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Holiday From Irony Most Canadians have never gotten too incensed about the dubious moral quality of US commerical media products, or to whom these products are marketed, but now that we're consuming so much of them, maybe it's time to think about it a bit more carefully. Most young people will tell you they "just find it funny" to watch violent movies or read sexually-explicit features in Cosmo or Maxim, loudly advertised on the cover. They realize that the gyrating, half-naked females in the Green Day video are there as "a joke", and that the violence in American Psycho is "satirical". But how many expressions of women as sexual objects (or murder fodder) do I have to swallow down to be involved in my culture? Personally, I'm up for a holiday from irony. I'd like to take it all dead serious for a while, and find out just how left-out I feel. The liberal impulse is to resent anything that reeks of censorship or hypocricy. For example, a year ago, then-republican-candidate Elizabeth Dole had a platform plank that libraries had to ensure that their computers didn't allow access to pornographic web sites, or risk having their federal funding yanked. This seems ridiculously off-the-mark--surely libraries need promises of more money, not threats of less. But at the same time, it's hard not to believe that little kids shouldn't play video games where they have to shoot people--and get more points for shooting them in the head. They shouldn't listen to rap music that features people gleefully murdering men and women indiscriminately (everyone picks on Eminem, but he's just one example among hundreds of artists). And, Dole's right--they shouldn't be allowed to look at pornography at their local public library. If you think I'm being anti-sex, check out some internet pornography, and pretend you're a twelve-year old boy. Scared yet? People miss the mark by saying violence in media leads to Columbines. I think it does something less dramatic, but just as sad. When children watch sexual stereotypes in action and see people indulging the lowest human emotions, it strips away children's innocence, and makes society worse. I think you can believe in free speech, and yet still believe that pornography and violence degrade and corrupt human beings, and perhaps there shouldn't be quite so much of them, quite so easily accessible. Maybe turning Larry Flynt and Hugh Hefner into popular media heroes really is reprehensible--and it's the mainstream media we have to blame for that. Sure, wrestling is on late at night, as it should be. But why do they sell toys of all the characters at Toys R Us? It's not 18-year-olds buying them, it's the kids on my street. The rebuttal to this argument against a crass and poisonous culture is always the same: it's parents' job to protect their children from all this. They're the ones buying their kids "M" rated video games, or bringing them to "R" rated movies. But when exploitative sex and violence are on every channel, and when they are relentlessly marketed and forced upon the impressionable young (it's a cliché because it's true), that argument collapses. There has been an unfair distribution of blame--parents blamed for everything, but media producers getting off scot-free because they are protected by free speech. They may be free from legal liability, but capitalism being what it is, we consumers can "vote" with our dollars. So, that's the form my protest will take, and that'll have to be enough. Is it hopelessly Pollyannaish to wish that the foulest and crudest parts of life could be chosen less often as subject matter by movie makers, TV producers, pop musicians and video directors, and thus might recede in the popular imagination? Maybe. But until that does happen, I think I'll spend my money carefully and stay on holiday. |
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Linda Lebrun lives and writes in an undisclosed location. She is working on a series of essays for Another Toronto Quarterly |