âIf fiction canât cause bad things to happen, how did Jaws cause a wave of shark killings?â
1. Jaws tapped into an extant fear of sharks. It was based on four fatal shark attacks in 1916, at a time when Americans were largely ignorant of sharks and werenât sure whether they could even bite humans. These real-life attacks caused an irrational fear, which Jaws exploited.Â
2. Stephen Kingâs Cujo did not tap into an extant fear of St. Bernards. It was based off real-life events (specifically, a visit King once made to a mechanic, where a St. Bernard growled at him) but Americans did not fear St. Bernards. Culturally, dogs were beloved as family pets, and people could read or watch Cujo without suddenly developing a desire to murder their pets.
Both Jaws and Cujo were bestselling novels with popular, high-grossing film adaptations. If fiction affects reality the way antis claim it does, then Cujo should have caused a wave of dog slayings â especially since Cujo itself was just one book at the tail end of a horror fiction trend for evil dogs (including masterpieces such as Hell Hound, Dog Kill, Rabid, The Pack, The Dogs, The Long Dark Night, The Haven, and Blood Snarl). Weirdly enough, US and UK readers were able to read and enjoy these books without mass slaughtering their Jack Russell terriers.
When you argue that Jaws caused shark killings (instead of acknowledging that America already feared sharks and considered killing them a non-issue), youâre aligning yourself with uneducated parents who blame first-person shooters (or Richard Bachmanâs Rage, now out of print) for school shootings. Angry, depressed teens with murderous fantasies will seek out media which seems to align with their fantasies â such as Doom or Marilyn Mansonâs music. If they donât find this media, they kill anyway. If the media they find condemns their fantasies, they kill anyway. Parents blame media because they donât understand how a teenager can kill other teenagers, so they need a boogeyman to point fingers at (thereâs a lot of reading on this topic, but my personal favorite is Why Kids Kill by Dr. Peter Langman).Â
So, what does fiction do? Not much, on its own. Itâs a tool people can use to explore new ideas (e.g., a closeted gay kid may see Kurt on Glee and use that character to explore the concept that gay people arenât innately bad) or to reinforce the ideals they already hold. For example, a white person with nascent racist ideals may watch Birth of a Nation (1915) and come away cheerily convinced that racism is perfectly fine; but the same person may also watch Jordan Peeleâs Get Out and come away with the same exact cheerful conviction, even though Get Out rather explicitly condemns racism. No matter what the message is, people will twist it to fit their own ideals.Â
Any piece of fiction can be used for any purpose. Unfortunately, the same applies to nonfiction. Dr. Amy Hammel-Zabinâs Conversations with a Pedophile is intended to educate parents so they can recognize when their parents are being groomed, but it can also be used by pedophiles as a handbook on how to groom a child.Â
The solution isnât to ban any book that could potentially reinforce a negative value, because every single book ever published has that capacity. Every fanfiction, no matter how fluffy or G-rated, could theoretically convince a pedophile that child molestation is okay â because pedophiles are seeking that confirmation everywhere they go, and when they donât find it, theyâll twist the source material so that they do.Â
Not to dump a South Park meme on you, butâŚ
Donât know why I still have to say this.
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