I’m very much in favour of content warnings, but I don’t think that a handful of F-bombs in a written-for-adults work are sufficient reason to require one.
As with Felix, this fear of profanity isn’t an issue in Portugal, so it always strikes me as a bit silly.
I wonder if the literary world were to gain something if every time a book had ‘fuck’ in it, a “Parental Guidance” (or similar) sticker were to be on the cover. There are even some books with strong profanity in the title, and they’re not, by any standard, garbage or rude fiction. Of the top of my head: O Amor É Fodido (Love is Fucked Up) by Miguel Esteves Cardoso, and Memorias de Mis Putas Tristes (Memories of My Melancholy Whores) by Gabriel Garcia Marques (I don’t think ‘whore’ has the same strength in English as ‘puta’ has in both Spanish and Portuguese - ‘puta’ is one of the strongest curse words in these languages). These are two strong pieces of literature by too strong writers (one of them a Nobelium), both about love, sex, humanity, fear, aging, and relationships.
Also, it actually bothers me that this is an issue within a game that will feature strong gore and violence. There isn’t a problem in depicting a zombie riping someone’s head, but there is a problem if the victim cries ‘fuck’ at the first bite?
Finally, I don’t bite the ‘Is there a point for the word to show up in the game, or is it just gratuitous?’ argument. Yes, there is a point: the same point as all the other words the author chose to build his phrase. Sometimes it won’t fit a given phrase or a given mood? No it wont, but that’s pretty much the same with ‘happiness’ or ‘cheese’ - sometimes phrases are just not well built, and that’s just not fuck-related.
People use these words in their lives, so it is only natural that something that addresses those lives sometimes features those words.
To this day, many aspects of American culture lie under a shadow cast by the fact that the very first European colonization on these shores was by the Puritans, who came here for the express purpose of founding a society in which they were “free” to abolish freedom. The prohibition of the 1920s, the various modern prohibitions (marijuana, tobacco and – if the prohibitionists get their way --meat) and censorship of all forms of art, which has traditionally been more widespread here than in many parts of the world, are all aspects of this.
Robert Rothman
Preach it, brother.
Oh, for fuck’s sake. These are three completely different things. Marijuana is illegal, tobacco is legal but in some jurisdictions can’t be smoked in places where it causes a health hazard for third parties, and meat isn’t illegal in a single goddamn jurisdiction.
Leandro is of course right about the attitude toward swearing and violence – I believe The King’s Speech received an R rating for a single utterance of the word “fuck,” whereas the Dark Knight was full of violence and torture and was PG-13. The disparity in attitudes toward sex and violence is the same way (I read an essay somewhere about how US televisions, showing the Godfather, didn’t cut a second of the incredibly bloody killing of
Sonny
but censored the brief nudity in
Michael’s
wedding scene, and on European TV it’s the other way around.)
My wife tells a story about her friend’s mom. She was at her house, watching the movie “Body Parts” on TV. It’s a horror flick about a guy who gets a hand-transplant from a dead serial killer and the killer’s soul takes him over. Pretty nasty stuff. But there was a brief moment of respite, where the hero and his girl share a moment of intimacy. If I’m not mistaken, they’re completely clothed, just kissing. My wife remembers thinking what a relief it was from all the disturbing violence. But the mom interrupted the scene, saying “How can you kids watch this trash?” and changed the channel. 
They won’t get their way, of course. But I know for a fact that there are people who wish that slaughtering an animal would be classified as an act of murder. And I absolutely agree that this kind of attitude could only have become a cultural factor in America, and the people promoting it are a kind of modern Puritan.
He does let out quite a string of profanities (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJvGE7Vvd4M) but you’re right in that if they had replaced that scene with him beating someone to death the movie would’ve gotten a lower rating.
I saw King’s Speech on a plane (on an American airline) and they had censored that scene by removing all the swear words. Not bleeping them or even muting the sound completely, just removing the individual words. It was quite surreal when you could still hear his footsteps as he walks across the room, mouth moving but no words coming out. (Fits the movie’s theme, in a way.)
I’ve decided not to distract the player with a warning in the banner, but there will be one in the ‘about’ message.
They’ve been doing that with songs on the radio. I first heard it with Nine Inch Nails’ “closer,” but more recently they’ve been doing it with Mumford & Sons’ “Little Lion Man.” They leave in just enough of the word that you can’t quite tell it’s been removed - it’s kind of a weird experience.
Throw my vote in with this point of view. If some aspect of the content is likely to negatively influence someone’s experience of the story, by all means let them know in advance (especially if it is likely to put a serious damper on their day), though I doubt that casual profanity is going to be that for most people.
Vegetarianism is a culturally American phenomenon? I tend to associate it with non-Western religions, and the kinds of hippies and yuppies that have pretty much none of the “puritan”-associated restrictions against intoxicants or sex (not that “Puritan” meant what most people think it means, either).
