On Dangerous Penises and Harmless Torture

To continue my previous rant...er, post, and to indulge my love of throwing a controversial theory around, are images of sex, violence, and drugs in popular media all that harmful? Or is the contextual basis what we should really be looking at?

Here's my (soon to be belaboured) point. I don't think that violence, harsh language, or sex is all that harmful to older children or teenagers, provided they are capable of understanding the context and the purpose for showing it. When it doesn't have a purpose, it's what we call gratuitous. There just to titillate, a little "gratuity" or tip for the hardworking average Joe for coughing up $25 or whatever it is now for a ticket. I love gratuitous nudity and violence in its place. If you ask me, a courtroom drama where the DA takes down her hair, whips out her breasts, blows up a car outside, and then resumes her closing argument is a better courtroom drama because of it. But I'm 28 years old and a working professional. I would never blow up a car I paid 18% interest on for four years. And I also know that showing your breasts in a professional situations is more likely to get you hauled into HR's office than into a plushy executive position.

There, the purpose is to entertain. It's not a part of the story, no statement is being made, and the contextual basis is nil. We as adults can make that distinction. But children can't. We'd hardly want an 8 year old to think that blowing up a car doesn't have consequences. Or to not realize that when a ninja clears a room of bad guys, that the reason the bad guys are conveniently lying quietly afterward is because they are dead or dying of massive internal injuries. So do I believe we should limit gratuitous nudity, drug use, violence, and language in film to adults? Abso-fucking-lutely. Without the ability for children to understand not only what they're seeing, but why they're seeing it, they should never see disturbing material separated from its proper contextual basis. They just don't have the capacity to make the call...but moreover to even understand that a call is being made.

But when controversial elements are used to make a point, I believe it can be more beneficial than damaging. Sure, you don't show a three year old a beheading under any circumstances. But look at Glory, Boys in the Hood, Requiem for a Dream, Mean Creek, or Bowling for Columbine. These movies all use controversial elements, and all of them earn their right to depict what they depict with a thoughtful treatment of the matter at hand. Hotel Rwanda showed little children dead on the lawn of a suburban neighborhood, and that image has never left me. But it earned the right to do that. Pay it Forward used the death of a child to force people to cry right at the end. It was completely unnecessary, exploitative, and served as a plot twist. It was melodrama, and melodrama is entertainment. Is the death of a child entertaining to you? Not to me.

Glory showed graphic violence, yes. Would I recommend that 11 year olds see it? No, but it's a well-made film with considerable historical value that puts across so many valuable messages without being preachy: that people united in something of value can put aside racial and class differences and support one another, that standing up for what is fair and right is more important than monetary gain or social acceptance, that bad attitudes can be changed by empathy and willingness to understand a fellow man's experiences, and that war is a horrific experience and that the casualties involved are significant and personal and tragic - unlike most video games would have us believe. Yet no one under 18 is able to see this movie, despite the fact that they are the very same age group targeted by military recruitment efforts. Apparently we believe that 17 year olds with parental consent are fit to serve in the military, but not old enough to witness the human consequences of war.

Boys in the Hood was a movie that looked at systemic racism as a whole, and more specifically, how gang violence, drugs and alcohol, and absent parents contribute to the shocking mortality rate of (mostly) African-American (mostly) men living in ghettos. This is a very relevant film that takes a hard look at the senseless violence that results from joining a gang, and the trap that drug and alcohol use can create when it strips away the desire to change one's current environment. Unless I'm mistaken, and the newspapers would lead me to believe I'm not, the 15-17 year olds that can't see it would be the ones that need this message, in time, the most. Not to mention that the characters in the movie were 17 year olds; are we arguing that we can bear that they deal with in reality what we couldn't bear for them to see in a movie?

Requiem for a Dream is disturbing, all right. The MPAA felt it was so much so that it was hit with the NC-17 rating, meaning that no theatres in their right mind would have shown it, and it would have faced financial ruin. The producers finally elected to release it unrated to avoid this, but theatres would then still have to restrict children. Now, this is not for the kiddies; double-headed dildos, forced amputation, electroshock treatment and prison beatings are pretty extreme consequences of drug use. But as a deterrent from drug use, for older teenagers who are experimenting with harder and harder drugs at younger and younger ages, this sure would beat the pants off the vague "just say no" superficiality of most anti-drug policies. The presence of the drugs isn't the point, and their inclusion shouldn't necessarily be the problem, since only the certifiably insane would claim that this film glamorizes drug use in any way.

