The Desk

A friend told me to punch him in the face after we finished watching the movie Fight Club. We were in the theatre’s parking lot and he thought it would be a good idea to start our own fight club. Not because of the reasons in the film, just because he wanted to prove to me that he was tougher than I, which isn’t very hard. I’m a blubbering vagina, and inside that vagina is another vagina.

So after a few minutes of arguing with him, I decided I was going to punch him in the face but not then. No, he was going to have to wait for my fury. I was going to punch him when he least expected it.

The idea kept bouncing in my head, almost like a grocery list reminder—“Oh yeah, I’m supposed to punch Matt in the face today”—but I kept putting it off. A few days passed and at a party, I decided it was time. I snuck up behind him and once he was in my wheelhouse, I turned him around and dropped my best haymaker.(side note: I have terrible aim and ended up punching him in the ear). He fell down and immediately screamed: “What the fuck was that for! Why would you hit me in the ear!” I reminded him of our previous conversation and he remarked, “That was like four days ago, what the fuck is your problem.”

This situation is a perfect example of why the movie Sex and The City has little effect on young people. The idea that the show turns our nation’s sweet young innocent—and barely legal—teens into sex slaves is flawed because pop culture’s effects barely last past the movie theater parking lot.

The mediums of television, movies and music are a mirror to popular culture. It upholds basic ideas and trends already in the mainstream and rarely creates new ideas. Almost every media medium you see is chocked full of things you already know, or have already experienced.

The most obvious place to see this is the horror genre. In the 1920s through the 1940s, post WWI and into the depression was a common belief that evil was passed through indoctrination, and some even believed that it could be passed via syringe. That era’s horror flicks were based on “inoculation” evil. Evil that could be spread through a vampire bite or werewolf attack where the attacked becomes an attacker in a matter of a moon cycle.

The 1950s through 1970s, when the Cold War and Mutual Assured Destruction lurked on the horizon, the evil were manmade creations that could overrun its masters and wreaked havoc on the rest of us—i.e. radioactive ants or zombies. The newest trend, in the post 9-11 world, is evil for the sake of evil. The Saw films or the recent movie The Strangers show when evil attacks the innocent because it can. There is no why; there is only kill and die.

The films upheld our beliefs but didn’t change our perception.

A landmark 1961 study by Albert Bandura, entitled the Bobo experiment, exposed children to violent television programs and then locked the angry little sons of bitches in a room with a 3-foot tall blow-up doll. The experiment showed that kids exposed to violent television programming (and I can only assume shows like What Not To Wear have the same effect) were more likely to beat the living hell out of the doll. The problem with the outcome was that it only proved that it had a showed a short-term correlation between hideous Style TV programming and the angry men inside your head. The effects were tested years later. After a good episode of Scrubs, I’m ready to go and perform an appendectomy; but that feeling is fleeting.

A recent study shows the 1 in 4 New Yorkers have herpes; which, if I may guess why, is probably caused by you guessed it … Frank Stallone. Religious groups, parental groups and your grandmother have been saying that movies steeped in sex lead to more people fucking—which, if my 8th grade health class is correct, is how STDs and bad grades are passed.

You could blame this on pop culture’s hold on our fragile psyches, but that argument is too naïve.

It’s the same salvo we all had when Elvis and Little Richard hit the stages in the 1950s. Here’s a novel idea: people love to fuck and moreover love to watch films and see shows based on the idea that fucking is Number One super cool.

Sex and the City didn’t promulgate the idea that being a flippant, uber skank is cool. We already did that. We are just that.

Sex and The City is our a metaphor for our obsession with our own trashy, throwaway, cynical culture.

Sex and the City didn’t give you herpes, the infected girl you met at the 6:30 p.m showing of Sex and the City did.