A: They target teenagers sometimes in extremely unpleasant
ways.
What’s another common thread here?
All of them are about old white men/women creating worlds in
which teenagers are put in their place.
Most disturbing of all for me is that I am a part of all of
this not just by reading the books and seeing the movies and participating in
the drug search – but I participated willingly and without thought. The common
theme through all of these is teenagers.
Evidence
1)
HUNGER GAMES was written by a 51 (currently)
year old white woman and depicts scenes of extreme violence in which teenagers
are encouraged to kill each other and when they do, they are rewarded. The main
supervisor of this mayhem is President Snow – an old white guy.
2)
The movie “Hunger Games” is a Lions Gate Entertainment
production. Lions Gate is a Canadian company owned by an old white Canadian
guy.
3)
ENDER’S GAME was written by a 62 (currently –
then 27-year-old) white man and depicts scenes of extreme humiliation and
violence in which teenagers are encouraged to beat each other up and kill what
is different from them. The main supervisor of this mayhem is Colonel Graff –
an old white guy.
4)
The movie “Ender’s Game” is a Summit
Entertainment production. Summit is an American subsidiary of Lions Gate
Entertainment. Lions Gate is a company owned by an old white Canadian guy.
5)
HOMELAND was written by a 47 year old white man
and depicts scenes of extreme violence and torture in which teenagers break
multiple laws (because all authority that doesn’t do what it’s told to do is
evil – BTW, a premise I do in fact support) and are frequently captured,
beaten, tortured and threatened. (Cory Doctorow is Brit – but that’s only since
2011. He was originally Canadian.) HOMELAND is published by Macmillan
Publishing, which is owned by Monika Schoeller and Stefan von Holtzbrinck (both
white, in this case, billionaires), German Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck
is a Stuttgart-based publishing holding company which owns publishing companies
worldwide.)
6)
The K9 drug search at the school I work at was
initiated by a black woman and supervised by a mixture of white men, black men,
white women, and black women. The high school I work at is approximately one
half not-white. The dog-handlers were all white males. The dogs were all some breed
derived from German Shepherds and were distinctively in a category apart from “man’s
best friend” and/or “look at the cute puppy” divisions of dogs and possibly
even in the “sic ‘em!” category. These were leashed and mostly under the
control of their handlers, but were neither silent nor slow. As a side-note, there
are vertical windows in every classroom door in this building.
What does this mean?
I can think of several implications but I cannot say
definitively. I know that while they are aware of this bias, teenagers lined up
in droves to see “Catching Fire” (CBS Los Angeles (online) reports: “According
to poll data, the popularity of ‘Catching Fire’ is crossing over to all
moviegoers, as compared to the female-heavy audience of ‘Hunger Games.’ About
12 percent more male moviegoers saw ‘Catching Fire’ and the audience was split
equally between those older and younger than 25.” Based on the estimated first weekend
“take” of $135,000,000 and estimating a $10 theater ticket, 13.5 million people
have seen “Catching Fire” by now. Half of those – 6.75 million of them are under
25. There are approximately 1.8 billion young people between the ages of 10 and
24 on Earth. In developed nations, there are some 216 million teenagers; which
means that three percent of those developed nation teenagers saw “Catching Fire”.)
and “Ender’s Game” (though not as many as they’d hoped for: “It played 58
percent male, suggesting it found sci-fi fans, a group that’s mainly men. But
54 percent of the audience turned out to be over the age of 25, indicating that
devotees of the book turned out — but not enough kids did.” This means that
roughly 1.3 million teenagers saw it during opening week. There’s no saying how
many have seen pirated copies, of course…)
I wonder what message wormed its way into their minds?
More to the point, what can I do about it?
Resources: http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2013/11/23/catching-fire-ablaze-with-135m-at-box-office/,
http://www.prb.org/pdf13/youth-data-sheet-2013.pdf,
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