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A videotape that had been on display at the National Portrait Gallery in D.C. for a gay portraiture exhibit by the Smithsonian but had been removed after protests from the religious right, has resurfaced in another gallery — in a trailer right next door.
The film was part of the 105-piece "Hide/Seek" exhibit that opened at the Gallery in October showing a century of art exploring gay portraiture. The 4-minute film contains 11 seconds of video of ants crawling on a crucifix. That imagery incensed some conservative politicians and the Catholic League.
The art video continues to be a point of controversy. After pressure from outside groups, the Smithsonian had pulled a video from the exhibit, outraging members of the art community. But now, that video is back on public display, literally steps away from the gallery.
The Museum of Censored Art — a mobile office trailer bearing the sign “Showing the art the Smithsonian won't” — is situated just outside the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery.
"The film is here," said Mike Blasenstein, one of the protesters behind the museum. "People might have to walk a few more feet to see it, but they can see the original exhibit as it played for a month in the National Portrait Gallery with zero complaints from the public."
The film is an excerpt from David Wojnarowicz's “Fire in My Belly." It's the centerpiece of the Museum of Censored Art and the reason the temporary museum exists.
“We're making him and his work visible again as close to the original site as possible,” Blasenstein said.
The film had been part of the 105-piece "Hide/Seek" exhibit that opened at the Gallery in October showing a century of art exploring gay portraiture.
Within 24-hours of their protest, the secretary of the Smithsonian had the video removed, calling it a distraction from the larger exhibit.
Some in the art community, including me, call it censorship.
"I believe that this sends ripples through the entire art world and that we're going to be sent right back to 1980s conservative realm where things like this happened all the time,” said Mike Iacovone, one of the protesters behind the Museum of Censored Art.
Eileen McClatchy said she stopped yesterday to see what she wasn't supposed to see.
"I don't know what the powers that pushed them to take it out were, but obviously some people don't want to see that truth or touch that pain," she said.
Protesters raised $6,000 and got permits to put their makeshift museum next to the gallery because, they say, it's paramount that people be able to make their own decision.
"Their purpose is to kind of facilitate that kind of learning and understanding, and if you're drawing people in for whatever reason, I don't see why that would be a bad thing,” museum visitor Carrie Garman said.
"Hide/Seek” will be at the National Portrait Gallery until Feb. 13. So will the Museum of Censored Art.
The Portrait Gallery supports the protesters' freedom of expression and hopes people who see the video will come in to see the entire exhibit.
The video also was shown at Transformer Gallery after being pulled from the Portrait Gallery.
— The Curator
A thorough and excellent analysis of hate crimes has shown that gays remain the most targeted minority group suffering these atrocious attacks.
The thought-provoking report, compiled and written by Mark Potok, appears in the SPLC Intelligence Report. The results were startling to me, considering the apparent improved societal stance regarding the LGBT community, including the resent lifting of the military's overtly discriminatory "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, and some legalization of same-sex marriages.
Potok suggests, quite logically, that the deep seated anger barely held in check within some hard-core anti-gays has bubbled over into sudden violence partly because of these general improvements in LBGT rights.
The column appears below in its entirety, or read it directly at the website.
Gays Remain the Minority Most Targeted by Hate Crimes
By Mark Potok, SPLC Intelligence Report
Posted on Dec. 31, 2010, Printed on Jan. 4, 2011
The religious anti-gay right has been knocked back on its heels by gay rights advances. But its hardest core angrily presses on.
Four teenagers commit suicide in a three-week span after being bullied, taunted or outed as homosexuals. Seven students — at least four of whom had endured anti-gay bullying — kill themselves over the course of a year in a single Minnesota school district. In New York, 10 suspects are arrested for torturing three gay victims. In Covington, Ky., a series of violent anti-gay attacks shock a trendy neighborhood. In Vonore, Tenn., a lesbian couple’s home, its garage spray-painted with “Queers,” is burned to the ground. A rash of attacks hits Washington, D.C. And in Michigan, a prosecutor harasses a local gay rights student leader for months.
All of this is only a sampling of the anti-gay attacks occurring around the nation, most of it drawn from just the last few months. Although the rash of student suicides drew major media attention for a few days, the reality, gay rights advocates say, is that the LGBT world has been plagued by hate violence for years.
But that’s not the way a hard core of the anti-gay religious right sees it.
Responding to the wave of teen suicides — including, most dramatically, that of 18-year-old Tyler Clementi, a Rutgers University student who leaped off the George Washington Bridge in New York City in September — anti-gay leaders instead blamed those who sought to protect students from bullying.
Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association said gay rights activists “pressure these students to declare a disordered sexual preference when they’re too young to know better, [so] they share some culpability.” Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, a key critic of anti-bullying programs, said gay activists were “exploiting these tragedies to push their agenda.” He said that gay kids may know “intuitively” that their desires are “abnormal” and that the claim, pushed by gay activists, that they can’t change “may create a sense of despair that can lead to suicide.” Matt Barber of Liberty Counsel said those activists want “to use the tragedies to increase pressure on the real victims: Christians.”