Mean Creek, rated R, takes a calm, quiet, deeply unsettling look at school-age bullying and what can happen when a bad, if somewhat understandable idea gets into the hands of the wrong kid. The bully in this movie is pretty bad, but the movie is brave enough and cares enough to show that his aggression is due to the deep loneliness he feels at being unable to connect. The teenager that encourages the others to act out a vengeance ploy is no white knight avenger but a bully in his own right, satisfying his own emotional agenda. The teens realize once the plan is underway that it might be a bad idea, but don't act, and their inability to resist the mob mentality results in tragedy. As if that wasn't enough antidote to the "kick the bad guy's ass" simplicity of most teen dramas, they must struggle with whether to tell the truth and deal with the consequences, and why they must in order to hope for redemption. The reason, incidentally, for banning this film from being seen by teenagers is because of the use of the "F" word. If you know of even a 10 year old who has never heard this word, you live in a much nicer world than I.

Here we have a movie depicting preteens and teenagers struggling as they start to develop an independent moral system. It's just that lack of moral system that we point to time and time again when we see horror in the news; but since we never give young people the encouragement or opportunity to think about these issues, how can we expect them to develop it in a vacuum? Bowling for Columbine is another great example of this specious logic, a thought-provoking film that teenagers cannot see. If anyone should be outraged by this, it should be those very teenagers, their schoolteachers, and parents. Gun control is becoming an issue that is screaming to be addressed. Children do not feel secure at schools, and they know damn well why they shouldn't; the same 17 years olds that acquired the guns and killed their classmates would have been deemed too young to see a film discussing their actions or the political system of a country that allowed it to happen. If teenagers are not asked to think about such things, we are putting an already vulnerable segment in an even more precarious position: ignorance.

I am certainly not advocating movies as a scare tactic for today's youth, but I believe that raising consciousness and having discussion about issues like drug use, bullying, gun control, gang violence, war, racism are more important than using censorship to pretend they don't exist. If a movie earns the right to depict something with sensitivity and depth, let us think twice before we reject it out of hand.

Or at the least, demand that the MPAA start to justify their decision making process. The sight of a penis or pubic hair almost guarantees an NC-17 regardless of context. Too traumatizing, I suppose, for teens to see something that exists in their own pants. But somehow it's not considered traumatizing for trashy Hollywood fare to show misogynist attitudes and violence if it's supposed to be funny.

How else do you explain the MPAA feeling that a movie like Employee of the Month, where the clerks sit around spewing homophobic remarks and a dimwitted female lead rewards with sexual favours anyone who attains "Employee of the Month" status as suitable entertainment for 14 year olds?

And then there's Big Daddy, where an unfit adult caregiver repeatedly has fits of violent rage in front of a 5 year old and even encourages said 5 year old to participate. Adults know that a child in real life who was abandoned, found by a stranger and forced to witness violence and urinate on newspapers would be seriously traumatized. And probably, so do most teenagers. But a little more insidious is how the main character continuously degrades and humiliates a woman because she worked as a waitress for Hooters to put herself through medical school. Somehow this feels...icky. What is the movie trying to say, here? We know that a woman intelligent and driven enough to support herself and get through medical school while working is a far better role model than a 32 year old who works one day a week at a tollbooth because he's living off a settlement, who uses an abandoned child as a ploy to get dates, and who is a violent jerk, but the movie's not quite sure about that. His incessant and misogynistic comments about her being "nothing but a Hooters girl" and "what are you going to tell your kids about their mother" despite her being a doctor is a little worrisome, considering that his character uses a "live nudes" sign as a night light. But the fun is being poked at his stupidity, right? I'm not so sure. The former Hooters girl with the medical degree is portrayed very clearly as the 'bad guy' for being concerned about the child's welfare and condemning the clearly antisocial behaviour of the Sandler character, while the Sandler character comes off as sympathetic. So what's going on? And can a 13 year old really make that distinction, if I can't quite figure it out?

Or 2 Fast 2 Furious, another PG-13 where we have men repeatedly punching and kicking each other, a race where a car (and presumably, the driver) ends up turned sideways beneath a semi and is crushed, a man repeatedly bashing another man's head onto a dashboard and then using a button to eject said man into a body of water and (are you ready for this?) a scene where a men forcibly ties another man down, places a live rat in an upside down can on the man's bare chest and heats the can with a torch, thus making the tortured rat have nowhere to escape but through the man's body. Soon thereafter the man removes the can and rat, we see the bloody scratch marks on the man's chest.

Now that's something that I just wouldn't want a 14 year old to be exposed to. MPAA, you have some 'splaining to do.

On Fascism in Hollywood

The MPAA gets to do whatever they want and that really pisses me off.

