Fantasy and Voyeurism: Men and the Violence Culture

Ariel Levy, author of Female Chauvinist Pigs, worries that pornography is carving out a false image of femininity in our national consciousness. She is troubled at how the natural is being supplanted by the artificial, and by the glorification of performance sex over love making.

The negative gender stereotypes associated with pornography are no doubt worrisome, and more so for females because of the demeaning way in which they are often depicted in this genre (name one other form of lowbrow entertainment where perverted fat men get to crack jokes and rate the sexiness of females who they are simultaneously fondling, probing or getting fellated by?). But if women have good reason to be offended by their underling roles in this testosterone-driven industry, we men should at least be leery of the equally testosterone-driven entertainments that appeal to the generic aspects of our gender.

Spike TV is perhaps one of the most notorious purveyors of the notion that all men get hard-ons for cage fighting, muscle cars and bikini clad women. Shows like UFC: Ultimate Fighter Championship and Deadliest Worrier attempt to awaken our animalistic bloodlust with raw, savage depictions of guys beating the hell out of each other and scenes of ancient weapons of warfare slicing through slabs of meat as a way of demonstrating their deadly effectiveness. Entertainment such as this is troubling if one considers the sobering statistic that, in 2006, 1 in every 72 American men was incarcerated in a county, state or federal prison. By comparison, in that same year only 1 out of every 746 women was behind bars. Given our innately virile propensity to fight, murder and self-destruct, shouldn’t the modern man boycott all things which glorify senseless violence and brutality? Is the world so lacking in actual violence to necessitate the creation and consumption of fantasy violence? And just how are we contributing to human growth and progress if we give in to these natural urges which – when carried out in real life – only wreak havoc on our lives and the lives of countless others?

To get a taste of the very real and very permanent consequences of senseless acts of violence committed by men in the throes of passion, one need look no further than A&E’s First 48. This is a series which follows actual detectives around in the first forty-eight hours after a murder has been committed. The blood soaked crime scenes which the burned out and exasperated detective workers must canvass, and the trail of clues which invariably lead to a stoic, cold-blooded murderer – these things evoke a stark reminder of just how ugly a pandemic violence is in our culture. There are no heroic desperados of Hollywood proportion in real-life shootouts and slayings, just lowlife gang members and common street thugs. In light of this, pop cultural glamorization of death and killing seems, at the very least, irresponsible and jaded.

And yet shows like First 48 do more than just feed our curiosity about the procedurals of detective work. There is a voyeurism to it all, starting at the point when the detectives lift the tarpaulin to reveal the slain victim, all the way up till the end when they slap a pair of cuffs on the prime suspect and read him his rights. These police shows are a way for us to peer into the lives of people who we don’t really know or care too much about, allowing us to observe how they kill each other off. This is the real curiosity which gives programs like First 48 their momentum. Everything from the senseless motives for the killings, to the killers’ nonchalant attitudes about taking a life – given their unflinching indifference in the interrogation room you would think they were being accused of stealing a bike – causes every episode to convey an inexplicable foreignness. We know what we’re seeing, and yet we don’t understand it. We know who these people are, we have a vague idea of what they’re all about, and yet after seeing how they kill and react to killing, we understand them even less.

Other real-life shows feed our voyeurism in similar ways. Every weekend MSNBC runs back to back to back documentaries about prison life, visiting places from Alaska (like institutions which house that state’s worst murderers) to Folsom’s historic penitentiary in California to modern day chain gangs in the South. After watching just a couple of these programs, it quickly becomes evident that NBC is indirectly pillorying the weak-willed and downtrodden inmates on their cross country big house tours. The cameras take us though the prisons as if on a tour of a zoo, pausing before a cell to observe how an inmate makes contraband moonshine from fruit and shampoo as if he were a gorilla doing something strange. It is veritable Schadenfreude with a glossy shine. The result is that we feel a comforting contentedness knowing that these manimals are locked up where they are, and not walking the streets with us and our children. The shows also remind us that prison is no place we’d ever want to be, further driving home the old adage not to do the crime if we can’t do the time.

(Let’s also remember one thing: NBC may not have invented subtlety, but they have certainly perfected it in their coverage over the years. They have become psychologists; every word spoken by their anchors or pundits, and every news show, sitcom, biopic, miniseries or movie they broadcast is so saturated with multiple meanings and nuance that it is impossible to take them at face value anymore.)

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When we give up thinking for the day and cast our burdens upon the TV, there are multiple choices from which to get our violence fix. If we want to vicariously experience fantasy violence there are car chases, endless murder mysteries, or sci-fi movies where we can insert ourselves into the role of a hero who saves the world from an outer space bug invasion just so he can win the girl he loves. If we want entertainment that blurs the line between fantasy violence and actual violence, there are shows like UFC: Ultimate Fighting Championship where the kicks and punches might be truncated so as not to deliver the full force of the blow, but they still draw blood sometimes. Finally, if we want the real, raw stuff without all the dressing up and glamour, there are shows like First 48 and MSNBC’s prison marathon weekends.

As a modern man, which form of televised violence should we turn to when our peaceful boredom becomes too much to bear? As the physically stronger sex, we need outlets for all that extra energy. Viewing violence, reading about it, dreaming of it or partaking in it in some minimal (or big) way almost feels like a necessity – violence always has been and probably always will be one of our many hungers. Perhaps the goal of the modern man therefore shouldn’t be to eradicate violent tendencies from our DNA, but rather our goal should be to learn how to control these tendencies. When violence is in your grasp, you feel powerful, mighty and invincible. But as we’ve witnessed far too often, this power always becomes too great too quickly and invariably leads to people being physically or emotionally hurt, and the imminent imploding (or exploding) of the violence bearer. Riding high on violent power is like riding a huge serpent, you cling to its scaly back for as long as possible before you are eventually thrown off and tossed about in its wake.

Perhaps violence is sacred, something to use only in rare instances when there is no other alternative. They endlessly try to teach us in anger management classes about the realistic allocation of negative feelings – feeling murderous rage towards the guy who killed your daughter is normal, feeling that same type of rage towards the lady that cut you off in traffic is not – but the lessons take a while to sink in. If we can’t control our hormonal tendencies, perhaps it is best to banish them to a faraway place within us.

Violence serves an inverse evolutionary purpose. The longer we are alive, the more it becomes prevalent that the cool kids – the desperados, the slackers, the gang bangers and all the other guys who lived by the seat of their hormones – didn’t get themselves or us anywhere. The phrase “only the strong survive” – coined by Jerry Butler in his titular song and later immortalized by Elvis – may not be such a truism after all. As evidenced by the aforementioned A&E and MSNBC shows, men who fight to defend their personal territory, virility and respect against frivolous threats often end up in prisons or morgues. They finish each other off in street brawls, wars and drag races gone awry. By living in the moment, these men lack the planning and foresight necessary to effectively pass on their genes.

Peacefulness is becoming the new golden rule. There is no place in the future for combative rogues and hot tempered territorial nitwits. The conquerors of history, the ones who will make most proud the thousands of generations of our ancestors who suffered and fought and foraged so that we could exist today, will be the men who were capable of being the better man by walking away from a fight. These males are the humble and happy men who value book smarts over street smarts. They are the teenagers who sacrifice their youths so that they can have a rich future which doesn’t involve a lot of tattoos, gas-pumping and frequent trips to Wal-Mart. They are the future. We are the future. The immature naysayers and trash talkers are shouting into a wind which blows louder and more fiercely with each passing season.

That wind is the Modern Man.