thing. OMG, the women on it might as well be completely f*ing naked. There they are gyrating and thrusting...singing about getting hot and dirty on the dancefloor.
I just sat like a goldfish amazed. DH didn't bat an eyelid.
This shit should not be on TV until after 9pm. Why is it not censored FFS?
AIBU?

OP posts:
Alouiseg · 14/08/2010 19:54

I just actually loathe any form of censorship tbh.

The world is a place that children grow up and fit into it's not going to work if it's designed to revolve around children.

MTV don't make the videos they just show them, why not take it up with the Artists, the producers, the dancers themselves?

ElusiveMoose · 14/08/2010 20:03

Hmm. This one seems quite easy to me - you are being both reasonable and unreasonable.

Reasonable because yes, this stuff is pretty vile, and yes, it should be censored pre-watershed.

Unreasonable, because there's no way either you or DH should be allowing your kids to watch it (nor should your DH be allowing your kids to see that he has any interest in 'drooling over it', either, frankly).

PosieParker · 14/08/2010 20:09

Censorship is not for the children whose parents give a shit and monitor what they watch it's for the thousands of parents who don't give it a second thought., Ofwatch have a duty of care to all of their viewers surely.

TakeLovingChances · 14/08/2010 20:28

lemonysweet it's not that I didn't get the subtle POV of the Eminem and Rihanna song, but IMO many teenagers wouldn't get it. It's great that your 13 year old is sharp enough to get it, but I doubt that everyone that age would.

Also, it's hardly the kind of ditty that people would want to sing along with. Lyrics about "huffing paint" and setting fire to a girlfriends house. Charming it ain't.

AlisonDubois · 14/08/2010 21:55

It's been years since I watched any music channel so was slightly taken aback to say the least when it was on yesterday.
I acknowledge that not all music is aimed at children, but a hell of a lot is. The artists such as Girls Aloud know damn well that their main audience are young girls who will emulate them.
Lady Ga Ga and Katy Perry may be 'tongue in cheek' but they are definitely not portraying strong women. A strong woman would not feel the need to cavort around in her undies to grab attention in order to sell something.

I was particularly dissapointed in Beyonce, who I wrongly thought was the epitome of a strong woman ..wrong again.
Even the male artists seem to think their music cannot sell itself...it needs women gyrating in bikinis again.
I want my DC's to enjoy music, not have to censor everything they listen to on daytime radio. My DS1 thinks its perfectly okay to go around singing 'I'm a bloody big mess inside' because he hears it on the radio.

OP posts:
pinkteddy · 14/08/2010 22:12

Agree with you Chandellina. Funny enough was talking about this with friends yesterday. I had been watching the top 20 videos on TMF (free view channel) the other day (first time in years, I had seen a pop video). There were only about 2 videos that I would consider acceptable for a child to watch. I was really shocked. I was also very sad that women in the music industry feel they need to strip off/gyrate/simulate sex to sell their records.

Puddingtoast · 14/08/2010 22:12

it's filth. i'm cancelling my 'added extras' channels on sky, so no more music channels full stop. I can hear the music on the radio, and if i really want to see the videos i can see them online.

Kids are being sexualized so young; is this what women's lib went through for? Is this being liberated? You have to get naked to get noticed, fabulous. We've come a long way ladies. Bah.

Puddingtoast · 14/08/2010 22:14

and whats with all the lipstick lesbians? More pandering to male fantasies. I swear in every video there is at least one girl-on-girl image, and Te Amo by Rihanna is full on soft porn IMO.

AlisonDubois · 14/08/2010 22:31

I actually asked my Dh about that song. Thought it was about lesbians but DH not sure.
First I thought it was about a child singing to a woman ie mother figure. Realised when I saw vidoe...it wasn't.

OP posts:
proudnsad · 15/08/2010 07:03

It's the videos I object to rather than the songs. I agree with those saying we live in the modern world and have to embrace it. We listen to Kiss and like R&B, dance stuff etc at home as dh and I like it and the kids love to dance around.
The lyrics go straight over dc's heads at their young age. They can't process or even hear what they don't understand.
Remember when you watched Grease as a child and missed all the swearing and sexual references completely? You only notice them as a teenager.
It's the pornographic videos where near-naked women are sexually subservient to alpha males that is so disturbing.
Even my raving tomboy of a dd gyrates to music in a worrying way when they're dancing about - and fgs we have never put MTV or similar on so it's just snatched videos she's seen here and there (I don't actually know where).

tokyonambu · 15/08/2010 07:56

"But what about MTV - do they have a carte blanche, free for all, no holds barred, anything goes, no censorship and no boundaries on what they transmit - whatsoever??"

No, they don't.

However, you're not asking for censorship on the basis of explicit violence and sex. And by explicit, I mean "body parts that would get you arrested if you flashed them in M&S" and "violence that would get a 15 certificate". The former is fairly objective, the latter there's a fairly good understanding of (although certification debacles like Dark Knight show it's not quite clear-cut).

No, you're asking for censorship on the ideological content of the video. And you're asking for it on a three-minute by three-minute basis. The chances of getting any two people to agree on the criteria are close to zero. I don't allow shit like Eastenders in the house, because I think it has a low moral tone and shouldn't be broadcast pre-watershed, but that's my problem: I'm clearly in a minority. Others object to rap videos that demean women, to the satanism in Harry Potter or the fact that those nice David Attenborough documentaries talk about evolution. In all those cases, it's the parents' responsibility to enforce their mores, because it's simply not possible to get agreement on the classification of ideological content.

Film (and by extension TV and games) classification relies on an "exchange rate" between sex, violence and bad language which many disagree with (sweet romance Le Concert gets a 15 because one subtitle briefly includes the word motherfucker; had it contained instead a graphic scene of violence it would have got a 12).

Once you're outside a ticklist of immediate issues, there are a handful of "difficult issues" which will get you a certification issue, but Juno was (rightly) certified PG although a generation ago it would have got a AA or more, because abortion isn't as incendiary as it was. But although a PG, I suspect it won't get shown pre-watershed in the UK (I'd like to be proved wrong). I suspect many parents find that PG troubling: that's why there's the parents' BBFC extended classification information.

If people aren't aware that MTV show salacious videos, they must be living in the attic like Miss Haversham. If they think that there's any way to provide a monotonic scale of "badness" for pop videos and then assign times of day to each rating, they are sadly mistaken. If they don't think some of the content is suitable for their children, they have only one option. It's not as if I'm saying "don't watch the improving programmes on CBBC because they sometimes show porn", I'm saying "don't watch the mindless shit on MTV because there's other, worse, mindless shit on it as well". No one is going to be harmed, deprived or otherwise impacted by not watching MTV, and they might even read a book in the time freed up.

Violet5 · 15/08/2010 08:19

YANBU...and besides anything else i never bother watching it anymore as it's all the same mind decaying guff.
Every video is just about the same, women, bikini's, 'bling', yatchs, nightclubs, cars, boobs, bums and topless men. Different people ofcourse but much of a sameness. I only need to have watched one video to have seen them ALL. Yawn.
My kids love music but none of them have any desire to watch the music channels, my 11 year old daughter rolls her eyes when she see's a bit of one and turns over. Which i'm very Grin about as at least she's never going to think she has to look a 'certain' way Smile

If people want to watch that stuff then fine ,personal choice, but i do think a lot of its inapropriate before 9pm and i can't defend it personally as i think it's both very sad and boring.

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