Random musing about media violence and desensitization

[Mischief Maker]

Everyone's talking about how violence in comic books... oops, I mean in movies... oops, I mean in rap music... oops, I mean in video games is making young men more prone to violence.

I'm wondering if more women are getting into fights they cannot win because of all the movies and TV shows that feature 90 pound waifs spin-kicking 250 pound goons through plate glass windows?

[Obiwanshinobi]

I've yet to see any proof that people exposed to violent fiction get any more violent themselves. Back in mid-nineteen-seventies Bettelheim, in his fairytales' defense, referred to some experiment where kids bullying others, once shown films with violent scenes, would calm down considerably.
When all is said and done, nobody's opinion that cruel, vengeful etc. imagery is all wrong will prevent anyone from savouring such fantasies.

[Xyga]

In my eyes a miserable life (social/family/combined) is a primary reason why people adopt violent thinking and behavior.
Violent media can then become one of many inspiration sources for violent acts, but unless forcefully spammed into an individual's mind like a brainwashing routine, they're not harmful.

I mean any human without a specific mental disease or who hasn't been intentionally conditioned, should be able to reason enough not to let himself be influenced by pictures, games, movies, books, whatever.

Like other species we're not naturally attracted to (our own or other's) pain, suffering, cruelty, murder, etc. Or if we are sometimes it should be on rare occasions and not in excess (not to the extent of actually doing it. And repeatedly).
You know, what Plato said.

Now are many human societies on our Earth taking a wrong turn and influencing individuals to live with more violence than necessary ?
Sure they do. But I will never believe this is what individuals want.
In group though, maybe we are - in our own fashion - like those herds that turn mass-manic in situations of overpopulation and famine.

[Mischief Maker]

I guess the source of my musing is learning about Fallon Fox from Bill Burr's recent standup special. Fox is a Male-to-Female transsexual who was fighting in MMA women's leagues with her man shoulders, man thighs, and man hands intact, and not disclosing her MtF status at first. Apparently a lot of feminists have been defending Fox's right to compete in women's leagues despite the fact that the result is a bunch of women getting the crap beaten out of them by brutal knockout by someone who is still physically a man.

I mean look at this shit! The one whose body is composed of pure muscle, who has a look on her face like she's going to kill and eat your entire family, and who charges WAY more aggressively out of the gate, is a natural born woman. The other one, with the ironic title "Queen of swords," is an ex-dude. Watch the results.

I don't think you could find a single feminist who would find "she started it" an acceptable excuse for domestic violence. Why are feminists saying this is okay? Do they really think a couple weeks of kickboxing class is all Jennifer Lopez needs to beat the crap out of some huge guy?

And yes, one woman did beat Fox with superior technique, but even she said afterward that she took that fight under duress and the hits Fox managed to land rocked her world like no woman's.

[Mortificator]

I'm reminded of that recent controversy where a commentator asked a female tennis player to twirl. A dumb request, no doubt, but it seemed a little hypocritical for women in tennis to blast this guy for sexism, while being fine with competing in a sexually segregated sport.

[JBC]

This is the first I've heard of the Fallon Fox thing. How absurd, but it was bound to happen eventually. Was he reprimanded at all? Did the MMA know about this before allowing him to fight or did he slip under their radar?

[Ed Oscuro]

Good rundown of the pro- and con- arguments about Fallon Fox here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallon_Fox ... _advantage

I'm the main thing that annoys me is something that people can't be "blamed" for. Michael Phelps got some strangely precise diagrams back around his last Olympics talking about his "unusua" body structure giving him concrete advantages in swimming faster. I tend to be less than keen on cheering or booing contests that are so influenced by things that are pretty much outside the control of those involved. It seems like Usain Bolt failing to run through the tape. I don't want to make a bunch of statements about what is good or bad, but I'm more keen on things like cultivating good work ethic and smarts - things people have to work for.

And what's easier (and less honorable) than using other peoples' struggles for our own ends?

Talking about feminism specifically, the argument about whether dimorphism between men and women is sexual, and how that would manifest (physically, mentally?) looks like it's largely divided by attitudes about tactics. It certainly isn't based on whether there is dimorphism, because that's there and, in cases like this, unmistakable. An early-camp feminist, the kind who says "transsexuals are the latest male plot to degrade womanhood" is probably going to say that being a woman means dimorphism has taken hold all throughout a person, so you can't be part one and part the other. They are going to say that Fallon Fox simply isn't a woman, end of story. If men could say the same thing in response, this puts people on both sides of that argument in the position of having to argue that people who don't fit all those classic signs of being male or female don't get to claim a traditional gender or sex identity. On the flip side, it's not obviously wrong to point out that some people are in fact intersex (or whatever word is most appropriate). It's just not appropriate to harp on about it all the time. Back to the Fallon Fox case, I'm sure that a guy who had a too-small body wouldn't get told he had to fight in the women's league; if he did, I'm sure people would be waiting for an underdog breakout, or maybe he'd be a comic villain like Andy Kaufman wrestling women.

Very little of that argument has anything to do with reality, and everything to do with self-serving political expediency. While I'm sure the politics mean that feminists, or any other group, on one side or another have some kind of "compelling interest" in how this story gets told, it's cases like these that make me want to find some simple principles for deciding what to do. In this case I would say: It's up to the fighters to decide what to argue. Of course, the people with direct stakes in this issue don't automatically get free of criticisms that their preferences are politically motivated and open to criticism too.

This is what we get when we have rigid ideologies about what it is you can or can't be, that are so bloated and baroque that they don't allow anybody to ask simple questions like: Is this good for the competitors? Does telling somebody that approval to fight in a league is not related to our feeling about what their gender or sex really is? And what the hell do you say if somebody says "would you love me even if I changed my sex?" Well, I have to admit I don't think you would be a terrible person if you said "I'm sorry, but I just can't do this."

