On Sex and Violence

Today, at the gas station, I realized how inured I’ve become to pornography. Instead of deliberately glancing above the racks of big-bosomed, lip-licking trucker porn, I felt my gaze just brush by and over it as I cruised out the door. It was so anticlimactic that I thought it must really mean something.

It’s hard to explain pornography’s role in Europe to anyone who’s only lived within the U.S. Naked breasts appear on a fairly regular basis in Spiegel, the Germany’s equivalent of Time Magazine, and on an extremely rigid schedule on the front page of Bild-Zeitung, a rag which has no equivalent in the U.S. You go beyond accepting porn; you gradually assimilate it into your world view. It’s no longer surprising to see softcore action on public TV after 10:30 p.m. Gratuitous nudity is often used in comedies as a cheap laugh. Off-color jokes now seem only stupid; not stupid and embarrassing. Eventually, you become European in your outlook.

Then, you watch an American film and become overwhelmed by the sheer brutality of it all. I’m certainly not the first to note that most action-film heroes are homicidal psychopaths. And they always triumph by meting out to the villain a horrifically gruesome death. Over the years, I’ve developed a theory that this violence is America’s pornography. Lacking its natural outlet, the animal sex drive appeared, distorted and distended, as America’s love affair with guns, knives, boxing, you name it.