Nor will you be able to claim that sex, especially the sort of sex lurid enough to build TV ratings, is "healthy and typically harms no one." We all know the risks of sex, and that riskier sex makes better TV. Despite any talk of Americans freaking out, our airwaves are loaded with everything short of full nudity, and even that is available on the paid TV channels that so many Americans receive. So let's not pretend that present-day America is Puritan New England.
1. The "risks of sex" are overstated. And they are getting lower every year as the prevalence of STDs gets lower, and lower, and lower.
Typically, as in in the majority of cases, sex indeed hurts no one. ( I mean, of course, in the health sense. If your wife leaves you, or you're left upset by something you did, that's certainly not something the government should protect you from.
2. Sex is exactly like violence in the moral sense. Sex, like violence, is morally neutral. (Nobody here is a pacifist or opposed completely to all sex). There are circumstances where violence is morally right and
deserves to be glorified. People like Zaitsev, Patton, I want to hear about them more on television. With sex it seems to be the same. Certain kinds of sex are okay, and others are not (personally I think all consensual sex is okay). Certainly I don't think the moral rightness of sex is what gives TV ratings. Do you think if we showed a film about, say, the sex life of a married woman and her husband (with the married woman played by, uh, Mila Jovovich or Summer Glau), with explicit erotic scenes, it would somehow
fail to grow ratings?