In fact, the chief target of these anti-gay ideologues — the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) — has been working to get protection from school bullying for a wide range of racial, religious and sexual minorities, not only LGBT students. It’s extremely hard to see how their efforts are exploitative, or how the “real” victims of bullying are Christians. GLSEN’s mission statement says that it “strives to assure that each member of every school community is valued.”
What’s more, bullying is only the beginning of the violence experienced by gays in American society. The reality is that homosexuals or perceived homosexuals are by far the group most targeted in America for violent hate crimes, according to an Intelligence Report analysis of 14 years of federal hate crime data. The bottom line: Gay people are more than twice as likely to be attacked in a violent hate crime as Jews or blacks; more than four times as likely as Muslims; and 14 times as likely as Latinos.
A Changing Landscape
Remarkably, most Americans today seem to have a sense of the violence that the LGBT community is regularly subjected to, or in any event are increasingly rejecting extreme religious-right narratives about the alleged evils of homosexuality. An October poll by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute found that 65% of Americans believe “places of worship contribute to higher rates of suicide among gay and lesbian youth” (33% said “a lot” and 32% said “a little”). Seventy-two percent said places of worship “contribute to negative views of gay and lesbian people” (40% said “a lot” and 32% said “a little”). (At the same time, the survey found that 44% of Americans still view same-sex relations as a sin.)
This was not always so. In 2003, the legalization of same-sex marriage in most of Canada, plus the U.S. Supreme Court’s striking down of anti-gay sodomy laws in 13 states and a court decision in Massachusetts against gay marriage bans, produced a major backlash. By 2008, fueled by the anti-gay rhetoric and political organizing of religious-right groups, at least 40 states and the federal government had adopted constitutional bans or laws against same-sex marriages.
Since then, the record has been mixed. But it’s clear that public support for same-sex marriage — and opposition to its religious opponents — is on the rise.
Five states now allow same-sex marriage, and another three recognize such unions from other states. California allowed them for some months in 2008, but the Proposition 8 referendum ended that — until a federal judge this fall overturned the proposition, saying it discriminated unconstitutionally against homosexuals. A 2006 federal bill that would have prohibited states from recognizing same-sex marriage failed. By this August, according to a Roper poll, a majority of Americans supported same-sex marriage for the first time. The poll found that 52% said the federal government should recognize such marriages (up from 46% in 2009), and 58% said same-sex couples should be entitled to the same benefits as other couples.
An earlier Gallup poll, released in May 2010, had similar results. It found that Americans now see gay relationships as “morally acceptable” by a 52% to 43% margin — compared to a 55% to 38% unfavorable view just eight years earlier. Every demographic group within the data set grew more accepting — Catholics, for instance, polled as 62% favorable, compared to 46% four years ago.
This fall’s mid-term elections were the first since the 1990s with no measures to ban gay marriage on any state ballot, according to The Associated Press. And although same-sex marriage was an issue at press time in four gubernatorial races, the AP reported, Democratic candidates in Rhode Island and California were vying to become the fourth and fifth openly gay members of Congress.
“We’ve reached a tipping point this year,” said Wayne Besen, founder of TruthWinsOut.com, which monitors the anti-gay right. “The religious right is losing some of its steam. We’re going to win this issue quicker than people think.”
It may not be only gay rights advocates who think so. Last February, after founder James Dobson retired and pastor Jim Daly took over, Focus on the Family — for years, the powerhouse organization of the anti-gay religious right — markedly softened its anti-gay rhetoric. Daly began meeting with gay rights activists, ended the ministry’s controversial “reparative therapy” for gays and lesbians, and even suggested that legalized same-sex marriage might not be a disaster.
“I will continue to defend traditional marriage, but I’m not going to demean human beings for the process,” Daly told an interviewer. “I want to express respect for everyone, all human beings. It’s not about being highly confrontational.”
Digging In
It is in just such situations — when long-held societal notions about blacks, Latinos, Catholics, homosexuals or other minorities are shifting — that violent backlashes often set in. As groups like Focus on the Family have moderated their positions on homosexuality, a hard core of anti-gay groups, sensing they are being politically marginalized, seem to be growing angrier and more radical still.
The reaction of Laurie Higgins of the Illinois Family Institute, may be illustrative. Upon hearing of Daly’s moves, she said the Focus on the Family leader was showing “surprising naïveté,” adding that he instead “better figure out how to stop the pro-homosexual juggernaut.” As to his comments about refusing to “demean human beings,” Higgins said, “The language employed by Mr. Daly here is the kind of language commonly employed by … homosexualists.”
“True conservatives,” Higgins added tartly elsewhere, “need to rethink their cowardly refusal to address the inherent immorality of homosexual practice and their deeply flawed strategy of calling for a moratorium on ‘social issues.’”