The MPAA (that's the Motion Picture Association of America, natch) is the association that determines movie ratings. Movie ratings, in turn, tell us what subject matter is harmful to people, and at what age.

So what, you ask? Well, film has and continues to play a large part in shaping dominant cultures, and is a medium through which we express what is relevant to our society and how we interpret it. Not only the boob, to be flip, but how we feel about boobs. It gives us both the subject and the contextual frame. The medium, as MacLuhan has long said, is the message.

Said MPAA has had a long standing (and long criticized) policy of tolerating extreme movie violence while adopting a very punitive attitude towards acts of sexuality, particularly that related to the human body. This would lead me to believe that the minds behind the MPAA's rating system feel that extreme gory violence is less harmful to people than sex. As someone who has dated in Vancouver for five years now, I'm almost tempted to agree.

The identity of the MPAA members is a secret more carefully protected than how they get the Caramilk into the Caramilk bar (which by the way, I looked up, and it's clever machinery and judicious layering.) Despite all this cloak and dagger crap, it's probably a safe guess that an association that would give a movie featuring loads of casual and gory violence and pretty extreme homophobia a PG-13, one free of violence but featuring a naked woman an R, and one featuring a plain old penis the "kiss of death" NC17 rating might possibly have a disproportionate prevalence of heterosexual conservative white males. But that's only my guess; the MPAA has never, to my knowledge, been required to reveal the demographics of their members, how they are chosen, or even the system they use to rate the movies themselves. Doesn't that seem a little strange to you? My beloved second family throws an annual rib competition that has a more formal and accountable process than that, and last I checked, BBQ ribs have only a very minor impact on the formation of cultural values, at least outside of Texas. So why all the secrecy?

The MPAA claims that their group is demographically balanced, but given that they've taken pains to never be accountable to prove that, it's a questionable claim at best. Secondly, the fact that the members selected are exclusively parents inherently refutes their claim that the association is demographically balanced, at least in terms of sexual preference, given that there are still states in the US that ban gay adoption. If fewer gay people are permitted to adopt in the US, and thus be parents, then that automatically ensures a heterosexual bias, admittedly slight, on the association.

And doesn't it seem odd that the fact that the members have to be parents? This would lead us to conclude they don't think that people without children would have a balanced perspective on what is and isn't damaging. This is a distinction that eliminates the rather valuable opinions of counsellors, sociologists, schoolteachers, doctors and politicians, should they not have children themselves. There are some pretty bad parents out there and some pretty conscientious single people who would like to have some say in the world they bring children into, should they choose to. I think it would be a tough argument to state that bearing children makes one more open-minded, educated, or morally apt. It didn't do much for poor Britney, did it?

Even more ridiculous is that the parents in question aren't even required to be parents of young children - the very ones that would impacted by the ratings - so a 60 year old with grown children would still be prefered over a childless child psychologist. I'm not trying to generalize, but someone whose last experience raising little children was when Eisenhower was president might be slightly out of touch with the challenges faced by today's parents and the progressions of modern social norms. Kids today have internet access, cell phones, and increasingly live in urban cities. Trust me, a boob is probably the last thing you need to worry about them being harmed by.

So we have an association made up of the most wealthy studios dictating who can see what and when and why, using a rating system and a member selection roster that is deliberately kept from the public. And the studios stand to profit by their decisions, of course, which makes the whole thing even more suspect since they aren't exactly impartial. There is no accountability save a repeal board - made up of the same members, through a process also not required to be visible. Excuse me if this sounds a little libertarian, but isn't that just de facto censorship supporting the moral beliefs (and prejudices) of a specific social and demographic class who stand to benefit financially from maintaining the status quo? And don't we all kind of agree that that's a bad thing?

Adolf, put your hand down, please.



For Roger Ebert, a tremendously gifted writer who once postulated that the MPAA board members have "cut loose from sanity and are thrashing about at random."

On Gluttony

How did gluttony get to be a deadly sin? I figured I'd start with the "lightest" sin and work my way up, but come on. I'm not convinced this even is a sin. It would be understandable for it to be a sin if what you were eating was, say, babies, or if you were a glutton because you were taking food away from hungry people, but how is it a sin all on its own? Wanting more of something is pretty natural.

In fact, it's driven by a survival mechanism. If a wolf brings down a caribou, you never see it nibble a leg and then go all coy and say to the wolf head-deep in the belly next door, "oh no, you bad thing, I just couldn't eat one more bite!" No, they eat until they fall over. And they're the ones that survive the winter.

