Violence is not entertaining.

 

Squirrels non-violently entertaining children at a campground

I am not entertained by violence. Not violence in TV shows or movies, not violence in games. Not in books or songs. I reject superhero violence, cartoon violence, dinosaur violence, monster violence, and spaceship violence. I will not look at vehicular, gun, sword, magic, or fist violence. Not sports that formalize or simulate violence. Not historical, sexual, or emotional violence. The threat of violence, the tools of violence, aptitude for violence, and the glorification of violence are unwelcome. My kids found superhero comic books at the library and I will not support the reading of them. Chess is the most violent thing I will entertain, and even there I would enjoy it more if there was less association with war. My feelings about this have only strengthened with age and events.

Feeling this way about violence is one reason I do not watch TV or movies, do not watch sports, and avidly avoid American Popular Culture, which makes allowance for those who are offended by sexuality but offers few refuges to those who are offended by violence. Facebook for example insists on showing me ads for horror movies, action movies, police movies, etc. That anyone can fail to be entertained by violence is not allowed for in any algorithm.  

I understand this focus on violence in popular entertainment in commercial terms, in anthropological terms, in sociological terms, in evolutionary psychology terms, but it feels alien and harmful.

Harmful in that it crowds out other ways for characters to interact with the world. Harmful in that it perpetuates toxically-masculine depictions of what a leader is, what an athlete is, what a conversation is. Just as much pornography teaches unhealthy lessons to young people about sexuality, violent entertainment teaches them unhealthy lessons about communication, empathy, politics, and conflict. I would not ban either, but see the same avenues of harm in both.

And it feels alien, not in the not-from-around-here way, but in the "I am unlike all these people" way. What most members of our culture will pay to see, I find depressing and enervating. The vast majority of fiction in our culture is about people being bad to each other, and I fundamentally do not identify with finding that interesting, relaxing, or desirable. Rejecting people-being-bad-to-each-other entertainment is a position so far outside the norm that even those who know me best tend to chuckle when I state my position. It cuts me off (by choice) from vast domains of human endeavor, foundational cultural touchstones, central shibboleths.

We are products of cultures built around violent entertainment. We print great mythical violence-makers onto diapers and metaphors. We parade children in costumes of characters named after the paramilitaries that brought the Nazis to power. We make aircraft carriers available to film-makers because it helps with recruiting actual sailors. I do not blame anyone for participating in our culture, but this aspect of it I hope will eventually change.