A leading criminologist and sociologist of hate crimes, Jack Levin of Northeastern University, sees evidence of the growing radicalization of the fringe in other ways. He says perpetrators of anti-gay hate crimes appear to be getting older. No longer are they dominated by teens engaging in thrill-seeking with predatory gangs of their peers. More and more, he says, lone adults are committing what Levin calls “defensive hate crimes” — crimes carried out in reaction to sweeping social changes that they see as threats to their home, family, religion, culture or country.
The shrinking size of the most virulent parts of the anti-gay religious right was much in evidence at the August “Truth Academy” staged outside Chicago by Peter LaBarbera and his Americans for Truth About Homosexuality. The three-day gathering immediately followed what to many anti-gay activists was a kind of nuclear disaster — the overturning by a federal appeals court judge of Proposition 8, which had temporarily ended gay marriage in California.
And what better motivator than a “homosexual judge” canceling out some 7 million votes against same-sex marriage? But that turned out not to be the case. Subtracting speakers, family members, volunteers and at least four interlopers who attended only to monitor events, the tally of those who paid to hear LaBarbera and the others speak during the first day was almost certainly fewer than 15.
Nevertheless, for many hard-liners, fighting homosexuality is a biblical imperative. They regard being forced to accept uncloseted gays as tantamount to being persecuted as Christians. If same-sex marriage becomes universally legal, the Family Research Council’s Perkins told the “Call to Conscience” rally held in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 4, “In one generation, we will have gone from banning the Bible in public schools to banning religious beliefs in society.”
As a result, the hard core of the anti-gay religious right is digging in. They have gravitated toward three particular tactics: “love the sinner” rhetoric; secular validation; and depicting gays as a global threat.
The Hard-Liners’ New Lines
Not long ago, anti-gay propaganda was remarkable for its vulgar and wild-eyed tone — depicting homosexuals as immoral, feces-eating, disease-ridden pedophiles. And some of that tone, particularly the idea that gays seek to “recruit” children in school, remains in certain quarters. But that kind of approach doesn’t resonate much with younger audiences, who grew up with positive images of openly gay actors, musicians, artists, politicians and business leaders. As gays came out of the closet, others increasingly found they had gay friends and relatives.
Now, more and more groups on the religious right are framing their arguments with words that are meant to show respect for gays and lesbians. There is no better example of that than the Manhattan Declaration, drafted in 2009 by Watergate conspirator-turned-evangelist Charles Colson, Princeton University professor Robert P. George and Beeson Divinity School Dean Rev. Timothy George.
The declaration framed opposition to same-sex marriage as part of seeking an end to the “glamorizing” of promiscuity and infidelity generally. It emphasized that “our rejection of sin, though resolute, must never become the rejection of sinners.” It conceded that “there are sincere people who disagree with us … on questions of sexual morality and the nature of marriage.” “And so,” it concluded, “it is out of love (not ‘animus’) and prudent concern for the common good (not ‘prejudice’), that we pledge to labor ceaselessly to preserve the legal definition of marriage.”
That kinder, gentler language drew the support of many, but not as many as the religious right was used to getting. After setting a goal of obtaining 1 million signatures within 10 days of its Nov. 20, 2009, release, organizers said this Aug. 3 — almost nine months later — that they had amassed 463,000 signatures.
Another emphasis has been in seeking secular validation for anti-gay arguments — scientific evidence of the alleged pitfalls of homosexuality. Many on the religious anti-gay right now frame their arguments almost entirely around the idea that homosexuals present various dangers to children, that they will live short and unhappy lives, that they are more vulnerable to disease, and so on.
The clearest statement of this may have come in late 2008 from Paul Cameron of the Family Research Institute: “We can no longer rely — as almost all pro-family organizations do today — on gleaning scientific ‘bits’ from those in liberal academia… . [W]e must subvert the academy by doing original, honest research ourselves and use this to advance the historic Christian faith.”
There’s just one trouble with this approach. Almost all the “facts” trotted out by the religious right about gays turn out to be false or misleading. And no one does more to create these myths than Cameron, whose work has been repudiated by three scholarly associations. (Others who are commonly cited as “researchers” by the anti-gay right include Joe Dallas, John R. Diggs, Joseph Nicolosi and the late Charles Socarides.) In addition, many scholars who do serious work in the area of sexuality say their work is misused by anti-gay groups. In fact, at least 11 legitimate scientists have recorded video statements saying their work was being mischaracterized by the religious right.
Related to this effort has been the creation of “ex-gay” therapies — programs run by the religious right that claim, against the weight of scientific evidence, to be able to turn homosexuals into heterosexuals. The problem is that so few people seem to have made the change — and so many who supposedly did later repudiated it.
