I’ve been seeing a lot of posts about the “dangers of fiction influencing reality” with linked scientific findings and stuff and I appreciate the effort to back things up with psychological studies rather than, like, memes, but I’m just letting y’all know… that was literally the argument Tipper Gore used when she went after Prince music for fear it would turn her daughter into a stripper. That’s the exact argument that was used against Rockstar when they were accused of ‘making’ kids shoot up schools. These crusades against media have time and time again failed with their only positive results usually just being more prevalently available warnings for mature content. And their negative repurcussions have been far greater, such as an increased stigma against black music and parents banning their children from playing any video games. (Blocking people off from experiencing multiple genres based on racial bias and excluding access to an entire artform.) I’m not saying that there’s not stuff to be concerned about/critique. I’m just saying that if you’re going the “fiction is dangerous!” route it has historically been proven to be a lost cause.
Let’s not forget that gangsta rap was one of the things people like Tipper were after too.
I.e.: artistic expression by black men who were, sure, sometimes being vulgar for the hell of it (like white rockers weren’t?!) but who were also often talking about social issues and injustices too
You can’t kill the vulgarity without killing the important part too.
Your pesticide kills both.
Yeah. I’ve been trying to communicate this a lot for a few years, that it’s the same as trying to ban video games or certain kinds of music.
I’m not that old, but I was a 90′s kid and I know so many guys who weren’t allowed to watch DBZ or Pokemon growing up because their parents thought it would make them into violent people. And so when they walk into my room and see my toys, their faces light up and they ask to hold Gokuu. They never got to have that hero (most of them were forced only to look at Jesus for inspiration).
So, it just all looks exactly like that when I hear 14 year olds trying to say that fiction is voodoo and brainwashes people into thinking what’s in it is okay to do IRL and is directly responsible for the crimes in the real world.
However, now that I think about it, I definitely had friends in highschool who constantly questioned my interests. They thought it was weird that I was obsessed with the Parker-Hulme murder (and the film I learned about it from, Heavenly Creatures).
They thought I wanted to kill my mom because I was fascinated by this story. I also had friends who were disturbed by my interest in dark fics. Even at 17 I was like, “Uhh… no? Just because I like this story doesn’t mean I think what happens in it is okay?” and for whatever reason they couldn’t understand it.
Like, it’s fine if you always want fluffy pure happy, sometimes I do, but I feel like to deny the darkness is more dangerous than disallowing it to exist in what can be records of thought experiments which help us to learn and grow in compassion in the first place.
Some of us like to pretend dark and scary things safely in fiction as a way to bleed out the congested emotions and experiences we’re too full of.
Also, it’s not always that deep. It’s fun to pretend.
(Another also, this argument always makes me think of my daycare: we weren’t allowed to watch Power Rangers or even say those words because of fear it would make us violent but then the nanny was physically abusive to us anyway. She yanked me by my ponytail and hit me and stuff, but oh no don’t watch Power Rangers!!! Lol fuckin antis, you are no different)
THIS.
I remember when some people blamed Columbine on Marilyn Manson.
I was a Manson fan.
The killers didn’t like Manson, they liked KMFDM. (A band that, uh, also does not go around telling kids to murder everyone at school? And that I also kinda liked?) They played DOOM, which my friends and I also played.
No one threatened me or anything, but I remember worrying. How could I dress? What could I say?
I eventually decided to wear all my band shirts and paint my lips blue AND GO AROUND BEING AS POLITE AS I POSSIBLY COULD TO EVERYONE to make a point.
Honestly, it made me a nicer person.
This kind of “art did it” person is not new…
…and has never been right.
I was just thinking about this earlier. It seems like they literally don’t comprehend the fact that we’ve heard the same words they’re saying before, but last round was “violent media will make you violent” and “seeing gays on TV will turn kids gay, and also make it acceptable for adults to prey on them because mumble mumble.”
What worries me is that it seems to go in cycles.
Like – I’m completely willing to believe that some large portion of the abuse survivors in the current young adult generation had abusers with edgy tastes, because edgy tastes were just generally more acceptable for a little while, as the internet let people get out from under the thumb of conservative & fundamentalist culture leaders.
But I wish they would believe us, too, when we say that abuse happened just as much in the previous generation’s purity culture. That its standards were used to create the current system where kids don’t have access to education on sex and consent. And that in the iteration of that culture that we saw, well-intentioned rules about what was good and proper for art to contain were mainly used to silence minorities, because policing always favors the privileged.
We also shouldn’t forget that the wave of purity culture that de-funded art about HIV, created the war on drugs and the prison-industrial complex, called Dungeons and Dragons satanic, and banned black music, was partly reactionary to the permissive period of the 60s and 70s.
And I wonder now how much of that was the same broken logic – people blaming ideas or aesthetics that their abusers used as justification, and not the fact that abusers will use anything to justify their actions.
This.
My mom thought Dungeons and Dragons would make me go crazy because of a movie.
Like…this stuff isn’t new it’s just the next generation latching onto it and rolling with it.
Folks need to learn their history.
Also most of the research is actually not …. very sound?
Like, the ones that are scientifically valid and can be checked over for bias, control group comparison, accounting for other variables, etc. show a *very thin margin* of impact. It’s enough to be scientifically interesting but not enough to be a major effect. What has consistently been shown to have a larger effect on kids, and be able to override media, is a) how permissive and/or encouraging adult authority figures are of things like violent behavior (aka when the teachers go “well kids will be kids” the kids all get the message they SHOULD act like that and that it’s expected and okay, esp. if there’s no positive reinforcement of empathy/positive behavior and good treatment of others), and b) MODELING FROM PARENTS AND ADULTS, ESP. AUTHORITY FIGURES. The thing with the biggest impact on whether or not kids started mimicking violent behavior was if they saw an adult or someone they were supposed to respect acting that way.
(This is actually why a marriage where one parent is abusive towards the other but neither of them are abusive to the child is incredibly damaging; exposure to the abuse of the victim parent is traumatic and also counts as modeling behavior to the child as “the way things should be”, and forcing that to stay together “for the kids” does MORE damage than a divorce would.)
The dramatic “THIS PROVES MEDIA CAUSES THE BEHAVIOR IT SHOWS” studies are usually uh. Sketchy as fuck?
I mean, the big meta-study that gets thrown around by the news about ‘video games causing violence’ is actually debunked as not scientifically valid, since they cherry-picked like Hell and in some cases used lines out of context to cite conclusions that were not there in the source research or that were the opposite. A lot of the others don’t account for the behavior of the adults involved in the scenarios, the home situations of kids/others involved, or have the framing and handling of the kids skewing things towards the desired result.
Also it’s now been long enough for “And this is where we are Cassandra” to kick in on the early research that predicted that thorough, clear sex education with health, safety, and consent would be *beneficial* and *reduce* rates of teen pregnancy/STD’s/etc. to actually have proof in comparisons between populations in areas that did thorough education and areas that do abstinence-only/purity-culture.
Guess which areas have been getting epidemics, which is a piss-off because it was so thoroughly preventable and manageable and is usually coupled with gutting the programs and treatments that would care for the results.
So yeah no. Purity culture is actually kinda documented to be actively damaging and based on flawed logic and flawed premises.
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
thisacelovesheadcanons 