There’s a tale told about grand­par­ents who refused to take the grand­kids to see a clas­si­cal orches­tra per­form.  Asked why, they explained that it was a bad influ­ence.  Too much sax and violins.

I was remind­ed of that joke by fan­ta­sy author George R. R. Mar­t­in’s reply to those con­cerned about the graph­ic sex in his books (and the TV show based on them) (via Boing­Bo­ing):

“I can describe an axe enter­ing a human skull in great explic­it detail and no one will blink twice at it. I pro­vide a sim­i­lar descrip­tion, just as detailed, of a penis enter­ing a vagi­na, and I get let­ters about it and peo­ple swear­ing off,” he said.

“To my mind this is kind of frus­trat­ing, it’s mad­ness. Ulti­mate­ly, in the his­to­ry of [the] world, penis­es enter­ing vagi­nas have giv­en a lot of peo­ple a lot of plea­sure; axes enter­ing skulls, well, not so much.”

I agree entire­ly with Mar­tin, which puts me at odds with var­i­ous groups, not least the MPAA, which assigns movie rat­ings.  You can stab, shoot, maim, beat, spin­dle, and spool movie char­ac­ters with­out get­ting an R rat­ing, but show them hav­ing sex or using lan­guage that real peo­ple use to non­vi­o­lent­ly release anger, and you’ve got a restrict­ed audi­ence.  Dit­to for TV: astound­ing num­bers of peo­ple on TV are shot, stabbed, and maimed, but heav­en for­fend we should see Janet Jack­son’s breast for a moment, or that some­one should drop an f‑bomb.

This was brought home to me last week­end, when I pre­sent­ed at and attend­ed the annu­al meet­ing of the Amer­i­can Sci­en­tif­ic Affil­i­a­tion.  ASA is a group of sci­en­tists who are also evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians.  They are most­ly squared away on evo­lu­tion, though there was a siz­able pres­ence from the ID cre­ation­ist Dis­cov­ery Institute. 

I’ll have more to say about the con­fer­ence anoth­er day, but there was a moment dur­ing a keynote which seemed emblem­at­ic of the expe­ri­ence.  The con­fer­ence’s theme was “Sci­ence, Faith & the Media: Com­mu­ni­cat­ing Beyond Books,” so they invit­ed a Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­er in to address the crowd.  The speak­er, an evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian, has pro­duced block­busters includ­ing 4 Star Trek movies and X‑Men movies, but also pro­duced the Left Behind movies (a Rap­ture fan­ta­sy based on the world’s worst books) and the cli­mate change deny­ing Cool It!  He praised Glad­i­a­tor as his favorite movie, and men­tioned Mel Gib­son’s bloody Pas­sion of the Christ favor­ably.  He also spoke high­ly of Big Bang The­o­ry as an exam­ple of Hol­ly­wood get­ting sci­ence right.

The first ques­tion from the audi­ence asked why the char­ac­ters on Big Bang The­o­ry were so sex-obsessed, a cri­tique he grant­ed freely.  Lat­er, he was asked how his Chris­tian­i­ty informed his pro­duc­ing deci­sions; he explained how he’d replied to evan­gel­i­cal crit­ics of witch­craft when he pro­duced Hocus Pocus, and how he’d got­ten unspec­i­fied swear words out of the Wolver­ine script.

Did he do any­thing to tone down the bloody vio­lence of Wolver­ine?  It nev­er occurred to him to say any­thing on the top­ic, despite the mur­der­ous ram­page which took place less than 24 hours ear­li­er at a screen­ing of the lat­est Bat­man movie.  He felt no com­punc­tion about cit­ing Glad­i­a­tor as his favorite film, despite the gore that movie spreads across the screen.  Nor did any­one from the audi­ence have any­thing to say on the sub­ject of vio­lence in movies, even though sex, lan­guage, and witch­craft had their moments in the sun.

To be clear, I think we can afford to take Amer­i­can soci­ety’s con­cern about sex, vio­lence, and lan­guage in movies down sev­er­al notch­es.  My con­cern here is the imbal­ance, the taboos ban­ning sex and strong lan­guage, while treat­ing vio­lence as rou­tine and accept­able.  As I think about how I want to intro­duce TV and movies to my baby as he grows old­er, I’m far less con­cerned about let­ting him see lov­ing, con­sen­su­al sex or real­is­tic lan­guage than I am about him see­ing vio­lence offered as a solution.