A final new emphasis being used by many of the hard-core anti-gay groups is the charge that homosexuals make up, in effect, an active conspiracy whose agenda includes the destruction of Christianity and, ultimately, Western civilization. Sometimes, their propaganda sounds noticeably like Nazi descriptions of Jewish plots.
In a Feb. 6 column headlined “The bitter fruit of decriminalizing homosexual behavior,” for example, the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer paraphrased another writer, agreeing that decriminalizing homosexuality had left society facing “a powerful, vicious, and punitive homosexual cabal that is determined to overthrow completely what remains of Judeo-Christian standards of sexual morality in the West.” Fischer adds that, “as [the writer] points out,” gays have received “special protections … which come at the expense of religious liberty, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech and freedom of association and lead to the punishment, intimidation and harassment of any who oppose their agenda.”
For his part, reflecting on “the rise of gay power in the culture,” Americans for Truth About Homosexuality’s LaBarbera sounded a similar theme during a radio broadcast last summer, saying, “The homosexual activist movement has very strategically insinuated itself into every sphere of power in our society.”
And at the Chicago-area Truth Academy, Robert Knight of Coral Ridge Ministries cited a 2008 Time magazine article that he said “makes the case that the Democratic Party is a fully owned subsidiary of a group of homosexual billionaires.” (In fact, the article discussed a group of wealthy gay men and their effect on pro-gay politics.) Knight then went a few steps further, saying that homosexuals in the nation’s capital have “blackmail power.”
How is that? So many gays work in the hospitality industry, Knight claimed, that “they see congressmen dallying with their secretaries. They see them with their mistresses, and they let them know if they step out of line on the gay issue, it just might find its way into the wrong hands.” He offered no evidence.
“The gay Mafia in Washington,” he concluded. “It’s very real.”
Facing the Future
In the end, many legal observers have suggested, same-sex marriage — or “marriage equality,” in the words of its backers — may well be legalized across the United States, whether through the actions of the courts or the legislatures. But that doesn’t mean that the hard core of religious resistance is about to disappear.
Frederick Clarkson, an independent journalist who has written about the American religious right for a quarter of a century, notes that the social conflicts set off by Roe v. Wade and Brown v. Board of Education continued for decades after the Supreme Court ruled. Moderating public attitudes toward homosexuality, he says, are viewed by the religious right as “symptoms of a society that has fallen away from God’s laws, seriously enough that God is ready to smack the country down.”
After all, to the hard core of that anti-gay religious right, Clarkson says, “homosexuality is a profound capital offense against God’s order.”
The upshot, in all likelihood, is that violence, hatred and bullying of those perceived as homosexual will continue into the foreseeable future. Although leaders of the hard core of the religious right deny it, it seems clear that their demonizing propaganda plays a role in fomenting that violence — a proposition that has sparked a number of Christian leaders to speak out in the wake of the latest series of tragedies.
“The recent epidemic of bullying-related teen suicides is a wake-up call to us moderate Christians,” the Rev. Fritz Ritsch, pastor of St. Stephen Presbyterian Church, wrote in October in the Fort Worth, Texas, Star-Telegram. “To most unchurched Americans — meaning most Americans — the fruit of the church is bitter indeed. … [T]he bullying crisis has put a fine point on the need for moderates to challenge the theological bullies from our own bully pulpits. We cannot equivocate. Children are dying. We need to speak up. If not now, when?”
[Note: Mark Potok is the editor of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report.]
— The Curator
The Catholic Church continues to lose followers for awful decisions like the one it made last week to strip an Arizona hospital of its official religious status because it performed an emergency abortion to save the life of the mother.
The controversy has the ACLU appealing to the federal government to ensure that emergency contraceptives and abortions remain available at Catholic hospitals.
In a letter to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the ACLU said "the refusal by religiously affiliated hospitals to provide abortion and other services was becoming an increasing problem."
Their complaint stems from a Catholic Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted's decision to strip St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix of its Catholic status after staff doctors performed an abortion to save a mother's life late last year.
The bishop who oversees the hospital excommunicated a nun who was involved in the decision-making process last Tuesday and announced that the hospital could no longer call itself Catholic because he discovered it had been providing women with "birth-control pills and other forms of contraception" and sterilizations and abortions in certain situations.
The medical center followed with a very brave announcement of its own last Tuesday, saying it will continue to provide life-saving abortion care to patients even though it means losing its affiliation with the local Roman Catholic Diocese.
This commendable decision by St. Joseph’s and the hospital network that oversees it, Catholic Healthcare West, upholds important legal and moral principles. It also underscores the need to ensure that religiously affiliated hospitals comply with their legal duty to provide emergency reproductive care.
Advocates for reproductive rights are concerned that as Catholic hospital chains take over more hospitals, it will become more difficult for women to access contraception and medically necessary abortions.
The controversy stems from an incident in November 2009, when a 27-year-old mother of four in her third month of pregnancy arrived at St. Joseph’s. She was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension, a serious complication that might well have killed her if she had continued the pregnancy.
