Censoring Censorship

I recently got into an unpleasant disagreement with a friend over one of our intellectual exchange of ideas last weekend. You see, she was very upset about the Malaysian media censorship board because apparently they broke an age old tradition. In the past, most of the censorship of the media (mainly movies and T.V. programs) were done by an older more elderly group, probably 40s or 50s, of censor officers. But recently instead of up holding the age old tradition when the older batch of censor officers retired, the board instead hired a bunch of young (I mean to say the following term without stirring any racial issues) tudung clad fresh grads to man the censorship board. By the way for all non-Malaysians, tudung is the local term for the head scarf that Muslim women wear.

So anyway, my friend was livid and felt that these fresh grad girls weren't experienced enough to actually work on the censor board. I think she was hoping for me to agree with her and start criticising the powers above that broke the age old tradition. I on the other hand decided to criticise something else, and that was what got us into the heated argument, err I mean intellectual discussion in the first place. The reason? Instead of questioning the appointment of the supposedly inexperienced girls, I questioned the existence of the censorship board all together and also their role.

In my humble opinion, I think that a censor board should be monitoring and categorising films based on age groups but what they are doing now is far from that. Nowadays anything remotely sexual (a mere kissing scene) or violent gets totally edited out from the film or T.V. program before the general public can view it. I question this act because I feel it may be a little over doing things and is quite very much so unnecessary. Do you mean to tell me that even after putting a Rated-18 or Rated-21 tag on a film, it still need additional censoring? What the heck... Are our adults in Malaysia really so immature that they cannot tell what’s right from wrong and need the help of a censorship board to edit out sexual and violent scenes? Maybe.

Certain people I spoke to recently are of the opinion that scenes containing sexual references or violence need to be censored because there is a chance that the public will watch something on screen and then follow suit to do it in real life. Hmm... I always thought monkey see monkey do was a kiddie thing? Thats why we have age ratings for movies, right? Once again I ask... Are our adults here not 'adultish' enough to tell right from wrong and will imitate what they see on T.V. Maybe.

But to edit out scenes from a movie is a desecration of art, if I were the director or an actor/actress in the film, I would find this act of defilement insulting to all the hard work I've put into making the movie. I mean lets face it, if 'Sex And The City' is rated 18sx, and the word sex was in the title, would it still be appropriate to censor out the sexual scenes? Ain't this is an adult comedy for adults... Does it really need censoring? Apparently.

I can only imagine a documentary on T.V. about the great Michelangelo, he was gay apparently, and the documentary was about all his greatest work done in his creative lifetime. But guess what, the segment about David was censored out because the sculpture was naked... It would have been a blasphemy to Michelangelo. But in reality that is something that can happen here.



It is sad that there are people whom feel our adults aren't grown up enough to tell right from wrong, but it is even more sad if they were actually correct. Did we go wrong in our decision on the scope of power and portfolio of the censor board? Or did we go wrong in the moral teachings of our people? I guess the censor board are always going to continue doing what they are doing today, whether the reason is politically motivated or the reason is to keep crimes such as sexual or violent assault cases down. So I suppose illegal DVD peddling is always going to be around as their goods need not go through the censorship board. Should I 'sigh' out or 'sign' out...

Signing out.