No, not vegetarianism. Of course there are strong Buddhist and Hindu traditions of that. But religious vegetarians, to my knowledge, don’t believe in judging other people based on what they eat, or attempting to control what they eat.
The American phenomenon is a form of militant vegan activism. Thanks to PETA and its allies, telling other people what to eat has become almost mainstream. Tracing the story back further we can see the influence of Sylvester Graham and John Harvey Kellogg, who are quite solidly grounded in American Puritanism.
That’s an interesting point about hippies. Michael Pollan talks about how hippies influenced American ideas about food. They were some of the first to oppose industrialized food and support the organic movement. They acquired some of their ideas about food from Eastern religions, and you’re right - in most ways they were very un-Puritan. But as the “whole foods” movement has grown and splintered, I think the ideas of vegetarianism and veganism have been divorced from the hippie ethic and become quite mainstream. Heck, even Bill Clinton is doing it now… and he never inhaled!
In a feeble attempt to return to the main topic, I’ll note that both Graham and Kellogg were vocal opponents of masturbation.
My distinct impression is that a very substantial majority of Swedish citizens would think it out of the question to legalize marijuana; smoking is not allowed on working premises, sites, or in offices (though the acceptance for this is lower – and did not exist at all twenty years ago); and I know several people who finds raising animals for slaughter immoral (at least under any conditions that would make it economically worthwhile) – though this last is certainly explained by the disproportionate amount of philosophers among my acquaintances.
Still, I would be surprised to meet the kind of vehement responses to swearing in Sweden that I sometimes see on English speaking internet fora etc.
By the way – the phenomenology of the reaction interests me. Personally, I often find inordinate swearing somewhat aesthetically displeasing (and swearing in order to offend just for the fun of offending ethically doubtful); but the vehement reactions of people that really take offense by profanity seems to be something else entirely. My best hypothesis is that it’s not a matter of principled moral indignation but of feeling painfully insulted by it. Can it be?
This is the most ridiculous thing to me. Anyone over the age of three knows what the missing word was, so what’s the point?
Okay, this is getting weirder and weirder. As an example of how the vegan movement mirrors the temperance movement, I googled “lips that touch meat.” The first result I got was an article written by a guy I know from work!
Oh I’m such a Language Log fan!
Total conversation derail: as a supertaster, I do actually refuse to kiss anyone who’s been drinking (just until the taste fades, of course). But it’s certainly not a morality thing.
I’ll go with the derail: I once got sick after kissing my wife - it turned out she had eaten dairy! I’m not allergic, but I’m very, very sensitive.
First I dont favor profanity for shock value, like swearing for the sake of swearing. But if you are depicting characters and you want to set a certain mood that is set by a character who swears habitually, I would say that you shouldn’t let ideas get in the way of expressing your story.
That said, I’d like to point out that in science fiction, sometimes they throw in made up words to take the place of swear words. That can be fun.
But if, for example, I was depicting a game sort of like the tv show Mad Men, which features advertising executives with questionable values in the 1960s, that might be an ideal venue to throw in the occasional f or w word.
Reading this thread, I’ve been thinking about how I react to these words. I don’t use swear words myself (well, if you count the word “shit”, sure, but I don’t use it as a swear word, and I never use “stronger” language when I speak Swedish), and most people around me rarely use them. The words have simply never been a part of my vocabulary. When I hurt my toes I scream very loudly, but without words.
When I think of those words, I get an emotional reaction. I think of situations like the time I was threatened by a drug addict when I was working in a store. It’s words from a different culture - a different world. I suppose that’s what scares people the most.
Then there are of course the rational arguments against swearing - just think about what the words mean. In Swedish, most of these words have religious origins, and I have no interest in calling for the devil.
I also note that I don’t get an emotional reaction when I watch an American movie. I’m so used to hearing people saying fuck this and fuck that in movies that I barely notice it. (I don’t even mind Gordon Ramsey!) That’s probably another reason why people are protesting against it. The more a word is used, the more accepted and normal it becomes, so I can see why someone who don’t want it to be normal or accepted would object.
That was a lot of words… do I have a point? I don’t really know, I just found it interesting to think about. Do I have an opinion? Not really. I certainly can live without these words, and I believe that most uses in media would have been better without. Obvious counterexample being The King’s Speech, of course, and I agree that the American ratings systems seem strange to an outsider. I fear my thought won’t get clearer than this, so it’s time to press the “Submit” button.
My point was that the Puritan tradition is consistent with the mindset that it is appropriate to ban things which other people might find pleasurable because the one seeking to do the banning determines them to be morally offensive (or, more often, that the one seeking to do the banning finds them to be morally offensive precisely because other people might find them pleasurable). That is the case regardless of whether the specific banned behavior was banned by the actual Puritans.
Robert Rothman