The hospital performed an abortion, leading Bishop Olmsted to declare Sister Margaret McBride, a member of the hospital’s ethics committee, “automatically excommunicated” because she had consented to the therapeutic abortion necessary to save the woman’s life.
Last week, Bishop Olmsted said he no longer had confidence that the administration of St. Joseph's Hospital would run it according to Catholic teachings, "and therefore this hospital cannot be considered Catholic."
Leaders of the institution, founded in 1895 by a Catholic order, the Sisters of Mercy, said it would continue to operate "in the Catholic tradition" but without the official sanction of the church.
"I have hoped and prayed that this day would not come," the bishop was quoted as saying at a news conference. "However, the faithful of the diocese have a right to know whether institutions of this importance are indeed Catholic in identity and practice."
Just last month, Bishop Olmsted threatened to remove his endorsement of the hospital unless he received a written acknowledgment that the abortion violated Catholic policy and “will never occur again at St. Joseph’s Hospital.”
The hospital has steadfastly refused to bow to these demands, summing up its position with elegant simplicity: “Morally, ethically, and legally we simply cannot stand by and let someone die whose life we might be able to save.”
It is hardly reassuring that following the incident at St. Joseph’s, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops said Sister Margaret was properly punished and seconded Bishop Olmsted’s stance against providing the abortion, even to save a woman’s life.
No one has suggested that Catholic hospitals should be required to perform nonemergency abortions. But as St. Joseph’s recognized, the need to accommodate religious doctrine does not give health providers serving the general public license to jeopardize women’s lives.
The hospital's president, Linda Hunt, said she was "deeply saddened" by Olmsted's decision, adding, "The fact that this situation stems from our decision to save a young woman's life is particularly sad."
This is no small matter. Catholic hospitals account for about 15 percent of the nation’s hospital beds and are the only hospital facilities in many communities. Months ago, the American Civil Liberties Union asked the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services to investigate reported instances where religious doctrine prevailed over the need for emergency reproductive care, and to issue a formal clarification that denying such treatment violates federal law.
As previously mentioned, St. Joseph's is run by San Francisco-based Catholic Healthcare West, which operates more than 40 hospitals and clinics in California, Arizona and Nevada.
— The Curator
Gay men and women will soon be able to serve openly in the military for the first time in our nation's history, rather than hiding their sexuality or being forced to lie about it.
There are thousands upon thousands of blog posts across the globe about the repeal of the military's bigoted "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy against gays, so I hesitated adding my small voice to that growing cacophony.
What can I say, that hasn't been said? Then it dawned on me: I'm bisexual, so I HAVE to add my small voice.
Before becoming disabled, I worked in law enforcement, within an agency that mimicked many military practices. In fact, a huge percentage of my co-workers were retired police, military or reservists. After 9-11, a large number of them were re-activated or volunteered and were sent immediately to Iran and into combat.
I knew that many of those men and women were also members of the Lesbian-Gay-Tri-Gender community. They responded to the country's call to arms without hesitation, putting their civilian lives on hold indefinitely. They kissed their families and significant others good-bye, and donned their helmets, fatigues and loaded their automatic rifles.
As most know, the military code of conduct requires that each member practice and respect honesty in service. How then, could these brave heroes be told by their country that they must lie about the core truth of their lives, or they would be barred from serving, or drummed out of the military in disgrace?
So, all of the ones I knew lied by omission. They did not declare their sexuality, and refused to disclose it if asked. Some of them were wounded, some never came home. The ones that did, were often re-deployed more than once because they had advanced military training and skills. When they finally came home and stayed, many were scarred emotionally and/or physically, and most were forever changed — just like their heterosexual counterparts. No difference. No difference at all.
I don't know one LGBT man or woman who wants to "seduce" a heterosexual, especially during combat! They simply want equality, to live normal lives, free from the constant stereotyping and bigotry that they have had to endure for eons.
Sexuality is NOT a choice, or a lifestyle. It is simply a biological fact. There are rotten LGBTs, just like their are rotten heterosexuals. The person you sleep with is not someone's defining char-ac-ter-is-tic — no, that would be char-ac-ter! You know, like strength, perseverance, compassion, courage, and honesty!
Equal rights means, uh, equal rights, i.e., freedom. It remains shocking to me that LGBTs have been seeking the right to die for those rights by defending our country. Shouldn't we all be focused on working toward peace? Maybe now, we will be.
"By ending 'don't ask, don't tell,' no longer will our nation be denied the service of thousands of patriotic Americans forced to leave the military, despite years of exemplary performance, because they happen to be gay. And no longer will many thousands more be asked to live a lie in order to serve the country they love," President Obama said in a statement.
It is high time that America joins the rest of the developed world. LGBT's right to serve openly and without penalty or disdain in the military is a huge step in doing just that. Now, let us turn our attention to bringing our military service members home safely — and soon — from all wars.
