The One With Skippy and the Full Frontal Nudity

Skippy is going to be baptized tomorrow. Last Sunday in church the kids were given a really cool object lesson about how watching and listening to unwholesome material can make our thoughts very muddy so that we can’t hear the Spirit. The visual was a clean, clear glass of water, and then another where several different food colors had been added to make the water murky. Skippy raised his hand and asked, “When you get baptized, do you get to pour out the dirty water and get clean water again?” I thought how sweet and innocent he is.

And then the next day I showed him a naked woman.

At this juncture, we can just stipulate that I am a bad parent. Skippy and I were home alone. I have been spending every waking moment at the computer working on music, and he begged to watch a show with me on TV, and I took an hour break to oblige. I love sci-fi and he does too, of late, and I figured Stargate SG-1 would be a fun one to watch. It ran for something like fourteen seasons, and I saw most of them. So we queued it up on Netflix and started watching. Bad mom alert: I was also kind of sort of checking my e-mail at the same time. I glanced up from my e-mail, and there they were. Breasts. Very impressive ones, I might add. Startled, Skippy and I looked at each other wide-eyed, and he immediately covered his eyes. I grabbed the remote and started zipping through. Breasts, breasts, larger-than-life breasts.... pan down... and there it is. A whole naked woman.

I watched Stargate SG-1 for several years on Fox network. It was such a clean show as to be unrealistically sterile at times... and so it didn’t even cross my mind that the shows were originally aired on SHOWTIME, and it seems that premium stations have become nothing more than peddlers of pornography, even more so now than when Stargate originally aired. While I was shocked to see it, and even more dismayed that I showed it to my eight-year-old son, I suppose it was extremely tame compared to what HBO and Showtime offer today, which we found to be so disgusting that we won’t allow those stations in our home at any price.

I am also extremely disappointed with Netflix for not securing the edited-for-regular-network versions, and even more so because, as you can clearly see here in the screenshot which I just took from the Netflix website, the series is rated TV-14, which does not, according to the TV rating guidelines, permit nudity. The program, aired in its uncut format, would have to be rated TV-MA, which is the rating Showtime and HBO generally use (and with good reason) for all of their original programming.

Netflix is definitely going to hear about this from me.