-
1 of 10
-
2 of 10
-
3 of 10
-
4 of 10
-
5 of 10
-
6 of 10
-
7 of 10
-
8 of 10
-
9 of 10
-
10 of 10
The F Spot: Framing the FTC’s Picture
Archive
Comments
Story
Well, surprise, surprise, a recent study conducted and released by the Federal Trade Commission showed that although the entertainment industry has done plenty to identify adult content in its movies, video games and music, it sure doesn’t do a whole lot with that information. In fact, the study confides, many industries actively peddle their wares to our unsuspecting youth. I guess snatching Joe Camel from the billboards just didn’t cut it.
I applaud this study, commissioned by Clinton in June 1999. At least this attempt to scapegoat the mass media for the recent rash of school shootings shows a little more imagination than playing “pin the accusations” on the shooters’ parents.
I have to admit, though, I anticipated something with a little more, well, oomph. I jumped feet-first into this study, expecting the FTC to connect The Matrix to at least one school shooting or maybe tie Eminem to a recent surge of gay bashing. I wanted drama, intrigue, villains and heroes. Instead, I got stats on the number of kids sneaking into R-rated movies. The FTC report didn’t concern itself with the rationale and effects of violence in the media, I found, but merely with children’s accessibility to it.
Why just children? I wondered initially, slightly offended. Did the FTC, like our mommies and daddies, wave us a tearful goodbye come our first semester of college? Don’t they realize the strain of working and going to college, of delaying all gratification for four or five long years? Now that’s a recipe for disaster, folks!
After extensive chin-stroking and deep meditation, I finally concluded that the Clinton administration wanted to perform a violence checkup on our children not only to cleanse itself of the responsibility of the recent school shootings (”Where should you point your self-righteous, taxpaying fingers? Certainly not at the federally- and locally-funded educational system, that’s for sure! Lookee here at this FTC study for your culprits. Problem solved!”), but also because they seem to assume we adults have a greater capacity for contextualizing violence. In short, the Clinton administration, the FTC and the makers of the V-Chip must think that along with the ability to vote came the capacity to tell the difference between fantasy and reality.
I’m just not so sure we can say the same thing about them.
The study really doesn’t present us with any foundation-rocking information. Take three major entertainment media, all of whose goals include profit seeking, profit making and profit expansion, add a teen demographic that supplies them with just that, and bingo, you have a marriage made in heaven, ethics be damned. Capitalism 101.
The purpose behind the study, in my humble opinion, stems from the desire to locate and root out the seed of violence blossoming in the skinny chests of our modern youth. A noble venture. After all, hasn’t study after study proven to us that exposure to violence and pornography increasingly desensitizes its consumers to the concepts and reality of violence? Haven’t feminists invested buckoo bucks in connecting rape to pornography and eating disorders to anorexic models? From this standpoint, the study makes perfect sense, even paving the way for a follow-up study that takes our hands and guides us from point A (the violent image) to point B (the consequential violent act).
I propose we stop while we’re ahead. While I’m certainly not an ardent flag waver for pornography and other degrading or violent images, analyzing them as solid, tangible evidence of our culture’s devaluation of individual life just doesn’t fit right. After all, did these cultural artifacts fall from the heavens in a blaze of fire and fury? Come time to point the finger of blame, we seem to conveniently forget how movies, music and video games come into being through the primordial soup we call the modern American culture.
I have a difficult time imagining the average movie as a slick, red Ferrari that zooms into our life, dumps its values into our passive laps and then forces us to integrate them into our psyches. These messages, however violent and degrading, would have no meaning without a cultural context in which to place them, without their active interpretation by all of us socialized girls and boys.
A symbol, especially one zapped through a mass media channel, doesn’t mean a whole heck of a lot when it doesn’t refer to something else, doesn’t reflect the context in which it emerged and thrives. In this case, the sex and violence that permeate the entertainment industry refers to the — you guessed it — violence and misogyny plaguing our culture. Without this cultural context, these symbols would deflate.
My point? I’m prouder than punch that the Clinton administration has created a potential diversion from our microscopic analysis of the shooters’ home lives. If the study’s purpose, as I submit, does include helping us finger the media as the villainous sources behind our children’s recent outbreak of middle-class violence, however, I think it’s a little misguided. Denying our children access to misogynistic and violent entertainment material seems a little like putting tape over a mirror and pretending the image it echoed disappeared along with its reflection. We need to broaden our scopes just a little and see how we, as a violent, warring, socially and economically inequitable culture, live, breathe and reproduce images and concepts of violence. The resulting, persecutory and harmful images are inevitable because, simply, we are they. Focusing on our access to them seems a little beside the point.
I thank the FTC and President Clinton for assuming I can tell the difference between fantasy and fact. Now I encourage them to stop studying one, ignoring the other and pretending that they aren’t one and the same.
Lesleigh Owen (The Arbiter)