South Park on Hypocrisy, Censorship, and Good Old American ParentingBoth the television and film versions of South Park have a reputation for its vulgarity and often absurd humor that in in some ways it also includes relevant social criticism. The film effectively exposes numerous hypocrisies within American culture, including our aversion to sex and swearing, but our innate love of violence, our supposed hatred of ignorance and being ignorant at the same time, and to root of it all, how parents want to raise their children versus what children actually need. These examples are explored through South Park's strategy of making us laugh, letting our guard down, and making us see problems in our world that we didn't realize or didn't want to acknowledge. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay America has some strange ideas about censorship in our media. Cartoon violence, exemplified by classic shows like Tom and Jerry or Family Guy, is great for younger children, and even modern shows like Game of Thrones feature incredibly graphic and gory depictions of mutilation, death, sex, and even some their rather disturbing combinations. While this is an extreme example, as journalist Stephen Holden writes, most mainstream films "allow almost unlimited violence while remaining petrified of anything that smacks of obscenity." (Holden) Many television programs may contain intense physical violence but only a certain amount of swearing is allowed. If the idea is to protect younger observers, it doesn't make much sense. They will learn swear words at school, from friends or online, so banning them from television ultimately doesn't matter much. The excess violence shown in our media, over time, desensitizes us. In a way, the film aims to try to achieve the same effect, disrupting “notions of suburbia, authority, the body, sexuality, war… through its pervasive intertextuality and its vulgarity”. (Halsall) His characters hurl creative, pointed expletives so often that the audience eventually becomes immune to a phrase like "biting boner, farting cock, making shit face" that would probably cause a stir otherwise. It's just another line among hundreds of equally crude lines. In this way, South Park shows its audience exactly what desensitization of violence looks like and how ridiculous it is that it is allowed to be so mainstream while we impose limits on arguably less important things like profanity. While the film does a great job of clearly showing their thoughts on this particular example of hypocrisy, it also manages to show America's backward behavior when it comes to parenting and education. righteous and, more worryingly, incapable of parenting their children properly. They form an anti-Canadian coalition and foment a frenzy to go to war over a film that has “corrupted” their children without first attempting to safely correct unwanted swear words. This ties into the issue of censorship. While parents nobly want to limit their children's exposure to everything we consider "adult," they often go about it the wrong way. The creators of South Park make it clear that they believe “pompous and hypocritical rhetoric about protecting children from basic if unpleasant realities” (Holden) is doing more harm than good. Indeed, the overzealous acts of fictional parents mirror the movements of real-life parents to keep thechildren away from weed - and not from other worse drugs like heroin or cocaine or anything else for some reason - as well as from swearing, from sex, from gluten, from video games. , and so on.. The film paints a clear picture of the “desperate, paranoid adults yearning for an incredibly sanitized environment” (Holden) that we see so often but rarely think about. Interestingly, Holden describes the forms of the "sanitized environment". A rather realistic metaphor for parenting in real life. Some parents keep their children in very sterile environments, which seems good at the moment because they don't get sick. But as they get older, they are exposed to common pathogens that their immune systems have no experience with, and they become seriously ill, more often than their peers. While parents certainly had good intentions, they simply don't understand that children need a certain level of exposure to the real world, both for the benefit of their immune systems and for their overall understanding of the world. Too often, overprotective behaviors ultimately harm their children, because they involve a lack of trust, an invasion of privacy, and a neglect of providing the essential information children need. Amusingly, South Park uses Stan's questions about the clitoris to highlight this point. Although children seem to have a rudimentary idea about sex, almost everything they have learned comes from the media, so it is not necessarily complete or correct. His misguided attempts to understand the female anatomy highlight a fundamental issue in our country regarding parental hesitancy and, to some extent, refusal to thoroughly educate their children in topics they consider taboo. Protecting children from the truth can be helpful in some situations, but Stan is clearly at an age where he deserves an explanation to his questions. Overly withholding information from children is simply keeping them safe and can easily backfire when they receive the information in a way like the one Chef gave to Stan; somewhat informative, mostly confusing. Alternatively, they simply never properly learn something incredibly basic about sex. For example, parents who rely solely on schools to teach sex education can have dire consequences in states where the education is abstinence-only. They learn the horrors of not using condoms without being taught how to use them. And, most worryingly, they learn nothing of substance about sexual safety beyond “chlamydia is out there and it will find you.” However, teen sex continues to occur regardless, and their rates of STDs and teen pregnancies soar because they don't receive adequate education. Parents' insistence on preserving their children's innocence ultimately causes them harm, and this truly reflects "the naivety of the adult population obsessed with the corruption of innocence." (Halsall) It is not uncommon for children to experience a loss of innocence early in life without their parents knowing, and later try to protect something that isn't there. Where parents should have a supporting role, they often take on the reinforcing role instead, inadvertently forcing their children to learn from something less reliable… which is what the parent was trying to avoid in the first place. It's a careful balance between what parents offer and what children need, and too many parents fail to find that balance due to their own internal hypocrisies. Please note: this is just an example. Get.”