Violent Media is Good for Kids by Gerard Jones
Renowned comic-book author Gerard Jones argues that bloody
videogames,
gun-glorifying gangsta rap and other forms of 'creative
violence' help far
more children than they hurt, by giving kids a
tool to master
their rage. Appeared in Mother Jones online, June 28, 2000.
http://www.motherjones.com/reality_check/violent_media.html
At 13 I was alone and afraid. Taught by my well-meaning,
progressive, English-teacher parents that violence was wrong, that
rage was something to be overcome and cooperation was always better
than conflict, I suffocated my deepest fears and desires under a
nice-boy persona. Placed in a small, experimental school that was
wrong for me, afraid to join my peers in their bumptious rush into
adolescent boyhood, I withdrew into passivity and loneliness. My
parents, not trusting the violent world of the late 1960s, built a
wall between me and the crudest elements of American pop culture.
Then the Incredible Hulk smashed through it.
One of my mother's students convinced her that Marvel Comics,
despite their apparent juvenility and violence, were in fact devoted
to lofty messages of pacifism and tolerance. My mother borrowed
some, thinking they'd be good for me. And so they were. But not
because they preached lofty messages of benevolence. They were good
for me because they were juvenile. And violent.
The character who caught me, and freed me, was the Hulk:
overgendered and undersocialized, half-naked and half-witted, raging
against a frightened world that misunderstood and persecuted him.
Suddenly I had a fantasy self to carry my stifled rage and buried
desire for power. I had a fantasy self who was a self: unafraid of
his desires and the world's disapproval, unhesitating and effective
in action. "Puny boy follow Hulk!" roared my fantasy self, and I
followed.
I followed him to new friends -- other sensitive geeks chasing their
own inner brutes -- and I followed him to the arrogant,
self-exposing, self-assertive, superheroic decision to become a
writer. Eventually, I left him behind, followed more sophisticated
heroes, and finally my own lead along a twisting path to a career
and an identity. In my 30s, I found myself writing action movies and
comic books. I wrote some Hulk stories, and met the geek-geniuses
who created him. I saw my own creations turned into action figures,
cartoons, and computer games. I talked to the kids who read my
stories. Across generations, genders, and ethnicities I kept seeing
the same story: people pulling themselves out of emotional traps by
immersing themselves in violent stories. People integrating the
scariest, most fervently denied fragments of their psyches into
fuller senses of selfhood through fantasies of superhuman combat and
destruction.
I have watched my son living the same story -- transforming himself
into a bloodthirsty dinosaur to embolden himself for the plunge into
preschool, a Power Ranger to muscle through a social competition in
kindergarten. In the first grade, his friends started climbing a
tree at school. But he was afraid: of falling, of the centipedes
crawling on the trunk, of sharp branches, of his friends' derision.
I took my cue from his own fantasies and read him old Tarzan comics,
rich in combat and bright with flashing knives. For two weeks he
lived in them. Then he put them aside. And he climbed the tree.
But all the while, especially in the wake of the recent burst of
school shootings, I heard pop psychologists insisting that violent
stories are harmful to kids, heard teachers begging parents to keep
their kids away from "junk culture," heard a guilt-stricken friend
with a son who loved Pokémon lament, "I've turned into the bad mom
who lets her kid eat sugary cereal and watch cartoons!"
That's when I started the research.
"Fear, greed, power-hunger, rage: these are aspects of our selves
that we try not to experience in our lives but often want, even
need, to experience vicariously through stories of others," writes
Melanie Moore, Ph.D., a psychologist who works with urban teens.
"Children need violent entertainment in order to explore the
inescapable feelings that they've been taught to deny, and to
reintegrate those feelings into a more whole, more complex, more
resilient selfhood."
Moore consults to public schools and local governments, and is also
raising a daughter. For the past three years she and I have been
studying the ways in which children use violent stories to meet
their emotional and developmental needs -- and the ways in which
adults can help them use those stories healthily. With her help I
developed Power Play, a program for helping young people improve
their self-knowledge and sense of potency through heroic, combative
storytelling.
We've found that every aspect of even the trashiest pop-culture
story can have its own developmental function. Pretending to have
superhuman powers helps children conquer the feelings of
powerlessness that inevitably come with being so young and small.
