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GERARD JONES
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7), author of several works of fiction and nonfiction,
ic books for Marvel Comics and other publishers.
„hed in Mother Jones magazine in 2000.
Violent Media Is Good for Kids
At thirteen I was alone and afraid. Taught by my well-meaning,
progressive, English-teacher parents that violence was wrong, that rage was
something to be overcome and cooperation was always better than conflict, I
suffocated my deepest fears and desires under a nice-boy persona. Placed in
a small, experimental school that was wrong for me, afraid to join my peers
in their bumptious rush into adolescent boyhood, I withdrew into passivity
and loneliness. My parents, not trusting the violent world of the late 1960s,
built a wall between me and the crudest elements of American pop culture.
Then the Incredible Hulk smashed through it.
One of my mother's students convinced her that Marvel Comics, despite
their apparent juvenility and violence, were in fact devoted to lofty messages
of pacifism and tolerance. My mother borrowed some, thinking they'd be
good for me. And so they were. But not because they preached lofty
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messages of benevolence. They were good for me because they were
juvenile. And violent.
The character who caught me, and freed me, was the Hulk: overgendered
and undersocialized, half-naked and half-witted, raging against a frightened
world that misunderstood and persecuted him. Suddenly I had a fantasy self
to carry my stifled rage and buried desire for power. I had a fantasy self who
was a self: unafraid of his desires and the world's disapproval, unhesitating
and effective in action. “Puny boy follow Hulk!” roared my fantasy self, and
I followed
I followed him to new friends — other sensitive geeks chasing their
own inner brutes — and I followed him to the arrogant, self-exposing, self-
assertive, superheroic decision to become a writer. Eventually, I left him
behind, followed more sophisticated heroes, and finally my own lead along a
twisting path to a career and an identity. In my thirties, I found myself
writing action movies and comic books. I wrote some Hulk stories, and met
the geek-geniuses who created him. I saw my own creations turned into
action figures, cartoons, and computer games. I talked to the kids who read
my stories. Across generations, genders, and ethnicities I kept seeing the
same story: people pulling themselves out of emotional traps by immersing
themselves in violent stories. People integrating the scariest, most fervently
denied fragments of their psyches into fuller senses of selfhood through
fantasies of superhuman combat and destruction.
I have watched my son living the samestory — transforming himself into
a bloodthirsty dinosaur to embolden himself for the plunge into preschool, a
Power Ranger to muscle through a social competition in kindergarten. In the
first grade, his friends started climbing a tree at school. But he was afraid: of
falling, of the centipedes crawling on the trunk, of sharp branches, of his
friends' derision. I took my cue from his own fantasies and read him old
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I have watched my son living the samestory — - transforming himself into
a bloodthirsty dinosaur to embolden himself for the plunge into preschool, a
Power Ranger to muscle through a social competition in kindergarten. In the
first grade, his friends started climbing a tree at school. But he was afraid: of
falling, of the centipedes crawling on the trunk, of sharp branches, of his
friends’ derision. I took my cue from his own fantasies and read him old
Tarzan comics, rich in combat and bright with flashing knives. For two
weeks he lived in them. Then he put them aside. And he climbed the tree.
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| POWER!
shut:
shut
shut!
shuka
A scene from Gerard Jones and
Gene Ha's comic book "Oktane"
Gerard Jones
But all the while, especially in the wake of the recent burst of school
shootings, I heard pop psychologists insisting that violent stories are harmful
to kids, heard teachers begging parents to keep their kids away from “junk
culture,” heard a guilt-stricken friend with a son who loved Pokémon lament,
"I've turned into the bad mom who lets her kid eat sugary cereal and watch
cartoons!”
That's when I started the research.
“Fear, greed, power-hunger, rage: these are aspects of our selves that we
try not to experience in our lives but often want, even need, to experience
vicariously through stories of others,” writes Melanie Moore, Ph.D., a
psychologist who works with urban teens. “Children need violent
entertainment in order to explore the inescapable feelings that they've been
taught to deny, and to reintegrate those feelings into a more whole, more
complex, more resilient selfhood.”
Moore consults to public schools and local governments, and is also
raising a daughter. For the past three vears she and I have been studying the
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SHUT UP!
The title character of
"Oktane" gets nasty.
