Sex and Violence: I'm for It

By Crispin Sartwell

We Americans are a great people. We are great in our freedom, in our spirit, in our generosity. We are great in that any white boy who is the son of a millionaire can grow up to be president, if he has enough corporate support.

But most of all, we are great in our hypocrisy. Never, perhaps, in the entire history of the genus homo, has a culture dedicated itself with such a glorious lack of self-reflection to solemnly intoning what it shows no tendency to believe.

Let us take the issue of sex and violence in the media. No one has ever been for it. Every politician and PTA member has deplored it daily since 1961. And yet it has flowered like the daffodils of spring.

That sex and violence are so universally reviled of course entails that none of us enjoy them or seek them out. Odd, then, that year after year Stephen Seagal and Elizabeth Hurley find themselves able to make a handsome living.

It seems to me that someone is perhaps buying tickets for the sex and violence-soaked extravaganzas that we so find so disgusting. Baby, that someone is us.

I am myself a monster of depravity, as many readers have pointed out to me. And yet unlike these very readers, I'm no hypocrite. And so I declare explicitly that there is not nearly enough sex and violence in the media.

A study just released by the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a public-interest group devoted to staring at screens for hour after hour reducing acts of sex and violence to sheer numerical totals, has reported that there is a slight decline over the last few years, the first on record.

I find this trend extraordinarily disturbing. We are in danger of becoming a culture of neutered cowards. Soon our entertainments will consist entirely of sedate yet pseudo-profound dramas adapted from pretentious British novels.

Don't tell anyone, but sex is fun, and watching beautiful movie stars remove their own or one another's clothing is, shall we say, enlivening. Violence is a primordial human experience, and seeing it depicted is sets the blood to racing like Vin Diesel in "The Fast and the Furious."

You know this, and you make your entertainment choices accordingly. Really, you do. Or at least, most folks do. And these folks need a spokesman.

A politician who got up and said that there wasn't enough sex and violence on TV would be crucified. His approval ratings would sink below zero. On the other hand, if there are any Americans who really don't like sex and violence on TV, they are widely regarded as deeply defective.

If you're talking with the guys over a beer, I wonder whether you'd be happy producing sentences like this: "Jet Li is a gifted actor. But why does he have to hit people? It's just so *brutal*." Or "Michelle Pfeiffer has no business wearing skintight leather jumpsuits." An attitude like that is deeply unamerican, not to say inhuman.

Of course, it is also unamerican not to deplore sex and violence in the media from every available public stage. That is, it is deeply unamerican not to wallow in sheer mindless gutless cant and inflict it on anyone who will listen.

There is something perversely admirable about a system that consists without remainder of balderdash, a regime that is the wholesale outlet of hoohah. We are a great people.

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Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Contact him at www.crispinsartwell.com