— The Curator
Primetime TV shows that appeal to teenagers are promoting the "sexualization" of girls at an alarming rate, including more portrayals of underage females being objectified than adults, especially for laughs, according to the Parents Television Council.
The questionable watchdog group is calling on producers, advertisers and government regulators to take an honest assessment of the sexually provocative way girls are portrayed on TV and take it down a notch. Or two.
But, is this study legitimate, or simply another way for this group to manipulate the statistics for its established agenda? The PTC is known to use scare tactics and thin statistics to jump to huge conclusions and generalizations about sex in America. It often does so without the appropriate, neutral scientific research to back up any of its claims.
PTC president Tim Winter, armed with only a 20-page study that the group released today, hosted a conference call with journalists and others to ask Hollywood to treat sex much as it has smoking: Strip it out where possible, for children's sake.
"They can step up. They can tone it down," he said, during the media blitz.
PTC analysts looked only at the top 14 scripted shows that Nielsen identified as being popular among children 12-17, including "The Office," "NCIS," "Two and a Half Men," "The Big Bang Theory" and "The Vampire Diaries."
"Underage female characters are shown participating in a higher percentage of sexual depictions compared to adults," according to the study, called 'Sexualized Teen Girls: Tinseltown's New Target' — hardly neutral language for a legitimate study.
The PTC argues that girls are increasingly shown as having their worth dependent upon their sexuality, a media phenomenon it asserts leads to passivity, depression, eating disorders and low self-esteem. In other words, TV is the root of most of the sexual evils of our time.
The report claims that 73 percent of televised sexual incidents that involved girls under 18 were designed to be funny, thus using "laughter to desensitize and trivialize topics that might normally be viewed as disturbing."
The study says 98 percent of the portrayals of underage girls acting in a sexual manner occurred with partners with whom they have no committed relationship, and 75 percent of such shows don't include the "S" descriptor beforehand to warn parents what's coming.
To bolster the PTC's case, the group put several "experts" on its conference call today, including former model Nicole Clark, who made the 2008 documentary film "Cover Girl Culture: Awakening the Media Generation."
"Our girls are being sexually objectified as young as six," said Clark, who is pregnant and broke down into tears several times during her presentation. "How did things get so crazy?"
Television executives are robbing children of their innocence — "preying on them" — she asserted, and their victims aren't strong enough to reject the destructive messages.
"Why can't the media be on our side?" she asked.
The provocative question regarding the veracity of this study was addressed in detail in an excellent column written by Chris Kelly, which appeared in today's Huffington Post. Read the opinion editorial in its entirety below, or directly at the website:
TV is Smutty, but the Parents Television Council is a Disgrace
By Chris Kelly
"L. Brent Bozell is a cheap has-been who died years ago, but that doesn't mean his work-from-home pressure group, The Parents Television Council, can't still come up with the occasional hot title for a press release. Take, for example, this week's shocking study — more than 35 hours in the making —
Sexualized Teen Girls: Tinseltown's New Target (deep breath) A Study of Teen Female Sexualization in Primetime TV
Just looking at him, you'd guess that L. Brent Bozell's savvy with technology was limited to opening cans, but you've got to hand it to him — the man can manipulate a search engine.
If there's one thing L. Brent Bozell hates about our sleazy, lowest-common-denominator media, it's teen girl sex teen female teen teen sex girls.
Especially in that dern "Tinseltown," where a smooth-talking sharpie can turn a dizzy doll's head, pitch her some woo, love her up, and leave her table dancing in some gin joint.
L. Brent Bozell is a busted valise, and the PTC is a card table, but the report has already been covered, and taken seriously, by ABC News, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Daily News. None of which mentioned that, just to give you a feel for where the PTC is coming from, this week they made a grid of every show on network television, and said only two were appropriate for family viewing — Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and Minute to Win It.
Here's the PTC's release about the teen sex sex teen sex thing:
LOS ANGELES (December 15, 2010) In a new report, the Parents Television Council details the nature and extent of Hollywood's obsession with sexualizing teen girls. PTC's report, Tinseltown's New Target: A study of Teen Female Sexualization on Primetime TV, is based on a content analysis of the most popular primetime broadcast shows among 12 to 17-year-olds during the 2009-2010 TV season.
This content analysis was limited to just 35 hours of TV — that's including commercial time — over two weeks. They only watched scripted shows on the four major networks, so the study doesn't include reality shows, which actually make up half of top 25, or whole channels, like MTV, TLC, Adult Swim or Comedy Central — the ones that air the shows teenagers actually watch. So remember, this study of modern TV trends has been prepared by people who've never seen American Idol and don't have cable. It's like getting a tsunami warning from a man listening to a seashell.
Pretty shocking, right, Grandma? Get out your checkbook. But let's take a closer look, claim by claim.
"When underage female characters appear on screen: more sexual content is depicted."
Than when? Than when underage female characters don't appear? Than during reruns of My Little Margie? Than when the Wright Brothers pioneered powered flight? Than when the TV is off?
