Gore’s article entitled “Curbing the Sexploitation Industry” is an illogical, poorly-planned argumentum ad misericordiam et ad populum relying heavily on the pathos of innocent children becoming damaged somehow by listening to the wrong kind of music without providing solid, legitimate proof or source material. Gore’s position is weak and undefended by any kind of cohesiveness within the body of the paper, a lack of source material referenced in the text to verify any measure of her position, and by the lack evidence indicating that she might any personal experience with the topic she is discussing. Furthermore, her vehemence about explicit song lyrics as a form of sexploitation seems ridiculous when it is compared to other examples of violence against women’s bodies and spirits, such as run-of-the-mill pornography, and her call for parents to “step in” to protect their children from brutality-laden media is undermined by an example she gives that indication that parents, much more than the media, are to blame for their children’s violent actions.
Instead of turning her eyes to the porn industry, which is a much more obvious target for an attack against sexploitation (which is never defined in the article and seems to me to mean, “sexual exploitation”), Gore instead examines song lyrics and their “explicit” content. The only definition to be found in the article of what makes a lyric explicit, “vicious celebration of the most gruesome violence, coupled with the explicit message that sado-masochism is the essence of sex” (Gore 456), is rather vague, and furthermore, I doubt that many songs fill the bill. Even most of the hardest-core inner city ghetto gan’sta’ rap does not celebrate violence, but rather depicts it as a part of a difficult and dangerous life, a sad fact that must be reckoned with. Many songs are composed with rougher language because that is what the singers/rappers are used to hearing, and have lyrics that target audience can relate to and understand. We cannot expect rappers to come out of ghetto neighborhoods and sing about cute, fuzzy puppies and flowers and love; it would be completely unreasonable. We cannot expect kids living in dangerous, tough situations to seek out music that raises its voice about issues that they cannot relate to. If music is communication, Gore’s mission of keeping offensive lyrics labeled to warn off customers seems to indicate that those voices that cry out about the prevalence of violence, hate, drug-use, and murder in inner cities should be silenced, or at least carry a black mark for both the message and the way it is phrased, lest these voices be heard by the next generation of political activists and voters. Edited lyrics do not purvey the same power as unedited; people who never hear the message because they won’t buy labeled CD’s will never hear for themselves what is that makes the songs so popular, so dangerous Gore and her sense of propriety. Also, Gore seems to forget that music is art as much as it is communication. She seems like the type, based solely off this three-page paper, that would want to pull NEA funding for Mapplethorpe exhibits and works of art like “Piss Christ”.
“…coupled with the explicit massage that sado-masochism is the essence of sex” (Gore 456) and “Sado-masochistic pornography is a kind of poison” (456) are both comments that indicate that Gore has only an extremely loose grasp of the definition of sado-masochism, and its proper context, as well as the only time she makes mention of porn as a bad thing. Usually called BDSM (an acronym that carries the complicated multi-definition-per-letter meaning of “bondage & discipline / dominance & submission / sadism & masochisim” (Grey alt.sex.bondage faq), sado-masochism is quite different than either of its component words. Sadism can mean simply “extreme cruelty” or carry the connotation of “the deriving of sexual gratification or the tendency to derive sexual gratification from inflicting pain or emotional abuse on others”(American Heritage Dictionary online), and masochism also has two definitions, one being “a willingness or tendency to subject oneself to unpleasant or trying experiences” and the other which correlates to its mate in sadism, “the deriving of sexual gratification, or the tendency to derive sexual gratification, from being physically or emotionally abused” (American Heritage Dictionary online). If Gore had used either of these words alone (most likely sadism), there wouldn’t be a definition problem, but she used the combination word “sado-masochism”, which carries a different connotation. This combo word leans heavily on the “leather” scene and their definition of BDSM play, which emphasizes responsibility, safety, respect for safewords, tolerating another’s limits, and the play aspect of bondage. To quote a very well-known BDSM faq’s introductory tagline:
Just so it is totally clear at the outset, NONE OF THIS MATERIAL ADVOCATES ANY KIND OF NONCONSENSUAL BEHAVIOR. What I am describing here is a variety of ways for lovers to enjoy one another, if and only if they both want to, and both give their consent. Anyone who claims that this information is in some way advocating nonconsensual, criminal acts is hereby charged with having failed to… understand what I am saying (Grey alt.sex.bondage faq).
While not the essence of sex, BDSM play weighs heavily on many people’s sexuality. Anyone who has ever enjoys or fantasized about handcuffs, zip-ties, spankings, riding crops, etc, has expressed some interest in “this kind of poison” (Gore 456). In short, it’s safe to say that people can be a little kinky, and this does not mean that they don’t have respect for their partners, people in general, and it has very little to do with most main stream music—at least as far as I know. I listen to a wide variety of music, and I can’t recall any songs with sado-masochistic overtones or explicit lyrics, except the satiric Masochism Tango by Tom Lehrer, of which I have provided a snippet at the beginning of this paper.
