A Parent's View of Pop Sex and Violence

By Charles P. Alexander

My two sons, ages 8 and 4, are having a deprived childhood, and they resent it. Although virtually all their friends have seen Batman and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, my wife and I have stubbornly refused to let our children join the crowds at the box office. We cling to the old-fashioned, even reactionary, notion that watching one act of violence after another may be harmful to very young minds.

Are we being ridiculous? I admit that as a kid I saw Roy Rogers shoot-'em- ups and the brutal battles between Elmer Fudd and Daffy Duck. These didn't warp me for life. But I never saw anything so violent as Batman before I could tie my shoelaces, and to this day I don't have the stomach to watch The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. As a teenager I thought the Rolling Stones' Let's Spend the Night Together was cool, but it's a long way from that to this Guns N' Roses lyric: "Panties 'round your knees/ With your ass in debris/ Doin' dat grind + with a push and squeeze/ Tied up, tied down, up against the wall . . ." Or this from 2 Live Crew: "Just nibble on my d like a rat does cheese."

I realize that I can shelter my boys for only so long. As they grow older, I will lose control of them, and they will eagerly sample the forbidden fruit. I hope that by then they will have internalized my values. But I fear that pop culture and peer pressure may overwhelm my influence. Look at how our culture spurred drug use among the young.

It is too easy to dismiss protests about pop entertainment as prudishness. Most concerned parents fret not so much about sex as about the combination of sex and violence. In heavy-metal music, there is often little difference between sex and rape. Too much of today's entertainment carries messages that are damaging to young psyches and dangerous to society. Among them: 1) women are sexual objects to be used and abused by men; 2) violence is an effective means of resolving conflicts; 3) it is O.K. to hate another class of people.

Parents would not be so upset if the sex and violence were confined to the screen and stereo. But our children are at risk in the real world. While the total population of teenagers is dwindling, the number of murders and rapes committed by juveniles is on the rise. Teenage pregnancy has reached epidemic proportions. To a degree, entertainment just reflects what is already going on in society. But isn't it possible that pop culture reinforces and perhaps amplifies bad behavior? There are many reasons for teenage crime, including poverty, family problems and psychological ills, but who can say for sure that violent entertainment is not a contributing factor?

Last year in New Jersey seven middle-class teens allegedly took a miniature baseball bat and sexually assaulted a 17-year-old mentally impaired girl as six friends looked on. Who knows what demons haunted the boys? Were they all psychologically disturbed, or were they acting normally in a culture where sexual violence is deemed tolerable, even entertaining? All parents have to live with fears that their daughter will be the next one assaulted or that their son will be one of the culprits.

Whenever parents raise these concerns, the entertainment industry invokes the evil specter of censorship. But the U.S. has always had censorship. Even MTV has its own censors. What is truly strange is the argument that there should be no censorship whatsoever. Should hard-core pornography be allowed on + prime-time, broadcast TV? Are there no limits? No society can survive if its only rule is, "Anything goes."

So the question becomes, "What goes?" In general, this question should be answered not by governments but by artists, disk jockeys, producers, theater owners and media executives. There are no simple formulas for what is permissible. And there is always a serious danger that high-quality, progressive art will be stifled for the sake of community standards. But much commercial trash, crassly produced to exploit the vulnerable minds of young people, is easy to identify.

No one is suggesting that society police every nightclub and root out every raunchy record from store shelves. There will always be filth on the fringes of entertainment. The problem arises when filth becomes mainstream, when it is mass-marketed. A few giant corporations, including Disney, Fox, MCA, Paramount, Time Warner, Britain's EMI, West Germany's Bertelsmann and Japan's Sony, produce a huge proportion of our children's entertainment. Many parents feel that these companies should take the lead in setting the standards for everyone.

No rock group should be banned entirely, but perhaps some of them should lose their well-financed promotional campaigns. Entertainment firms have a responsibility to society that must be balanced with their mission to maximize profits for shareholders. Parents are now giving media executives a warning: "Make your marketing decisions more responsibly, or we will get governments to make them for you." That is a real threat, at least at the state and local level, and the very idea alarms anyone who values the First Amendment.

Can the media companies mend their ways without government interference? There is certainly a precedent for it. In the 1960s and '70s, much entertainment, from Beatles music to the movies Easy Rider and M*A*S*H, glamourized drug use. But at some point, the world's artists, producers and media executives decided that promoting drugs was not a good thing. Nowadays the message that children receive from entertainment is strong and unambiguous: drugs are dangerous, and taking them is foolish. I hope that the future messages my two boys receive about sex and violence make just as much sense.