As the knife digs into the victim’s body, ten, twenty, thirty times, does the blood coat the fake walls of the movie set or our clothing? As the octagon rattles with the weight of two modern-day UFC gladiators, do we feel the pain of their wounds or the flooding of our endorphins? Entertainment in America is dominated by violence, and its apologizers would have us believe these things:

1. Violent entertainment is not emulated by violent crime
2. Violence is subsidiary to sexual content in its destructiveness
3. Violence is natural, and therefore must be treated as acceptable behavior

• Targeting the Susceptible

Violent entertainment can only be transferred into violent conduct by a willing mind. That violence is indiscriminately broadcast to all audiences, regardless of the mental state of the viewer, is irresponsible negligence on the part of the public. Minds that are prone to violence include those who’ve been raped, assaulted, or have seen someone raped or violated. Social frustration and lack of acceptance can lead to atrocities.

This sad fact is best seen in the case of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, infamous for the Columbine High School massacre. Eric and Dylan were tormented by popular social cliques, and returned an undue revenge to their tormentors, killing fifteen and injuring twenty-four. “All jocks stand up! We’ll get the guys in white hats!” Eric Harris screamed at his hostages. The AOL accounts of both teenagers at the time warned of violence to come, referencing stockpiles of guns and pipe bombs. Both Harris and Klebold were avid DOOM level makers, and while the game itself cannot be blamed for the teens’ bloodlust, the violence exhibited in that game definitely reached the wrong market.

• Attaining “Purity” in the Time of Pornography

Sigmund Freud often quipped that sexual repression was the chief psychological problem of mankind. A staggering 89,000 rapes were documented in the United States in 2009. Many rapes are sadly followed by murder. The wrong messages about sex, especially the concept of abstinence, are choking and suppressing a need as powerful as thirst or hunger, developed at the time of puberty. When a person absorbs a sexual stimulus from the television or Internet, it is a machine - not a person - distributing it. When faced in the real world with the fact that our culture does not favor promiscuity or sexual freedom, one can often feel lied to. The women of our television dramas are submissive, our men arrogant chauvinists. There is a violent theme here involving entitlement: that sex is a man’s right, and a woman’s duty. Even serial killer Ted Bundy related to evangelist James Dobson that the media of 1989 featured, “particularly sexualized violence” [Pureintimacy.org]; this is even more prevalent now. Meaningful sexual content should replace latent violence as our means of understanding sexuality.

• Justifications for Violence

“It’s just murder. All God’s creatures do it. You look in the forests and you see species killing other species, our species killing all species including the forests, and we just call it industry, not murder.”- Mickey Knox (Woody Harrelson), Natural Born Killers

Another ridiculous justification for violence in media is that it is natural, constant, and the way of the world. While this is obviously true, Freud also stated that sublimation - denying the base urges of our psyche - is the hallmark of civilization. In simple terms: our species grew out of slaying each other for food, territory and mating privileges; to resort to violence any longer for a means to these ends is in fact evolutionary regression. Aggression is also easily dismissed as “fake” when seen on TV; but to the impressionable mind, it is very real. It is a solution to problems, and an easy one to take.

Violence is proliferated in the media because it sells. Our capitalistic society has seen the brink of economic ruin in 2008, and the anger resulting from 9.2% of America being unemployed is easily manipulated and propagated. George Orwell described in his novel “1984” a condition in which sexual repression and poor living conditions made people easy to control.

If anger is an energy, rather than allowing it to displace randomly, many have seen that it can be harnessed, and directed into something productive. Violence is a base reaction, one that can be controlled even under the influence of our intoxicating media.