It does make sense, actually. Anytime this subject comes up there are two different things going on: what was going on during filming, and what was being depicted in the film. This gets sort of complex in some situations. Depictions of married or lifetime-committed people having sex are not so objectionable to most (or many) people on the basis of the subject, at least, depending on the degree of explicitness; but if it involves nudity and close contact between people who are married or committed to other people, that can make people uncomfortable, sure. Or if you use of-age actors to depict sexual activity (even mild activity) between two underage characters, that may make some people uncomfortable and others not; but if you use two underage actors to depict the same thing, that's going to strike a much larger percentage of people as wrong.
Also, it's just blinkered to act as if all depictions of all unclothed bodies in all contexts for all purposes carry exactly the same moral and ethical meaning. Would you also advocate nudity for all people at all times in all places? Why not, if it's what people see when they step out of the shower every day? How about your significant other when you're out with another couple? Or your husband or wife in front of your teenage son or daughter, maybe, or vice versa?
Yeah, I get the comparison between showing mere nudity (say, somebody just getting out of a shower or getting dressed in a film) versus showing heads being shot off and such. But again, some of that depends on the needs of the story. Is one more scarring or damaging than the other? Probably. I would agree that depictions of extreme violence can be not only disturbing but, over time, desensitizing. (If that weren't true, they wouldn't be used in training to make soldiers more able to kill without flinching.) But the relative value of one versus the other doesn't end the narrower question of whether one or the other considered separately is right or wrong in certain contexts.
But anyway...if a viewer wants to avoid actual nudity in a film, why does that viewer have to explain him/herself to anybody? The OP asked a simple question and got jumped by the usual crowd of "your value system must match mine or you're a human-body-hater / Puritan / sex-hater / whatever." Talk about making no sense.
reply
share