Gerard Jones
Then her mother and I started helping her tell her stories. She wrote
them, performed them, drew them like comics: sometimes bloody,
sometimes tender, always blending the images of pop culture with her own
most private fantasies. She came out of it just as fiery and strong, but more
self-controlled and socially competent: a leader among her peers, the one
student in her class who could truly pull boys and girls together.
I worked with an older girl, a middle-class “nice girl,” who held herself
together through a chaotic family situation and a tumultuous adolescence
with gangsta rap. In the mythologized street violence of Ice T, the rage and
strutting of his music and lyrics, she found a theater of the mind in which she
could be powerful, ruthless, invulnerable. She avoided the heavy drug use
that sank many of her peers, and flowered in college as a writer and political
activist.
I'm not going to argue that violent entertainment is harmless. I think it
has helped inspire some people to real-life violence. I am going to argue that
it's helped hundreds of people for every one it's hurt, and that it can help far
more if we learn to use it well. I am going to argue that our fear of “youth
violence” isn't well-founded on reality, and that the fear can do more harn
than the reality. We act as though our highest priority is to prevent our
children from growing up into murderous thugs — but modern kids are far
more likely to grow up too passive, too distrustful of themselves, too easily
manipulated.
We send the message to our children in a hundred ways that their craving
for imaginary gun battles and symbolic killings is wrong, or at least
dangerous. Even when we don't call for censorship or forbid Mortal Kombat,
we moan to other parents within our kids' earshot about the “awful violence”
in the entertainment they love. We tell our kids that it isn't nice to play-fight,
or we steer them from some monstrous action figure to a prosocial doll. Even
in the most progressive households, where we make such a point of letting
children feel what they feel, we rush to substitute an enlightened discussion
for the raw material of rageful fantasy. In the process, we risk confusing
them about their natural aggression in the same way the Victorians confused
their children about their sexuality. When we try to protect our children from
their own feelings and fantasies, we shelter them not against violence but
against power and selfhood.
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That's when I started the research.
“Fear, greed, power-hunger, rage: these are aspects of our selves that we
try not to experience in our lives but often want, even need, to experience
vicariously through stories of others," writes Melanie Moore, Ph.D., a
psychologist who works with urban teens. “Children need violent
entertainment in order to explore the inescapable feelings that they've been
taught to deny, and to reintegrate those feelings into a more whole, more
complex, more resilient selfhood.”
Moore consults to public schools and local governments, and is also
raising a daughter. For the past three years she and I have been studying the
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ways in which children use violent stories to meet their emotional and
developmental needs — and the ways in which adults can help them use
those stories healthily. With her help I developed Power Play, a program for
helping young people improve their self-knowledge and sense of potency
through heroic, combative storytelling.
We've found that every aspect of even the trashiest pop-culture story can
have its own developmental function. Pretending to have superhuman
powers helps children conquer the feelings of powerlessness that inevitably
come with being so young and small. The dual-identity concept at the heart
of many superhero stories helps kids negotiate the conflicts between the
inner self and the public self as they work through the early stages of
socialization. Identification with a rebellious, even destructive, hero helps
children learn to push back against a modern culture that cultivates fear and
teaches dependency.
At its most fundamental level, what we call “creative violence” — head-
bonking cartoons, bloody videogames, playground karate, toy guns — gives
children a tool to master their rage. Children will feel rage. Even the sweetest
and most civilized of them, even those whose parents read the better class of
literary magazines, will feel rage. The world is uncontrollable and
incomprehensible; mastering it is a terrifying, enraging task. Rage can be an
energizing emotion, a shot of courage to push us to resist greater threats, take
more control, than we ever thought we could. But rage is also the emotion
our culture distrusts the most. Most of us are taught early on to fear our own.
Through immersion in imaginary combat and identification with a violent
protagonist, children engage the rage they've stifled, come to fear it less, and
become more capable of utilizing it against life's challenges.
I knew one little girl who went around exploding with fantasies so
violent that other moms would draw her mother aside to whisper, “I think
you should know something about Emily. ...” Her parents were separating,
and she was small, an only child, a tomboy at an age when her classmates
were dividing sharply along gender lines. On the playground she acted out
Sailor Moon fights, and in the classroom she wrote stories about people
being stabbed with knives. The more adults tried to control her stories, the
more she acted out the roles of her angry heroes: breaking rules, testing
limits, roaring threats.
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