Curiously, this definition of sado-masochism as play is fairly well-known. Even if Gore hadn’t heard of it, hadn’t her editor, a beta-reader, any of the people that read this before publication? Wasn’t anyone tipped off by the pairing of the words and there nicely fitting meanings? Didn’t anyone say, “Hmmm, sadists like causing pain, masochists like receiving pain… sado-masochism sounds like it’d work out for both parties involved and everyone would be happy.” I’m quite surprised by this slip in editing.
Clearly, it is not just song lyrics Gore has a problem with, as shown by the paragraph in the center of page 456 that manages first to discuss slasher movies, then strippers and erotic dancers, and neatly wrap them both up into sexual brutality. Despite Gore calling these movies “the newest craze” (456), slasher movies that depict the murder and mutilation of young women are hardly new; they’ve been around as long as horror movies have been produced. For that matter, erotic dancing has been around as long as people could move, rising from the same origins as the world’s oldest profession. However, the fact that they both exist right now, and both are occasionally used in stage shows somehow ties them together for Gore, and to this tying I cry, cum hoc ergo propter hoc! Yes, they both are sexually oriented in one manner or another; yes, they both are used in attention-grabbing shows. However, hardly anyone would call erotic dancing “graphic violence” as Gore’s next paragraph does, and she offers no proof—conclusive or otherwise—as to whether dirty dancing and slasher movies are related in causing desensitivity to sexual exploitation and violence against women. I also call into question her usage of the word “often,” as it is used in this sentence: “Others titillate …audiences with strippers…and half-naked dancers, who often act out sex with band members [italics mine].” Often? I’ve never even heard of a stage-show such as this outside of a DJ-ed club scene, and usually when people are dancing half-naked in a cage, they are there of their own free will and are having a great time.
There is some deserved confusion as to how Gore managed to bounce from saving children’s delicate ears from sexually explicit lyrics to stage-shows, dance, and slasher movies. “The PMRC [Parent’s Music Resource Center, of which Gore is a founder] has created a lot of confusion with improper comparisons between song lyrics, videos, record packaging, radio broadcasting, and live performances. These are all different mediums…” (Zappa 460).
There is also much to be questioned about Gore’s linking of sexy dancing as exploitation and violence as exploitation. Clearly, one is much worse than the other, and I feel this distinction to be rather important! Someone can sexually exploit a woman by drooling over her erotic dancing and that’s insulting and a terrible thing, but it surely does not rank anywhere near rape and murder! Gore tries to blur the distinction between these two very different forms of sexual abuse further by dragging this odd combination of dance and homicide to small children and their tendency to mimic others’ actions. I haven’t heard of many small children bump-and-grinding in their Underoos on the kitchen table, and the only reason I (or anyone else) has heard stories of children like her example 5-year-old stabber is because the media loves to ham up how violence on TV is affecting our children, and make lazy, slacker parents who shouldn’t have reproduced in the first place feel that it’s not their fault that their kids are out-of-control hellions.
“The news media seldom pay heed to the fact that in eight out of ten counties in the United States entire years go by without a single juvenile homicide,” note Barry Glassner in The Culture of Fear (Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things) (68). “When a professor of communications at the University of California… monitored the media for a month in the early 1990’s he discovered that stories about health and economic issues together accounted for a measly 4 percent of [media’s] coverage of children. By contrast, 40 percent of the reports about children in the nation’s leading newspaper concerned crime and violence” (Glassner 69). He also addresses the specific fear of violence by children against children: “‘The number of homicides committed by children age 12 and under grew by 125%,’ USA Today let its readers know, at a time when fewer than forty kids under the age of thirteen were convicted of murder each year” (Glassner 70).