The dual-identity concept at the heart of many superhero stories
helps kids negotiate the conflicts between the inner self and the
public self as they work through the early stages of socialization.
Identification with a rebellious, even destructive, hero helps
children learn to push back against a modern culture that cultivates
fear and teaches dependency.
At its most fundamental level, what we call "creative violence" --
head-bonking cartoons, bloody videogames, playground karate, toy
guns -- gives children a tool to master their rage. Children will
feel rage. Even the sweetest and most civilized of them, even those
whose parents read the better class of literary magazines, will feel
rage. The world is uncontrollable and incomprehensible; mastering it
is a terrifying, enraging task. Rage can be an energizing emotion, a
shot of courage to push us to resist greater threats, take more
control, than we ever thought we could. But rage is also the emotion
our culture distrusts the most. Most of us are taught early on to
fear our own. Through immersion in imaginary combat and
identification with a violent protagonist, children engage the rage
they've stifled, come to fear it less, and become more capable of
utilizing it against life's challenges.
I knew one little girl who went around exploding with fantasies so
violent that other moms would draw her mother aside to whisper, "I
think you should know something about Emily...." Her parents were
separating, and she was small, an only child, a tomboy at an age
when her classmates were dividing sharply along gender lines. On the
playground she acted out "Sailor Moon" fights, and in the classroom
she wrote stories about people being stabbed with knives. The more
adults tried to control her stories, the more she acted out the
roles of her angry heroes: breaking rules, testing limits, roaring
threats.
Then her mother and I started helping her tell her stories. She
wrote them, performed them, drew them like comics: sometimes bloody,
sometimes tender, always blending the images of pop culture with her
own most private fantasies. She came out of it just as fiery and
strong, but more self-controlled and socially competent: a leader
among her peers, the one student in her class who could truly pull
boys and girls together.
I worked with an older girl, a middle-class "nice girl," who held
herself together through a chaotic family situation and a tumultuous
adolescence with gangsta rap. In the mythologized street violence of
Ice T, the rage and strutting of his music and lyrics, she found a
theater of the mind in which she could be powerful, ruthless,
invulnerable. She avoided the heavy drug use that sank many of her
peers, and flowered in college as a writer and political activist.
I'm not going to argue that violent entertainment is harmless. I
think it has helped inspire some people to real-life violence. I am
going to argue that it's helped hundreds of people for every one
it's hurt, and that it can help far more if we learn to use it well.
I am going to argue that our fear of "youth violence" isn't
well-founded on reality, and that the fear can do more harm than the
reality. We act as though our highest priority is to prevent our
children from growing up into murderous thugs -- but modern kids are
far more likely to grow up too passive, too distrustful of
themselves, too easily manipulated.
We send the message to our children in a hundred ways that their
craving for imaginary gun battles and symbolic killings is wrong, or
at least dangerous. Even when we don't call for censorship or forbid
"Mortal Kombat," we moan to other parents within our kids' earshot
about the "awful violence" in the entertainment they love. We tell
our kids that it isn't nice to play-fight, or we steer them from
some monstrous action figure to a pro-social doll. Even in the most
progressive households, where we make such a point of letting
children feel what they feel, we rush to substitute an enlightened
discussion for the raw material of rageful fantasy. In the process,
we risk confusing them about their natural aggression in the same
way the Victorians confused their children about their sexuality.
When we try to protect our children from their own feelings and
fantasies, we shelter them not against violence but against power
and selfhood. What do you think?
This essay is excerpted from the book, Power Play, by Gerard Jones
and Melanie Moore, Ph.D., coming from Basic Books in 2001.
Gerard Jones is a veteran writer of comics,
cartoons, and
screenplays,
including "Batman," "Spider-Man," "Ultraforce," and the
forthcoming
"Pokémon" newspaper comic strip and the Web strip The
Haunted Man. He is
the author of several books, including "Honey I'm
Home: Sitcoms
Selling the American Dream" (St. Martin's Books).
Melanie Moore,
Ph.D. is a former fellow of the Stanford Center on
Adolescence and a
consultant on children's issues and education
government
agencies and nonprofits.
Quick and Dirty Guide to Video Games