ENGL 1301 SO Harvey: Media and Culture

Many Americans, including members of the medical community, believe that exposure to violent entertainment harms young people. Video games are a particular concern because they may teach players how to commit violent acts. Some argue that violence in entertainment is so serious a problem that the government should protect people from it and regulate it, as has been done with tobacco. Opponents of regulation contend that the scientific evidence linking violent entertainment to real-world violence is far from conclusive and that restricting access to it would be unworkable and perhaps counterproductive. Regulation also raises constitutional issues because entertainment is protected speech under the First Amendment, and courts require the government to have a compelling reason to restrict such speech. In Regulating Violence in Entertainment, learn how this debate is likely to intensify, as more realistic and interactive forms of violent entertainment become available.

Pornography, once the taboo vice that no one dared mention, has become part of our daily lives-affordable, accessible, anonymous, and, increasingly, acceptable. The all-pornography, all-the-time mentality is everywhere-on the covers of main-stream men's magazines; in the promotion of music, movie, and television celebrities; and in the advice columns of women's magazines. The Internet is bursting with hardcore pornography, just a mouseclick away; cable and pay-per-view channels teem with porn; and "adult superstores" reel in customers off the interstate. The days of Playboy magazine wrapped in plain brown paper seem quaint. Most striking, pornography has become a big part of the personal lives of many Americans. In Pornified, Pamela Paul argues that as porn has become more pervasive it has changed our marriages and families as well as our children's understanding of sex and sexuality. She presents eye-opening portraits of Americans in the age of porn: Rob, who insists that his girlfriend look and behave, in bed and out, like a porn star, Charlie, who spends hours cruising porn sites and setting up meetings with women and couples he befriends in sex chat rooms, while telling his wife that he's just working late on the computer, Jonah, a fan of violent hardcore porn, who introduces tamer porn to his fiancee in an effort to revive their troubled sex life, Abby, who discovers her husband's hidden box of diskettes of child porn images downloaded from the Internet, Preteen girls who start their own pornography Web sites, Teenage boys, mimicking porn, who videotape themselves having sex with an apparently unconscious girl. Drawing on the results of more than a hundred interviews and an exclusive nationwide poll, Paul exposes how porn has infiltrated and unsettled our lives. We see the costs and consequences of pornography, as intimacy is replaced by fantasy, distrust, dissatisfaction, and emotional isolation. Pornified is an insightful, shocking, and indispensable investigation. Book jacket.

Douglas Brode overturns the idea of Disney as a middlebrow filmmaker by detailing how Disney movies played a key role in transforming children of the Eisenhower era into the radical youth of the Age of Aquarius. Using close readings of Disney projects, Brode shows that Disney' films were frequently ahead of their time thematically. Long before the cultural tumult of the sixties, Disney films preached pacifism, introduced a generation to the notion of feminism, offered the screen' first drug-trip imagery, encouraged young people to become runaways, insisted on the need for integration, advanced the notion of a sexual revolution, created the concept of multiculturalism, called for a return to nature, nourished the cult of the righteous outlaw, justified violent radicalism in defense of individual rights, argued in favor of communal living, and encouraged antiauthoritarian attitudes.