I’m puzzled by the warning that appears before a lot of TV shows: The following program contains scenes of violence, language and sexuality; parental guidance is advised. The violence warning I understand. The violence is the stuff that hurts people. The language warning is more obtuse. Of course the program contains language. The program’s actors use dialogue. Ipso facto the program contains language. (Do you like how I worked ipso facto into this. That’s Latin. Latin is a kind of language, too, only it’s dead—maybe because of the violence.) Apparently (which is not a real word), I am too literal-minded. When they warn against language, they’re warning against BAD language, the kind of language that, if you were using it in a blog, you would blot it out with asterisks, words like fuck and shit and asshole and motherfucker and cocksucker and shitfaced motherfucker and—you get the idea. But what really has me stymied is the warning about sexuality. I think what the warning means is: look out for (mostly implied) scenes of people using their bodies to get all cozy, and not in an American football kind of way either, but more in a penis and vagina, titties and butts kind of way. The problem is: that’s not what the word sexuality means.
Growing up in my good Christian household, whenever we prayed together around the harvest table and the word sexuality popped up (as it always did), it meant something vague and abstract, much like love and peace and Santa Claus. Most of the online dictionary definitions bear this out. Sexuality is a general term that encompasses a multiplicity of human experiences, from the mechanics of reproduction and the sense of a gendered identity to the expression of love and a totalizing ontological perception of one’s self as a body. Warning against sexuality is almost as meaningless as warning against being.
I thank the powers that be for these warnings, but I have more important things to worry about, like protecting my beleaguered mind from air-headed voice-overs by people who don’t know how to use their native language.