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]

Heh. No problem.

I'm not sure they are doing good. In fact I'm pretty sure they're not, or at least not enough to outweigh the harm we're doing. But I want them to stay as good people as they can, those that are, which is probably most of them. Because I think it will only get worse if they don't. And I think reading comics is as likely to make you a better person as it is a worse one, if it does anything besides provide escapism for people who seriously need it.

Mer

[witling.livejournal.com]

Yes, I didn't mean to slam comics in my first reply--or maybe I worked myself into a position where I was slamming without enthusiasm. Heh. I read superhero comics from time to time (The Authority! Gay superheros!) and I sure did grow up on them, and I have no quarrel with anyone who likes them. I also read graphic novels and consider them a completely valid literary form (I know, thanks, wiseacress, we needed that), and would like to start to build our library's collection there a bit more.

I think where I got myself into a tight spot was in equating low-quality entertainment crap like Daredevil with comics, which was careless. There are wonderful comic, fantastic worlds out there. I just watched Spirited Away and fell in love with it, for instance.

And that's interesting to me--if you sent Spirited Away to the troops, would it answer their need? I mean, who can say, and what's this single, monolithic "need" thing? There are lots of needs. But you say (sensibly) that people at war may have a craving to see clear lines of good and bad, right and wrong, and Gandalf the White coming over the hill at dawn. I can understand that. I can also imagine that some people might have a need to see a complex, ambiguous world presented back to them, to see others try to navigate it. To watch Welcome to Sarajevo, in which people try to do right under terrible, untenable circumstances, instead of Con Air, which is just schlock.

Schlock I've enjoyed, I hasten to add.

I don't know. Being prescriptive or judgmental is worse than useless, I think. But then I think, there has to be some dissension. I just don't believe that True Lies provides a good, healthy model for relating to the world and other people, however satisfying it may be for some folks to watch Arnold machine-gun Arabs and nuke a Florida cay. You know?

I'm also highly conscious of the fact that my little wibbling voice is pretty much irrelevant to the real world, the real situations. Or maybe it's not. Maybe there's room for a BooksforSoldiers2.com, providing alternative sources of entertainment that...I don't know, at least don't perpetuate the racism and xenophobia and greed and fear that got us into this war and will continue to get us into wars just like it until we drive someone to nuke us, world without end.

Um, okay. I'm sorry, Stakebait, I don't know what's got into me today. I'm too emotionally invested. I'm not trying to take over your LJ. Stopping now.

[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