Not only don't we know what any of these terms mean, we don't know to what, if anything, they're being compared. We just know it's MORE.
So we turn to the study itself, and find the PTC means more sexualized images of underage female characters than adult female characters.
This could be shocking, but remember, the PTC got to pick the shows it gets to talk about. And they picked the (network, scripted) shows that teenagers watch. So, it's not really that weird that they're about teenagers, and not about adults. Would it be less creepy if teenagers were watching shows where adult women had more sex than teenagers?
And what exactly is "sexual content?" According to the PTC, it includes dancing, nudity (partial, obscured or implied) and "scenes in which sexualization was intentionally ambiguous and communicated using subtle overtones and social cues" including scenes that "required knowledge of a previous storyline or history and/or knowledge of the characters' general disposition."
Your move, Taliban.
In other words, everything and anything. They don't know smut, but they know it when they see it, kind of see it, or don't see it at all. This, of course, is lunacy.
"The teen girls show next to no negative response to being sexualized."
According to the PTC report:
"Only 5% of the underage female characters communicated any form of dislike for being sexualized (excluding scenes depicting healthy sexuality)."
Again, remember: This announcement is being made based on the close study of less TV than the average teenager sees in a weekend, and deliberately excludes the shows the average teenager chooses to watch. And by "being sexualized" the PTC sometimes means sending subtle social cues about a willingness to dance.
Let's look at where they get their 5 percent. It's in Table 3 "Frequencies and Percentages of Female Characters' Attitudes Toward Being Sexualized Based on Age":
Participant's Attitude Positive 16 Negative 2 Unclear/Neutral 23 Total Incidents 41
Look at this another way: Even given their insane definition of sex, and their tiny sample of episodes of shows — that aren't really representative of anything — they still find that 25 out of 41 underage characters' responses to being sexualized are negative, unclear or neutral.
That's 60 percent. Which could be better, but it's not bad.
"More sexual incidents occur outside of any form of a committed relationship."
Here the Parents Television Council jumps the tracks entirely. What do they imagine they want? We're talking about children. What sort of committed sexual relationships would L. Brent Bozell like eight year olds to enter? This isn't an argument; it's just dog noises.
"There is less accuracy in the TV content rating."
Goddamn it, here we go again. Than what? Less accuracy than what?
One last shocking figure from the report:
"The data show that 73% of the underage sexualized incidents were presented in a humorous manner or as a punch line to a joke."
Outrageous! Except the PTC only looked at 14 shows, and nine of them were comedies. I'm thinking the comedies were the ones making light.
By the way, of the 14 shows in the study, only six even have underage characters: Two and Half Men, Glee, The Cleveland Show, Family Guy, American Dad and The Simpsons. So by "Tinseltown," the Parents Television Council means one sitcom, one dramedy, and four cartoons, one of them over 20 years old.
Obviously sexualizing children is wrong. But so is talking nonsense about nothing in language designed to deceive. It's contemptible and obvious, and L. Brent Bozell should knock it off."
The sexualization of children is deplorable, and appears to be ans increasing phenomenon throughout our society. It is an important topic that should be looked at with neutrality, not by a group that has an established agenda and manipulates minimal statistics primarily to generate fear and its own sensational headlines and point of view.
— The Curator
Want to be a nicer person? If you're a man, then shacking up may help. A new study is lending credence to the idea that marriage helps combat antisocial behavior.
Earlier research has found evidence that tying the knot can make men less aggressive and even less likely to engage in criminal activity. But it wasn't clear whether antisocial men were simply more likely to remain single, or whether marriage actually makes them into nicer people.
Both reasons may apply, according to a study published this week in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
S. Alexandra Burt, a behavioral geneticist at Michigan State University and the study's lead researcher, examined 289 pairs of male twins to find out how they would differ if one of the twins got married, and the other remained single.
"The married men engaged in lower levels of antisocial behavior at all ages," which suggests that they were less antisocial people to begin with, Burt concluded.
"But once they got married it seemed like the behaviors go down even more," meaning that something about their marriage likely made them become "nicer," she said in an interview.
Researchers examined the twins at age 17, 20, 24 and 29. They found that those who were less aggressive or more likely to consider the well-being of others at age 17 and age 20 had a better chance of getting married by age 29.
Once married, they became even less likely to do something antisocial, like get into a brawl, compared to their single twin brothers.
The study didn't examine why it is that antisocial men are more likely to stay single, or why married men may become more responsible and laid-back.
But the findings raise some interesting questions, Burt says. "I can imagine if you're a guy who really likes to get in fights and steal things, marriage may not look all that attractive to you," she said. "On the other hand, it could be that if you're a woman looking to get married, the kind of guy that gets in fights and steals things doesn't look as attractive as a marital partner either. So it's hard to know who's doing the selecting."
