Passing along more links

[stakebait]

Man from Washington State lynched in Mississippi over oil on the land. My god.

Quebec study urges decriminalization of prostitution

New report shows Bush administration removed 25 reports from its Women's Bureau web site, deleting or distorting crucial information (Salon.com, you'll have to view an ACLU ad to get the full story.)

Why fat is not a health risk, and why America is so invested in believing it is.

Clearing out the bookshelves? Books for Soldiers has requests from soldiers serving overseas.

For Angel fans, An interesting analysis of ATS up through Origins by ascian3.

Comments

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

Really it's fine. My LJ is unthreatened. Feel free to stop if this is bothering you, but not on my account.

I'm sure some people do need to see a more complex world presented back to them, but presumeably those people are asking for Welcome to Sarajevo, not Con Air.

I'm not trying to say there is a single monolithic need. I'm just trying to describe, based on the evidence that a lot of people in a certain situation are asking for a certain type of literature, how the one might cause the other without being necessarily a bad influence or a bad symptom. I'm sure there are plenty of people who aren't in this group at all, but then they don't need explaining.

It's true, of course, that there are some things you don't know you need until someone makes you watch them (Brazil, in my case, was one of those), but I think that comes better from a dear friend who has reason to know what you might need than it does from a stranger. There's something disagreeably paternalistic in trying to send people what we think they should have instead of what they say they want. As you say, being prescriptive or judgmental is worse than useless.

I also think that True Lies isn't intended (or, generally, recieved) as a model for relating to the world, healthy or otherwise. I've done this rant elsewhere on topics like rape fantasy, but basically I believe that there's a whole genre of literature and media that exists to bleed off, externalize, play out in a safe environment, impulses which many if not all of us have but it would be bad for society to exercise in real life.

It's like a carnival Lord of Misrule in medieval society -- the idea is not to follow it like a prescription, but to give resentment and envy and mockery a safe outlet, and it actually shored up the regular rulers the rest of the time.

I put action movies and most pornography into this category, so to me, to debate them as models is, to me, like critiquing a roller coaster for it's unsafe model of train construction. If it were such a model, it certainly would be unsafe, but it isn't. It's a sanitized alternative, a way to experience the adrenaline thrill of a runaway train without the real pain, just like a romance is a way to experience the thrill of connection without the real risk.

Mer

[witling.livejournal.com]

I'm going to subside here, because I need to be quiet with my smooth, smooth brain, but just to clarify--I wasn't saying you were positing a single, monolithic need. That was me, talking to myself. Which I do fairly often, in fact.

The bleed-off theory...maybe. I don't know. I'm a fence-sitter, somewhere between Dworkin and you. There are so many studies showing a correlation between viewing violent acts and increased tendencies to violence. It makes intuitive sense, which doesn't necessarily mean it's correct--intuitively, the planet's flat. But there are people out there studying violence in the media, and they seem to keep finding the same things, more or less. Feed your brain a diet of first-person shooter games and Schwarzenegger flicks, and you have a higher chance of being predisposed to violent or otherwise antisocial behavior.

What that says about porn, I don't know. I like porn. Porn is good.

::pets porn::

Thank you for such good points about all of this--it's been very good sharing thoughts with you.

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

*hugs* Have a nice quiet time with your smooth brain. Lemme know if you ever are bored and want to talk about those studies.

Mer

[nightstalker.livejournal.com]

Feed your brain a diet of first-person shooter games and Schwarzenegger flicks, and you have a higher chance of being predisposed to violent or otherwise antisocial behavior.

Wouldn't a more reasonable conclusion be that people who are predisposed to violent or anti-social behavior are are more likely to watch action movies and play violent video games?

[witling.livejournal.com]

I'll have to find the studies, I guess. I don't know whether your suggestion is more reasonable or not, offhand.

Sorry it took so long for me to dig it up.

[nightstalker.livejournal.com]

Usually it's the newspapers who distort causation and correlation, but in this case, it seems the researchers did it too.

http://www.rielley.com/sandy/rants/vidgames.html