Violence in the Media II: Girls On the Lam

With more and more young girls committing violent acts, it’s time to consider what exactly is driving them to such extremes. By this I mean, just how are television and films and songs and video games doing it? Don’t these media spend all their time spurring young boys on to violence? Is it a wise marketing move to branch out and tackle the young female demographic as well? I’m worried that the media will spread themselves and the violence too thin.

Of course, there’s the old fallback – simply show the news stories and clips of girls bullying girls and fighting girls. That usually helps. The media know that they have to emphasize exactly how powerful they are by showing what a terrible influence they can be. S.O.P.

But then they have to come up with the culprits – name names. Xena, Buffy, Sydney Bristow, Lara Croft, Max Guevara – these are the usual suspects. Never mind that they are fighting for good causes or beating up bad guys – they provide bad role models. After all, how can the young girls who watch these shows know who the bad guys are in their real lives? In the end, critics argue, it’s just about the aggression (and the form-fitting or revealing outfits) and girls are learning to solve their problems with violence.

Some say this trend goes back to the character of Ripley on Alien. In terms of appearance, Sigourney Weaver pulls off the he-woman look and fits in well with the guys on her ship. And when the fur and hatchlings and acid blood start to fly, does she try consensus building with the alien? No. Does she try to empathize with the alien’s pain? No. She does things like a man and blows the thing out the doors of her shuttle. Yes, she has power, but she chooses to use it in a very unfeminine way. And from her cinematic loins have dropped the other female power heroes mentioned above, up to and including the central characters Kill Bill and Ultraviolet, although when I saw those movies I recall mostly male audiences. They must have gone home and told their women-folk about the films. Sometimes that’s enough to get the fem-rage on.

And Lord knows The Spice Girls didn’t help. The more prescient cultural mavens must have realized even back then that these five tough grrrls heralded a shift in the cultural winds. All I knew was I was sure that they could kick ‘NSYNC’s ass and give the ‘battle of the bands’ new meaning. Forgive me for those long ago and still recurring violent thoughts.

But I worry sometimes that the media can’t be everywhere – that sometimes it may let some young women slip through the cracks. For example, where was the media when a group of mostly girls punched and kicked to death the young British Columbia girl, Reena Virk? I worry that the media might not get sufficient credit for something like this because these girls were not TV addicts, for example. It’s possible that, in a case like this, family problems, drugs, alcohol and a whole host of social issues might have had more to do with the violence than the media did.

And what can you say about the incident in 2002 in Lauro, Italy when a few days after an argument in a beauty parlour three women were dead and five wounded after a shootout between rival factions of the Cosa Nostra? It turns out that many women who rise to power in the organization after their male relatives are killed or imprisoned have some nasty non-media-related habits. Not many TV shows, for example, deal with the finer points of carrying around bottles of acid in purses to throw in rivals’ faces. There is a certain cultural acceptance of aggression among women there, perhaps. And maybe there is the increasing recognition among the women of the west that while there are still inequities in the system, power is gradually seeping into the feminine realms and with power almost inevitably comes violence.

Unfortunately, that means that if the media were as powerful as some of us like to believe, they wouldn’t waste time encouraging us to participate in violent acts – they would be out putting the hit on their competition. When they are powerful enough to do that, then we can take them seriously.