Violence sells, but it's all OK if it's not your fault!

Perpetually behind schedule, I just finished reading the articles for this week. The Males article on "teen bashing" stuck out the most for me, probably because of the partial similarities between what he reports and my own experiences as a growing teen. While I agree with Males that people - and the media in particular - have a tendency to make judgments about the cause of society's downfall in order to avoid confronting the real issues, my personal experiences lean in a slightly different direction. Rather than being feeling discriminated against because I was a teen (as Males seems to suggest when he focuses primarily on the media's interest in perp's ages), I found that people tended to look down on me because of my pastimes.

I'm a professional dork, so I tended to have a lot of interests that didn't coincide with the accepted mainstream: video games, Japanese cartoons, comic books, Dungeons & Dragons, and so forth. Though I was never stuffed into a garbage can, I nonetheless saw a lot of "you're into that? Doesn't that turn kids into criminals?" reactions. Video games in particular drew plenty of negative attention, helped along by the media, who likely discovered that headlines blaming crimes on something that was popular-yet-still-fringe got lots of attention. This in spite of a general lack of useful statistical data, not to mention the frequent signs that media outlets weren't all that well-informed about the subject. (Witness the flurry of post-Columbine reports citing the game Doom as an imminent public danger, when the game was six years old at the time and most gamers didn't really play it anymore. Or fast-forward a few years to when Rockstar Games, infamous for Grand Theft Auto, announced that its next title Bully would be taking place in a school, triggering a short-lived frenzy over the upcoming 'Columbine simulator' - never mind that no information had been released about the game aside from its setting.)

This is hardly a new phenomenon - the media has long been pointing fingers at things other than the real problem. Back in the '50s, a report found that 99 percent of all juvenile criminals read comic books, but neglected to mention that 99 percent of all juveniles read them. From Frederick Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent to stories of satanic D&D cults to that infernal rock n' roll music, the thing that's popular - but not yet popular enough - will always draw fire for causing problems that have been with us all along.

Though it probably wasn't intentional, I actually found it really funny to see how well the article on puberty proved its own point. Puberty is hard for American parents to talk about, to be sure; a great example of that is given in the chapter, where the author "explains" puberty by discussing the biological changes involved in painstaking detail - for pages upon pages upon pages. It may as well have been lifted from a biology textbook, providing very little practical information for the casual reader.

Meanwhile, on the emotional side of things, much time is spent discussing the problems adolescents have because of poor teaching, but relatively little is spent discussing the problems they would have otherwise. Thus it's implying that poor teaching is the main problem they experience - that biology-textbook speeches or puritanical sermons are all adolescents get.

What would happen if better teaching was given is never really said. Perhaps we simply don't know enough at this point to make a prediction.