The major thing that's promising is that there has been a large enough group of people, including feminists, who decided that evidence won out over hardened ideology. But unfortunately I'm not sure that enough people realized that baroque theories tend to come into controversy with reality, and so the real answer might be a wholesale abandonment of the rigid ideologies.

[broken harbour]

I tend to think of the media as more of a mirror, reflecting our attitudes rather than deciding them for us.

Would military FPS games be so hot without the world fixated on countless wars over the past decade?

[BryanM]

People are really, really, really ignorant about fitness. About everything outside of their primary job really, but christ. Everyone has to move to live.

Reminds me of a time I was explaining to a woman that anthropometry is the determining difference between male and female performance on the lifts. As the leg is to the arm, similarly is the male arm to the female arm. That a female's body has proportionally more devoted to the leg is the main reason they can still be competitive on the squat, despite the shallower, wider pelvis.

And she said no, she believed it was all hormones. Sigh. The same society where we teach innocent unknowing children that unweighted situps are worth their time, people.

So much of what applies to our world is two dimensional - the cross sectional strength of a bone, the attachments of tendons to a joint. No amount of hormones or go juice can alter one's underlying scaffolding. There are horrific operations to try to get a more dainty ribcage, but good lord. If I were Ellery Sweet or Somik-chan, I'd just wait for Kurzweil's magic nanobots than undergo something so barbaric.

Sure they do. But I will never believe this is what individuals want.

Basic human decency is really a luxury of situation. We're all just animals, and even after a millennia of sexual selection based on how good we are at being serfs/lords in the feudal societal structure, when you gotta eat you gotta eat.

Michael Phelps got some strangely precise diagrams back around his last Olympics talking about his "unusua" body structure giving him concrete advantages in swimming faster.

Bwahahahahha. The man isn't that exceptional at swimming - he's exceptional at kicking off of walls.

The Olympics are kinda dumb : [

Would military FPS games be so hot without the world fixated on countless wars over the past decade?

Yeah, probably. As much as it pains me to live in such a world, magic unicorns/demons/killer robots/anything with variety is not that popular with the norms. Hence why all the prime time sitcoms are so drab and un-anime.

[Ed Oscuro]

Reminds me of a time I was explaining to a woman that anthropometry is the determining difference between male and female performance on the lifts.

Michael Phelps got some strangely precise diagrams back around his last Olympics talking about his "unusua" body structure giving him concrete advantages in swimming faster.

Bwahahahahha. The man isn't that exceptional at swimming - he's exceptional at kicking off of walls. Every single race, he's like second or third, moving just a little slower than the guys better than him, until he makes gains on the turns. I'm not the only person in the world with functioning eyes, am I?

You're still saying that there is dimorphism in play here, though. And with Phelps, again, just like everybody has to walk, you have to kick off the walls to get back down the pool.

If anything, I read you as supporting the idea that early-life changes to body structure - and how do those happen? - persist after body chemistry is altered.

[BryanM]

Ye, I'm of the opinion that your levers and pulleys can only be altered by surgery.

Articles like this one just make my head hurt. I'm pretty damn sure my arms have a lot more mass than a chimpanzee's, but it won't matter after it snaps my arms off and eats my face.

The weird obsession with the extrinsic muscles annoys the shit out of me, too. It's the kind of thing only someone completely ignorant about strength would fixate on.

Is he a mediocre athlete for a male? Absolutely. That's why he's fighting women. If he went up a weight class, he would dominate far more. And if Ericka Newsome was a man, she would not be 143 lbs. She'd be around 154-160 lbs. At the same height. And would throw Fox around like a child.

[DunlapDunlap]

Would military FPS games be so hot without America fixated on countless wars over the past decade?

fixed.

[BryanM]

To be fair to us, it's just a fraction of the country interested in that. There's a reason they're so obsessed with Israel: they want to bring about the apocalypse and it's one of the relics or flags you supposedly need to trigger to open up the raid. I'm hazy on what the end goal is supposed to be: To kill the Four Horsemen and get some sweet lewt? To exterminate all of humanity? The most reasonable assumption is that they want to accelerate themselves into heaven, since they implemented that suicide taboo to hotfix the problem they had with believers killing themselves.

You're probably thinking "that's stupid. You're crazy. You're babbling some stupid conspiracy bullshit on an internet forum" if you're a rational person by now. Denial is a natural coping mechanism when confronted with the deep horrors of reality. You didn't want to believe that NAMBLA was real when you first heard of it, either. Nobody does.

But if you expose yourself to Evangelical sects, you'll be horrified at how many of them are basically socially accepted cults. The movie Jesus Camp is just a small glimpse into their world.

If you combine your knowledge of these cults, and who votes for politicians... 40% of the people who voted for Mitt Romney were white evangelical protestants. The GOP isn't the party of religious people or white people or old people. Even the rich aren't as devoted to them. It is solely, only, the party of evangelicals. That's why they often have candidates that explain to you that you should only have sex to make a baby and masturbation is wrong and birth control is wrong and already you should be beginning to understand why people living under such horrible conditions would really want the world to end pronto.

When George Bush explained to other world leaders "God told me to invade Iraq", that's just the tip of the iceberg. Underneath you have people deciding policy who literally believe we're living in the end times. Why care about Global Warming if we're all going to heaven and hell soon, anyway? Or: Global Warming is just God's design for the apocalypse, so it's a good thing if it really does end up killing everyone.

And that's my essay explaining why my country has a conservative Democrat party and a Republican party that seems at least somewhat interested in ending the world. Sorry everyone, we're doing the best we can to rescue people from these beliefs, but Evangelicals will still have significant political power for the next two or three decades or so. We should become a normal country after then, maybe. : /