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Sex, Violence, Tension and Comic Books - An Interview with Gerard Jones
GJ: I think at a certain point we calm down a little internally, as our body just gets used to the conflict between inner drives and outer constraints. Part of it may be our metabolism slowing, too. Certainly through adolescence and into our twenties the testosterone is pumping; we’re also still learning that painful transition from childhood to the increasing need to behave in adulthood. In some ways our social sphere almost gets tighter as we go through high school and into college. So I think those ages, say thirteen to thirty, that long stretch, you’re still riding this internal roller coaster of being forced to act more and more mature. GS: You bring up another point: testosterone. Why is it, in these discussions, we focus almost exclusively on young boys. Don’t young girls have pent-up aggression, too? GJ: Boys have more testosterone, girls have more estrogen, and that definitely has an effect on affect, but then there’s certainly a cultural system reinforcing that as well. From a quite a long time ago, girls have been expected to be the stay-at-homes, the local maintainers of the system. Boys have been expected to be the ones who go out and procure. This is obviously shifting. I think as more generations go by, we’re going to see further shifts in the way kids behave. Still, there’s a tendency for boys to be more interested in extreme violence. Though girls can certainly love action. GS: If we’re a culture with few outlets for boys’, we’re a culture with zero outlets for girls. GJ: There are people who are arguing that the greater verbal and social nastiness of girls in elementary school and middle school may be partly a product of that, that they still have the aggression, they still have the frustration, but they have fewer ways to process that in fantasy. Boys may slam into each other, but girls are more likely to do the excluding and gossiping. Then another aspect of that is that girls tend to be more interested in social systems, relationships, subtle cues between people. Part of it has to do with definitions. This word violence is rather old, but the way we use it now to mean physical damage to someone’s body is pretty recent. I think that a good verbal drama has its own psychological violence. And of course, we’re talking generalities. There are women who love violence. My next-door neighbor plays Halo; that’s just how she unwinds. But with girls there’s the tendency to take aggression to a verbal level, where with boys there’s this fascination with bodies flying around. Pretty early kids are getting this message that there’s a boy way to be and a girl way to be, and one of the positions we adopt is that girls are squeamish about blood and boys like blood. When we’re talking about defining maleness, part of that is saying, I love gore, and therefore loving these games. What’s interesting though is how many adolescent girls like horror movies. GS: Or even how female violence comes out in something like self-mutilation, cutting. GJ: It’s this sort of internalized violence–which again, horror movies have, because you’re identification tends to be with the person being pursued, with the classic structure of the female protagonist. She’s the one who survives, but she’s also the one whom all the evil forces beat down on. So there is a tendency again to move things inward. Perhaps not surprisingly, so far very few women have committed these anonymous rampage killings. There was the “I hate Mondays” girl–a depressed sixteen-year-old who got a gun somewhere and was shooting kids in the school yard across the street, and when she was arrested, she said, “I hate Mondays.” GS: What about the idea you brought up in your talk about video games violence as fetishized. What do you mean by that? GJ: By fetishized I mean something that evokes anxiety or feelings of disturbance, something that we form into a symbol that exaggerates what is disturbing. In video games its gore, damage to the body, pain and fear being shown. What makes it a fetish is that we partake in it at the level of horror, that it’s meant to stimulate the feelings of aggression, possibly sexual excitation. There’s also a pornographic quality to game violence: the careful loving attention to excess that create a visceral excitement, the thrill of portraying something that is normally forbidden. GS: Do you see a larger relationship between video game violence and video game sex? GH: Very much. There is a certain absurdity that parents make peace with Grand Theft Auto, until naked women appear in it. It has something to do with the fact that it was snuck in. In that way, it’s similar to people’s reaction when S&M is introduced in mainstream porn. Bondage gets a lot of heat. It’s okay to watch human sexuality, but when you bring power relations into the equation... With violent games, we’re learning to accept it. Your kids’ friends have these games too. But then our threshold for violence has always been higher than for sex. GS: Can sex in games play the same role as game violence, as a release valve? GJ: For teens, one of the functions of porn has always been the release of tension. Even if its not masturbatory, this is something they’ve been hearing about; they know it’s something out there waiting for them. Porn offers a safe arena that you know you can handle. Certainly when I was like eleven or twelve it was fascinating to be able to peek into Playboy–somewhere safe you can enter that provokes less anxiety and shame. Then again, with porn, there is the real concern that teens that will have sex too early, get pregnant, etc. But as with violence in games, the excessive anxiety is wrong headed. Though there is less of a concern that kids will be violent. Sex seems more real. It hits closer to home. As for games, I don’t know if that many people are really that upset. There are political gains to made. At least with porn, people aren’t terribly concerned. With new tech, like the internet, it becomes a question of availability: you can’t really make anything taboo any longer. Violence in games is just a flash point for a more generalized worry. GS: So if you had Hillary Clinton in front of you now, what would you say to her on the topic of video-game violence? GJ: Well, I’d want to be sympathetic. I understand that she’s trying to appear morally upright, and not let the Republicans steal that. But I’d tell her to remember that so many things that we now understand to be good were once attacked at this level, and that things look differently from the outside than the inside when you’re not used to them. In my experience with kids and adults who have played video games, they’ve turned out fine. So I’d say, let’s take another look at this material as part of the upbringing of decent people. |
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