It may also be that "when men are with their wives, they're just less likely to go out and do some of the stuff that they might do with their rowdy friends," she said.
Or perhaps marriage teaches men to better relate to others.
"Through getting married they're just learning better how to bond with people. Since antisocial behavior is really about disregarding the rights of others, they're less likely to do that," Burt said.
And once men get married, she added, "they also have more to lose."
This study clearly involved only marriages between heterosexual men and women. I would like to see the study replicated to see whether the results hold true in same-sex unions between men. I would expect the results to be exactly the same!
— The Curator
I hate this, hate this!
Breakups are agonizing. For both the heartbreaker and the heartbroken, the let's-not-do-this-anymore conversation is always awkward and very often painful, particularly for the person getting dumped.
Bradley Laborman knows this because he has probably been through more breakups than anyone else. That's because he runs the website iDUMP4U, which lets users hire a relationship hit man — i.e., Laborman — to do their dirty work for them. For $10, Laborman will make the breakup call, which he records for posterity — and for YouTube. That's right, customers can choose to broadcast these calls for their entertainment (or revenge) value.
Sound terrible? It really, really is. But, I think it also symbolizes just how far our society had devolved. People and relationships are beyond expendable, they have become simply 'objects' to be used then discarded along with the trash without a backward, emotional or responsible glance. So, why not use the new technology to keep your own hands clean? Dis-gusting.
But people do use the service. At $10 for a standard breakup, $25 for ending an engagement and $50 for demanding a divorce, iDUMP4U isn't turning a profit yet, but Laborman says he was surprised at how quickly business picked up after he launched the site in September 2009.
Originally starting it as a joke, Laborman so far has conducted more than 200 breakups, for almost every reason imaginable, from cheating partners to lazy lovers. And if last year's requests are any indication, Laborman's numbers are about to get a boost. The phenomenon known as the Turkey Dump — in which college freshmen break up with their hometown loves over the Thanksgiving holiday — provided Laborman with a lot of extra business last year. "Last year I had a lot of Turkey Dumps," he says. "I also had people who didn't want to buy a Christmas present [for their partner]. This time of year is the busiest."
Although Laborman may be the most extreme, he is not the only provider of third-party dumping services. There's BreakUpEmail.com, which asks users to fill out various details — their name, partner's name, reason for breaking up — and then produces a breakup e-mail to send to their soon-to-be-single sweetheart.
The site gets up to 5,000 visits a day, and its creator, Chris (who asks that we do not include his last name out of concern that moonlighting as a breakup facilitator might negatively impact his day job as a humanitarian-aid worker), says he has gotten thank-you e-mails from two types of people: those who find the site funny and those who actually use it.
And, of course, there's an app for breaking up. Erase Ur X can be used to create a form e-mail sent from your iPhone that breaks the news to your soon-to-be-ex. After that, the app does what creator Cory Wiles calls the hardest part of the breakup — deleting the now-ex's number from your phone. (If you aren't actually conducting the breakup yourself, that probably is the hardest part.)
For those of us who can still remember the time when breaking up over the phone, rather than in person, was thought to be in poor taste, services like these may seem an unimaginably impersonal way to end what should be your most intimate relationship. But for those who began their dating career in the age of texting, Twitter and Facebook, relationships have a whole new communication system. And so do breakups.
"We are so used to having standardized etiquette, and in some ways we are still waiting for that to emerge [online]," says Ilana Gershon, an assistant professor at Indiana University and the author of The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media. "But no one has set out the rules of what's acceptable and what's not." So for a society that once lived by Emily Post's code of conduct, we now find ourselves navigating the social scene sans guidelines, and what may seem like horrific behavior to some is (borderline) acceptable to others.
Ironically, Erase Ur X's Wiles and the other guys who run third-party dumping services admit that they'd never want to be broken up with by their own companies. BreakUpEmail.com's Chris says he's never broken up with anyone over e-mail, which may explain why he's still friends with most of his ex-girlfriends (one of them even gave him advice on developing the site). And iDUMP4U's Laborman says he'd prefer a face-to-face breakup to any other method.
Yet each defends their services as having a practical role for today's relationships. Wiles says that social networking has changed our ideas about privacy. "It used to be that breakups were private," he says. "This is just the new trend, a natural progression."
Laborman contends that with all the ambiguity that new media can bring to a relationship — it's not officially over until your Facebook relationship status says it's over, right? — using a third-party dumping service can let your partner know how serious you are about the breakup, and therefore improve your communication.
"Or," he counters, "it's the perfect way to burn a bridge."
No kidding! Anyone who would use one of these services is not someone I would ever be interested in having a relationship with in the first place. Relationships mean taking risks, and they require mutual responsibility and have consequences. Sometimes they cause pain, but they can also produce a profound joy like nothing else in the entire universe. They are not iPod applications for God's sake, they are real life. You remember real life, right? Jesus, I am developing a real, honest hatred for this era!
— The Curator
