Misreading Masculinity

I recently read the book Misreading Masculinity: Boys, Literacy, and Popular Culture, by Thomas Newkirk. I've read a lot of the current boys-in-peril/misunderstood-boys literature, and this is surely the strongest of the ones I've read.

I don't have time to do a full write-up, and the book is already overdue at the library, so I just want to use this as a placeholder for a few of the quotes from the book that I flagged as I was reading. Here they are:

Why, then, is violent content in classical literature perceived as nonthreatening (even uplifting and humanizing), when the same violent conflict in more popular media is seen as provocative and dangerous? The answer may reside not in the representation of violence, but in the way the audience for that violence is imagined. The reader of classic literature, or someone who rented the incredibly violent movie Titus (a rendition of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus) would be assumed to be part of a nonviolent literate social class who would approach the film with the proper aesthetic distance. There would be no danger of suggestibility in these activities because they would be intelligently mediated by the reader or viewer. No such assumption is made about someone watching a much less graphically violent movie, such as one from the Lethal Weapon series. The nonelite group that chooses to watch the more popular version of violence is perceived as more susceptible to suggestion, less capable of keeping the proper distance, more volatile. All of which leads to the question, Is the issue really about violence, or is it about the social group (and age group) the violence appeals to? (p. 96)

*****

The [research] approach is circular, assuming what is presumes to prove. It is assumed that the children have nothing interesting to say about the visual stimulus--so they aren't asked. The film is treated not as a text that is interpreted by the child, not as something processed in any way. The child is presumed to have virtually no capacity to interpret, to resist or mediate.... In this huge body of work, students were rarely interviewed or allowed to discuss reactions or interpretations--because it was assumed they did not have real interpretations, only reactions to stimuli. (pp. 98-99)

*****

One final problem with traditional research on media violence needs to be noted. Few shows that contain violence are about only violence; most action movies also stress teamwork, loyalty, perseverance, ingenuity, problem solving, stoicism, athletic fitness, courage, and frequently patriotism. The action hero typically has to overcome adversity, failure, and sometimes discouragement at having to face a superior force. If 200,000 exposures to violence cause a person to be violent, does the same number of exposures to teamwork create an ethic of cooperation? Does 200,000 exposures to ingenuity create a desire to be ingenious? Why should one message--that of the acceptability of violence--be the sole effect of these shows when even cartoons are about much more than that? The alarmist claims about the effects of media violence rest on research that reduces complex narratives with multiple messages to simple "stimuli" that work automatically, like a carcinogen, at an unconscious level. Not only is the media narrative reduced; the young viewers too are reduced, to being unconscious reactors with no interpretive responses. (pp. 102-103)