Sex and Violence: Or, the other Way Around

    Life and art run close together. Both involve a lot of the two things that get so much attention, ratings, criticism, and money in movies and television and sometimes music, which are forces that either drive some, or in so many ways affect us all: sex and violence, or in the reverse order. Sometimes they are not together, but they often come as as duo. Some people avoid both most of their lives, which is a goal of some religious or otherwise pure or simple people. They are able to avoid violence through pacifism and good fortune and perhaps avoid sexual relations through the will of celibacy, or perhaps innocently going through life without it. Then there are the majority of us.

   Art through the ages reflect all of these factors. Sometimes life imitates art, but I find it is usually the other way around. Art catches up with reality, much of the time.

   I have studied some of the history of film, a bit formally and more informally (like the majority of us), which accompanies television, the theatre, and music and a few other arts. The arts are often lucrative, and the bottom line to the masses, what subject matter that they pay to see, is violence and sex. It is portrayed in our video games, too, lest I not recognize that huge growing medium. Life and art merge into our own hands, hearts, eyes, and souls. Some, a great deal that is still profitable, does not include explicit sex or violence, but we know that too much of it, in my opinion, does.

   Why, what, how, where?

   The taboo and the forbidden are titillating and stimulating for national reasons. Freud would certainly tell us this, even though his interpretations and analyses may be very skewed. Ah, yes, all the German thinkers. Since Nietzsche and Faust and before... Heidegger, Hegel, and the others like Kant and Weber, and maybe Hecht. Brecht and other artists and social scientists and mad scientists, including those of the wars and movements. Deutschland, Deutschland, Deutschland...

 

   All cultures and societies have their relationships with the taboo and verboten, where it is more acceptable to some than others. Where some religions, institutions, and groups and individuals try their collective best to combat smut in the forms of indecency through the forms of sexual messaging and gore, all of it gratuitous or beyond the pale of worth, there are many people and industries exploiting sexual images and practices, and violence and gore, or a combination of the two (salacious films, for example, even to the extreme of snuff films) to exploit their subjects and pruriently tease or tease out the traffic of millions. It is like second hand prostitution, or sex trafficking, or bounty hunting and mercenary work for profit rather than the cause: the worst of us humans. Exploiters and human graft opportunists.

People can argue that governments and other institutions, even hospitals, religions, schools and academies, law enforcement agencies and courts, otherwise normally considered paragons of virtue, are also corrupted and bent towards corruption and suppression of populations for control over sexual mores and methods of their own violence and manipulation and coercion of people for its own interests.

That is a story for another day.

For now, be aware that your/our artistic tastes and drives and consumption habits feed all of the above.

What is in your entertainment wallet?

Are we parts of the problem, or the solution, or are we mere lifeless dummies tossed to and fro in the rivers of filth and surging undercurrents, battering and bruising and killing the life as it goes towards the oceans of the future?

Should we put up damns and river borders, in this analogy flood controls and erosion bulwarks, to ease the flow of sex and violence?

Makes sense to me.

Control. Moderation. Virtue.

Celebrate the decent.