Yesterday I went to see Sin City finally, which I liked. It’s pretty violent, sexually loaded and dark. In other words, it has all the earmarks of great comic books. Since then, I’ve gotten to thinking a bit more on the topic of sex and violence in the media. It’s certainly a sticky subject with a lot of disagreement, some of which I’ve covered elsewhere. The thing I was specifically considering though was the idea of life cycles.

That is, sex and violence are the beginning and end of the life cycle of animals. And we are animals. People spend a lot of time saying it’s not “healthy” to focus on these things. Certainly engaging in these topics has a time and a place, and everyone has the right to decide how to do that for themselves and their children. But this idea of sex and violence as being “unhealthy” seems to barely cover an underlying odor of denial: namely the denial of our own biological animal natures.

It seems like in ages past, the average person had a very different experience of the cycles of life and death than they do today. If you were raised on a farm for example, you might very well have learned about the “birds and the bees” from actually seeing it in nature: animals in heat fucking each other, giving birth to babies, and other ones dying - all in their own seasons. Similarly, wakes and funerals were not always the formal weird affairs they are today. In recent memory even, people held viewings of deceased family members right in their own living rooms.

But for many of us now, the world of media has largely replaced the world of nature and direct experience of the mysteries of life and death. Whether this is a good or bad thing could be debated all day. The real underlying argument, I think, is often overlooked. What’s the best type of experience: direct or mediated?