When people are gluttonous about good things, like exercise or charity or education, that's a good thing, although kind of annoying for the rest of us. So I suppose in order to indict gluttony, you have to indict it only as it relates to naughty things, like recreational drugs or Big Macs. But even then, how sinful is gluttony? Yes, it's not a good idea to turn one's body into Vegas, but is it a sinful one? For the most part, gluttony only punishes the person doing the gluttony, so it's a tool to punish sinners. (Just like religion.) I guess being gluttonous could make one grossly overweight, and thus makes one look bad in stretchy clothing, and I think that we can all agree that looking bad in stretchy clothing is definitely a sin. But the mindset behind gluttony? That's beyond reproach. We love people who really throw themselves passionately into things. So what if you're trying to smoke cupcakes through a crack pipe instead of adopting underprivileged orphans from exotic countries by the dozen? The central dedication is the same.

But, you say, people don't just hurt themselves. Addicts hurt their families and loved ones. People who eat, drink or hotknife their feelings tend to pass those traits on to their children. So, for the purposes of making this a very neat seven-part post, and in the spirit of not trying to refute the word of god, here are some gross facts about gluttony that make me kind of embarassed to be human.

In a medical study, people who had eaten a full meal within an hour were offered either a free medium or giant-size popcorn. Gues which one they invariably picked? And all the participants dug in and ate the popcorn even despite none being hungry, but that's not even the gross part. The people with the giant-sized ones were given stale, two-week old popcorn and they ate it anyway. Apparently, we'll eat something if it's free, even when we're not hungry and even when that thing is garbage.

In another study, one group was offered chocolate cake and another group 'gateau du chocolate.' The group with the gateau du chocolate ate way more than the chocoate cake group, even gateau du chocolate just means chocolate cake in French. (I guess that doesn't really make us gluttonous so much as snobby, and stupid.)

Scientists have found that if you eat with one other person, you'll eat far less than if you are eating with seven people. In fact, people will consume 96% more food in big groups. I have no idea why, except maybe that humans are pretty competitive; maybe we think it's kind of cool to be able to eat a steak covered in...another steak.

All of these facts, in case you were doubting me (and you are right to - I make up facts all the time) are from O Magazine. And I suspect Ms. Winfrey might know a thing or two about eating habits. So I maintain: gluttony is good in theology but not in applied science.

And eating babies is still definitely not OK.

On Why I Love the English Language

“Owl, wise though he was in many ways, was able to read and write and spell his own name, WOL, yet somehow went all to pieces over delicate words like MEASLES and BUTTEREDTOAST.”

~From Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day

The English language is a marvel of malleability. While there are some who will rage over the inclusion of slang terms into the dusty old upright corridors of Webster’s Dictionary, I am not one of them. I take a perverse delight in the confusions that result from the fluidity of modern language, and in no confusion do I take more delight than the made-up word.

Probably the primary reason that I do not censure the made-up word is that I have discovered I use a few of them myself. For example, today the auto-dictionary scolded me with its censorious little squiggly red line for using the word “agreeance.”

Surely agreeance is a word. I use it all the time: “if so-and-so is in agreeance, we’ll move on this.” “Are we all in agreeance?” Et cetera, et cetera. Except agreeance isn’t a word. The actual correct word is agreement. And so I was forced to acknowledge my own ignorance and be corrected by that bloody Microsoft paperclip. Guilty as charged.

Another set of words which cause a lot of confusion, and which result in descriptions of physically impossible feats, are figuratively and literally. Literally is shorter and therefore easier to remember, so is often used both for its actual meaning, and when people really mean figuratively. Literally means it actually happened as the words say it did – if someone literally jumped out of their shoes then you have a human being who has just levitated out of their Sketchers, and it’s probably time to call Ripley. If they didn’t actually physically jump out of their shoes, but were very scared (and perhaps demonstrated other amusing bodily feats, like wetting themselves) then they figuratively jumped out of their shoes. But literally sounds much more dramatic, and is thus much favored in cocktail party conversations.

My other particular favorite is irregardless. That is definitely not a word, although Websters caved and decided to add it with the definition of “the frequently misused synonym of regardless.” I suspect this made-up word was birthed from regardless and irrelevant, like some freaky centaur of ancient Greece, and I love it. But for the record, it's just plain regardless.

This word is extra fun because it’s often used by pretentious people who are including it in their sentence to sound smarter...

...but who are really just showing themselves, in fact, to be Wols.


For my friend T, who knows irregardless isn’t a word, and gleefully uses it anyways.

