Barrett Wilson compares a moral panic that convulsed the Wilson family (Satanic lyrics and overt sexual messages in contemporary movies and rock music) with today’s moral panic:
When my very Christian parents tried to throw away my 14-year-old sister’s heavy metal records, she ran away to her friend’s house. I cried for days. It felt like the end of everything. My sister would be gone forever. I would now live in what was referred to at the time as a “broken home.” I imagined that I’d be reunited with my sister in a few years—on the mean city streets after I’d been forced into a life of crime.
Both my parents and sister seemed to make good arguments. My mother and father tried to trash the records because they loved my sister, while my sister ran away because of her love for Dee Snyder. My parents wanted my sister to be safe. My sister wanted to express her individuality through music. My parents claimed that heavy metal was the cause of my sister’s rebellious behavior. My sister said that Judas Priest rocked, and elevated Ozzy Osbourne to secular sainthood. My parents thought my sister had fallen victim to satanic messages encoded in vinyl, while my sister believed my parents were enslaved to religious dogma printed in the Bible.
I remember the Bible studies and prayer groups well. There was a uniformity of belief and cause that united my parents and their pious peers. There was a collective smugness and sense of superiority that led members of the church to purge the culture (or what parts of the culture they could control) of dangerous and unholy influences. They wanted culture to be safer. Their targets: violence and overt sexuality in movies, music and video games.
So that was then, back in the benighted dark ages before the cell phone and broadband internet and all-consuming social media — they knew so little back then. We, as a culture, have grown so wise and mature that we’d never fall back into that kind of moral panic … oh, damn.
The right-left pro-censorship alliance that Gore formed three decades ago has its modern equivalent in the Twitter era. Right-wing men’s rights advocates and hyper-progressives found common cause in an online shaming campaign targeting Canadian feminist Meghan Murphy, for instance, after she dared suggest that women born into their female bodies might have reason to see themselves differently from those born with penises. And the recent de-platforming of second-wave feminist icon Germaine Greer on the basis of perceived transphobia would be met with gleeful applause by stridently conservative Australians as much as by stridently progressive gender-studies post-docs. The tactics used by right-wing Twitter trolls such as Mike Cernovich to get James Gunn fired from Disney are identical to those used by the left to get Twitter troll Godfrey Elfwick de-platformed. Their crime was the same: tweeting controversial jokes.
But while all forms of social panic tend to resemble one another, there are some stark differences between now and then. For one thing, young people today seem more naturally censorious and culturally conservative than their parents. Peace, love, freedom, and experimentation have been replaced by an obsession with emotional safety. Today’s young men and young women seem scared to death of each other. The LGBT community has fractured into its alphabetic constituent parts. And racial tensions are fed by a steady diet of online microaggressions. Everyone feels at risk, despite the fact the free world has never been safer.
Of course, moral panics are not based on facts but fears. In Stanley Cohen’s 2002 introduction to Folk Devils and Moral Panics, he writes that in moral panics, “the prohibitionist model of the ‘slippery slope’ is common … [and] crusades in favor of censorship are more likely to be driven by organized groups with ongoing agendas.” They are driven by organized groups, yes, but they are facilitated by well-meaning, ill-informed actors such as activists, therapists, and law enforcement officers. From the censorship of comic books, to video games, to music, we’ve known about the agendas of these special interests for a very long time. So why do we keep falling for it?
Moreover, there seems to be more hypocrisy at play in 2018 than there was during the moral panics of the 1980s. Many Christians who embraced Tipper Gore’s campaign truly were sincere anti-sex and anti-violence crusaders. But the world that people inhabit in 2018 is at once hyper-explicit and puritanical. In one browser tab, we’re typing about how words are violence, while in the other tab, we’re engaging in malicious gossip that could ruin someone’s career.
A feverish approach that seeks to sanitize culture is harmful but is also futile. Forbidding people from consuming content can often serve to make that content more desirable to consumers, something similar to the Streisand Effect. This phenomenon is named after Barbra Streisand’s futile attempt to keep photos of her Malibu mansion off of the internet. The harder she tried to stop people from posting photos, the more photos appeared. Paternalistically making music and art “forbidden content” makes it sexier, and elevates its status. The PMRC’s Filthy Fifteen is chockfull of rock and roll classics that went on to make millions. My parents’ disdain for heavy metal certainly did not make my sister pop Perry Como into her Walkman – she just rocked harder. Fans and free speech advocates rally around Tyler, the Creator today now more than ever.
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