If you pay any attention to television, movies or video games that have been released in the past few years, you will have noticed a trend regarding violence, sex and drugs in each format. Violence has always been in our media, from news reports on shootings and muggings to people’s heads being chopped in half in the newest grindhouse feature. Drugs are seen a lot too, and while smoking is on the decline, alcohol consumption is seen as normal and is as pervasive as ever.

The change is in nudity and sex. Since nipplegate, the amount of nudity that is seen as “OK” in a movie has gone down considerably, a decade long backlash that makes almost no sense.

Violence sells. Seeing blood and violence releases endorphins, gives us a rush. To a lesser degree, illegal drug use also gives us this glimpse of the forbidden, and allows us to live vicariously through the characters on the screen, another endorphin rush. However, studies have shown that exposure to violence and drug use in the media increases the incidence of actual violence and drug use. This means that calls to reduce these, especially in the forms of media that are normally consumed by children, actually have a legitimate basis from which to argue.

However, sex also sells. And even if there is a correlation between nudity in the media and nudity in real life, sex in the media and sex in real life, who cares? Why is it that we are so horrified at the idea that someone might see a nipple that directors like Robert Rodriguez, when producing gore-fest movies like “Machete Kills,” will make the choice to not show a single scene of actual intimacy? What kind of message are we sending to our populous when we show exploding heads, bodies being chopped in half, and extended torture scenes but hesitate to show a man’s genitalia?

Movies like “Saw” and “The Hills Have Eyes” are barely art, little more than blood and violence with only a bare excuse for a plot to string them together. A movie that substituted nipples for blood, and had the same level of plot, would be called pornography.

As we suppress our healthy attitudes towards sex and relationships and exalt our violent tendencies, we shape the society we live in and the society that our children will live in. Personally, to paraphrase “Married with Children,” I’d like to live in a world with less violence and more kinky sex and nudity.