Aside from that, though, I am curious about this anecdote about the five-year-old stabber. One simple, primary question sums up every problem with this story: Where were this kid’s parents or caretakers? Why was a five-year-old child allowed to watch a slasher movie, apparently without a responsible adult there to even say something reassuring like, “That man is a very bad man, because he wants to hurt people and that’s a bad, mean thing” or something of that nature, explaining that the action on screen was fake and a depiction of a horrible thing? Why was the child able to get his grubby little hands on a god-damn butcher knife, and then wander to an apparently unwatched two-year-old and stab her? Where are the adults in this story, and why aren’t they taking their share of the responsibility for this child’s actions? Why is all of the blame shoved on the film industry for showing violence when a simple intervention by a caretaker could have cut the whole thing short? Is Hollywood to blame for bad, irresponsible parenting now? I can’t wait to see that lawsuit…
And after raising this stupidly simple question about this story, one has to question Gore’s statement that labeling records for explicit lyrics is where concerned parents must make a stand! How dare she lay the blame for incidences like this at the feet of not only filmmakers but also concerned parents! Especially if the parents involved are anything like those of that Bostonian five-year-old… If parents are not willing to use a movies ratings to decide whether or not a slasher movie is too mature for a little boy, why would they consider an “Explicit Lyrics” sticker on the outside of a CD case? Even parents who are better at keeping track of their kids and honestly, genuinely care cannot keep their children from hearing music on the radio, at friend’s houses, in public, and cannot keep an older child from buying CDs with allowance money or paper route cash unless they are right there when the child is trying to get it. Add to that the fact that the stickers are often on the plastic wrapping of the product that is thrown out, easily peel off even if they are on the case itself, and that many people use CD binders instead of carrying around the bulky cases anyway, and you’ve got a labeling system that doesn’t do anything it is supposed to do. Or, as Zappa phrased the whole mess: “The PMRC proposal [of compulsory record labeling guidelines] is an ill-conceived piece of nonsense which fails to deliver any benefit to children, infringes the civil liberties of people who are not children and promises to keep the courts busy for years…” (459).
“This is where we as parents must step in,” Gore writes (457). “Where is that?” I have to write back. Where? At enforcing an ineffectual record labeling guideline when Gore herself writes at the very next line that parents must being to take an active interest in what their children are doing? Zappa hit the nail on the head when he wrote, “Children in the ‘vulnerable’ age bracket have a natural love for music… Why not bring jazz or classical music into your home instead of Blackie Lawless or Madonna? Great music with no words at all is available to anyone with sense enough to look beyond this week’s platinum-selling fashion plate… Your children have a right to know that something besides pop music exists” (461). Parents who choose not to participate actively in their children’s development and lives should have no right to complain that music and movies turns their precious children violent or depraved; maybe it’s not the music or movies; maybe a little attention from Mom would have helped at some point, eh?
Gore calls for a “moral consensus” to “protect the children (257)… because they lack the moral judgment of adults” (256), and hints that popular music and film is causing “deep and lasting damage…to our children” because of the “sexual brutality [that] has become the common currency of America’s youth culture.” Gore’s morality rubs the wrong way, as it is highly likely that her morals are not entirely shared by the majority of American citizens who might not want her value system stamped upon their children, or, for that matter, them, as consumers of music. “The PMRC’s request for labels regarding sexually explicit lyrics, violence, drugs, alcohol, and especially occult content reads like a catalog of phenomena abhorrent to practitioners of …[Fundamentalism]” (463), Zappa comments, and I can certainly see were he is getting the impression of a fundamentalist doctrine, from the intimations of morality and values in Gore’s article. Gore also seems hung up on her idea that children are hypervulnerable, and thus “need our help (257)” and “deserve…sensitive treatment (255)”. I would say precisely the opposite; children are incredibly strong by nature, and that the sooner and more pragmatically they are informed about things like sex, murder, abuse, and so on, the sooner they can coalesce a moral fiber around the ideas and know how they should feel about these subjects. “The type, the amount, and the timing of…information given to a child should be determined by the parents… (Zappa 462).” Hiding things from children only makes them more curious, and it is better to have topics such as these out in the open. Never in the past were children treated as the fragile, hypersensitive things they are today; frequently children were treated as small adults. While I am not making the case that kids are mini-adults and should be treated as such, certainly they are not as breakable as many people today claim. A happy medium could be found here.
Zappa makes a very valid point concerning the media and presentation of explicit material to the public, including children. “Thanks to them,” he writes of the Parents’ Music Resource Center’s broadcast discussion of explicit lyrics with a touch of sardonic humor, “helpless young children all over America get to hear about oral sex at gunpoint on network TV several nights a week” (460). He notes later that, “If the goal here is total verbal/moral safety, there is only one way to achieve it: watch no TV, read no books, see no movies, listen to only instrumental music, or buy no music at all” (461).
I have to agree.
Glassner, Barry. The Culture of Fear (Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things). New York City: Basic Books, 1999
Gore, Tipper. Curbing the Sexploitation Industry. (Class hand-out from a collection)
Grey, Johnson. soc.subculture.bondage-bdsm faq. 1 Nov. 2003. <http://www.unrealities.com/adult/ssbb/faq.htm>
“masochism.” American Heritage Dictionary online. 1 Nov. 2003 <http://www.dictionary.com>
“sadism.” American Heritage Dictionary online. 1 Nov. 2003 <http://www.dictionary.com>
Zappa, Frank. The Wives of Big Brother. (Class hand-out from a collection)