Violent Hedonism

There is a tidal wave of intemperance in our culture, and it goes beyond bling, cars, homes and appetites. The trickledown effect? A well-laid out path for pleasure-seekers and unassuming kids.

Last year I did an OP Ed about the surge of media violence in our culture and how often kids are the victims of its assault. Not surprisingly it caught the attention of some very angry people. One group was parents who were on board with me. The other group was enraged that the Parents Television Council was trying to suppress their First Amendment ‘rights’. (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Violent, scripted TV is not what the First Amendment protects.) They’re nervous that their favorite gore-fests will disappear, and heaven forbid they miss out on mutilated bodies and crude pedophile humor after a hard day at the office.

Hedonism at its worst.

This is what I tell nay-sayers: Unless you have a bedtime of 8 PM most nights, is it too much for you to wait until a later hour when (hopefully) most kids are already in bed? And please, stop complaining that broadcast TV should carry the same content as cable television. If that were true, cable providers would be in a lot of trouble. But if you still think I’m way off base, find the most violent and objectionable show on broadcast TV (Law & Order: SVU or any crime drama will do) and sit down with young kids-under 10 years old-and watch with them while a woman’s severed head is given a close-up. Or witness someone being raped and murdered, or a dead child shown as the result of a botched exorcism. Unless you’ve no conscious whatsoever, I highly doubt there won’t be some squirming on your end.

A couple of weeks ago I appeared on a NJ college radio station and had a rather interesting ‘debate’ with a professor of Communications. I use the word ‘debate’ liberally; the good professor spent most of the time speaking over me and getting upset when I wouldn’t agree with him. Simply said, he had a bone to pick with the PTC. Publicly in favor of unfiltered violence and against child-predator restrictions on the internet, he slammed all of our studies, comparing them to inept lab findings. I reminded him we’re not a lab nor are we scientists, but due to “technical issues” on his end nothing I said during the debate was heard clearly. What bothered me most about the debate was not his views (they are upsettingly common and nothing I haven’t heard before), but where he was coming from. Sitting on a pulpit of education and in a position of some authority, there are no doubt students who look to him for popular opinion, and a lot of those students will one day grow up to be parents. Hopefully they will have learned to dismiss his rather left-field thinking and enforce guidelines instead of hedonism in their homes, but we can’t be sure. At one point he said he’d have no problem watching a violent show with his 4-year old niece. Yuk, yuk.

It’s an interesting paradigm of our societal values: As soon as there is a whisper of a threat of anything dangerous in our food, water or synthetic products, they are yanked from store shelves faster than you can say “mass-tort lawsuit”. But anything violent (including sex crimes) is not only allowed to remain attainable to all, but is enforced and marketed to minors. What has to happen before this rear-facing anatomy stops?

Crystal Madison, Chapter Director
New Jersey Parents Television Council
800-257-9358
njc@parentstv.org