On Secretly Being a Yuppie

“Yuppie stands for "young upwardly mobile professional". Nightclub flunkie is not a professional category. I wish we were yuppies. Young, upwardly mobile, professional. Those are good things, not bad things.” ~ Des McGrath from Walt Whitman’s The Last Days of Disco

It’s interesting, isn’t it, how social monikers have become anathema? There were days when people would proudly declare themselves hippies, when feminists didn’t politely preface any opinion with “I definitely wouldn’t call myself a feminist,” and when people didn’t shrink from announcing themselves as Republicans for fear of being taken for a gun-toting anti-abortionist happily strafe-bombing Middle Eastern daycare centers. In simpler times, identifying with a group was reassuring; it served as a guidebook of how to dress, act, think, and whether or not one should ever buy a Volvo; and also to neatly distinguish neighbors in the daunting sameness of suburban life. ("Darling, of course we should have the Smiths over for dinner, but I heard they have their children home-schooled, are we quite sure they're not Communists?")

The neologism “yuppie” was coined, according to those sources that define such inane things as these, during Gary Hart’s 1984 presidential campaign. The term was used to describe his strongest supporters: socially liberal yet fiscally conservative young professionals. When Newsweek proudly proclaimed 1984 “The Year of the Yuppie,” the delight once taken in simple social categorization came under sudden and vicious attack by the emerging Generation X. Caught up in the orgy of apathy towards conformity, the title quickly tumbled from grace, absorbing all the negative connotations we can quickly recall by leafing through an issue of The Sharper Image, and its use today has dwindled to the point of near-extinction.

But have the yuppies themselves? I say no.

One defining quality of yuppiedom that has clearly not died with the label was single-minded devotion to career. According to The Yuppie Handbook (1984), “career had to be personally meaningful, emotionally satisfying, and a vehicle for self-expression;” in other words, people took their jobs far too seriously. Take a look through the titles in the corporate section at your local bookstore or at the ridiculously aggrandized vision and mission statements of any company’s website, and you’ll see that little has really changed.

(“Our guiding mission is to deliver superior quality products and services for our customers and communities through leadership, innovation and partnerships. Our vision is to be the quality leader in everything we do.” Name the organization? Tim Horton’s. Yes, folks, that lofty statement is the aim of a company that makes donut holes.)

Even job titles are morphing to keep pace with the need for us to imagine ourselves as deeply and emotionally fulfilled by our nine-to-fives; call me cynical, but it doesn’t make bothering people at home any more fun by calling myself a Outbound Customer Advocate rather than a telemarketer, and Ken Blanchard must be completely unfazed by his co-worker’s snickers to call himself the 'Chief Spiritual Officer' of his unimaginatively named Ken Blanchard Companies.

Yuppies were also highly discriminating (or at least highly self-conscious) about their social markers. No Danish minimalist glass coffee table would have dared be unadorned by a copy of The New Yorker, high-end food brands became the rage, and beer was snubbed in favor of wine, even by men (somewhat understandably – this was before the age of the microbrewery.)

Sound familiar? I can’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t be thrilled to find something other than Maxim in their potential date’s apartment. Capers and other high-priced “whole life” markets are popping up all over the place like the scrappy little organic veggies they sell, and “wine bar” has now entered our common lexicon just as “pub” goes on the wane. Those who pointed at the yuppie smugly and laughed at their slavish dedication to brands such as LL Bean and Mercedes should be cautioned; those who live in Apple or Lululemon houses best not throw stones.

What else did a yuppie make? An obsession with health and fitness, designer vodka, stainless steel appliances, cocaine, exposed brick, cocktails with silly names, and pasta. A quick spin through the trendy district of any urban center – and I point squarely at thee, Yaletown – shows that while carbohydrates have gone out of style, little else has. Politically speaking, I can't recall a single conversation I've had in the last few years where the person I was speaking to didn't say that they were "in the middle." "How so?" "Well, I mean, I'm socially liberal, but I don't believe in how overrun the government is by special interest groups." Right. In other words, be a whale-saving feminist minority rights supporter all you want, just don't ask me for any money for it. Socially liberal but fiscally conservative.

And now we're back to Gary Hart.

So, I am sad to say, we may in fact still be yuppies; it’s just that a label tends to fade very quickly until the group it defines eventually expropriates it. (I suppose that’s why honky never really caught on.) The yuppies may have shed their label in shame because the hippies and hipsters made fun of them, but they quietly went about consuming anyway. Now after a twenty year hiatus whereby we were scolded by Greenpeace, enlightened by the Body Shop and cautioned by Enron, the yuppie is back. And we are he.

Look on the bright side; a yuppie, at least, would have never been caught dead shopping at Walmart.

For my friend C, who is the only other person besides me who would admit to being a yuppie.