Cover of my book proposal for War and Penis
A few years ago I thought I might write a book I was jokingly calling War and Penis. I wanted to examine our cultural preference for violence over sex, but within days of beginning my research, it became overwhelming.
My goal was to interview people, from religious leaders to radical feminists around their preferences, what they found acceptable, and how they thought those views for formed. As I started looking at sex scenes in movies it was clear that most often nudity was accompanied by violence, and the same was largely true for literature. Television has gotten sexier, but also more violent, and the disparity, along with the connection, is almost universally consistent.
Initially I assumed it was a largely conservative driven paradigm, but the more I looked the more complicated it became. And with Fifty Shades of Gray, I started to wonder why the same liberals who have for years defended our right to play violent video games were worrying that a book or a movie might drive people to bad sexual behavior.
At the base of it, is what I believe to be a pervasive sense that we have more control over violence than we do sex. Violence can be entertaining, especially for middle class Americans, because it’s something we don’t expect to personally experience very much of. But when it comes to sex we have to be more careful. Most of us have sex of some sort, and if we talk about with any positivity at all, we’ll spin out of control.
In the end, I wasn’t the person to write the book. But each time I look back I wonder if there is a way out. If there’s a way to unlearn our behavior, to shift our perspective, and switch the two around.
But even for me, if there was anywhere close to as much sex in media as there is violence, I suspect it would feel like too much. If I saw as many acts of sex as I did murder, it would be constant. If there were are many scenes of people turning each other on as there are of characters scaring each other, I bet even the most liberal of us might find ourselves blushing.
I don’t know if there is an answer, but I do know that it’s sure as hell worth trying. We could all use a bit more blushing, and a little less hiding.