THE BOSTICK REPORT-There’s something I don’t get and perhaps you could enlighten me. Feel free to comment below this article with your input.
Why are we, as a culture, so overly concerned with censoring sexuality in our media yet extraordinarily permissive when it comes to violence? It’s far easier to stumble upon some bad guy slapping somebody around, brandishing a weapon, or a “comedic” moment of violence than it is to even see a couple, fully dressed, in repose on a bed. Or sharing a tender kiss.
Personally, I would much rather have censorship of the violence more than the sensuality. Read: sensuality, not graphic sex or explicit scenes of nudity, but sensuality and moments of human sexuality within a loving environment. I think it would be better for our culture to embrace love over anger. Crazy, right?
Because I think it says something really negative about us as a culture that we would rather expose children to violence, even as humor. It’s odd that we cannot tolerate or abide by a loving moment, yet even in movies produced for a nine year old, it’s ok to see people chased, punched, shot, stabbed, and dead.
This isn’t to say that I advocate for inserting sexy scenes into a child’s movie. I’m just pointing out that, based on what they are letting into our media and what they are keeping out, I think they’ve got it backwards. We need more sensuality than violence, top to bottom.
Our exposure to violence over sensuality really does drive our perspective of right and wrong. Grow up watching MMA and it becomes part of your internal viewpoint.
And that drives how you deal with issues in the real world. Take the two cases, both from the NFL, that have exploded onto the collective consciousness.
On the one side we have Ray Rice (photo), a football player for the Baltimore Ravens, and the leaked video showcasing the time he knocked his fiancé out in an elevator. On a different plane of the violence spectrum is Adrian Peterson, running back for the Minnesota Vikings, arrested for child abuse after beating his kid with a tree branch. OK, he “whipped him with a switch”. You say switch, I say tree branch. You say whipped, or gave a love tap, or whatever cutesy nickname you have for it and I say beat. Or inflict violence. Tomato, potato as they say.
It’s not shocking that both cases have resulted in mixed reactions from the public. It’s just sad. Clearly, I am one of those bed-wetting liberals who despises wife-beating and child abuse in every incarnation, regardless of how you describe it, so my opinion of this debate is cemented. I won’t be advocating for Ray Rice’s return to the field any more than I would advocate for permitting someone to beat their child with a tree branch, aka switch.
But, I know plenty of people personally who will – under gentler terms of course. Let’s take a look at those arguments.
On the spousal abuse, there’s a two-pronged approach. One builds its defense of wife-beating on the precept that “we don’t know what goes on in a marriage, so we need to let them be”. The other argument is the “she had it coming” defense.
Incarnations of “she had it coming” can take almost any form, the two most prevalent of which I’ve heard are: a) her shrewy nature put him in a corner she knew would make him hit her and she did it on purpose, or b) she’s a gold digger and this is the price for her gold and by the way, she deserved it.
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How ridiculous it sounds to me. Maybe violence works for them? Ok. Does it work in a healthy way or a sick way? Is their violence driving them to become better people more equipped to productively deal with their problems or is it costing them their financial security? How many people do you know who are thriving in a violent relationship? Or even happy?
Why is it so bad to beat your kid with a tree branch? On this, you hear equivocations that basically boil down to “my parents did it to me” so it’s ok.
This is a far more intractable position and far harder to deal with because the people who defend abuse are defending their own parents choices and propping up their own parenting choices. No one wants to think they are bad parents or had bad parents. And there is a general rule of thumb I’ve observed as a parent: no one, but no one, wants to be told how to parent.
On this, I’m biased. I was hit as a kid. A lot. So, take my argument with a grain of salt- that salt being the experience of living in a constant state of terror as a child.
I do, however, have a logical argument against spanking. That argument rests in the fact that there are only two possible times when you would hit a child. To stop them from doing something or as a punishment delivered after they have done something.
First, if the child is out of control, physically, then you might chose to overwhelm their violence with your own violence. You will physically dominate that kid to make the child stop doing whatever it was s/he was doing.
The lesson here is twofold. It says that it’s ok to control someone else by physically overwhelming that person. Might becomes right. The flip side, of course, is that once the child can physically overwhelm the adult, then the adult is wrong. And it is ok to physically overwhelm someone as part of an argument or debate.
The second way to hit a child is to wait until whatever behavior you wanted to the kid to stop doing has stopped and then you spank the child. This makes no sense at all to me because the behavior has already stopped. Once stopped, the kid needs to understand why the behavior was bad and be instructed how to do things differently next time. Then, the kid has a better chance to avoid committing the behavior next time because you’ve helped the kid see what was wrong. Otherwise, the kid will do anything he or she wants until someone violently stops that action.
That’s not a good life plan and leads to bad choices. Avoiding violence as a method of moderating your own behavior makes no sense in a civilized society.
There’s one other time when people hit their kids. When they’ve lost control. And that just teaches your kid that sometimes it is ok to lose control and hurt someone because you don’t like what they are doing.
As we watch the debate unfold in the Adrian Peterson case and the Ray Rice fallout, let’s try our hardest not to minimize or rationalize atrocities. It is atrocious that a child was beaten with a tree branch. It is equally atrocious that a person, either a man or a woman, was punched at all, let alone hard enough to become unconscious. And it is horrifically sad that two people are trapped in the downward spiral of an abusive relationship. We should not demonize them, but we should make it clear that violence is unhealthy, unacceptable, and not to tolerated.
Violence is ingrained in the human psyche and there is no way to avoid our animal nature. However, we as a culture can choose to censure ourselves in the media from whatever we want and it’s important to recognize that our choice of what we censors matters, has ramifications, and does set a tone for what we tolerate in our lives.
So I adamantly say today: more sex, less violence and neither in children’s programming. Pretty please.
(Odysseus Bostick is a Los Angeles teacher and former candidate for the Los Angeles City Council. He writes The Bostick Report for CityWatch.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 75
Pub: Sep 16, 2014
