DEBATE OVER -- SEX LOSES!

The hand-wringing over what's worse in our media, sex-or-violence, has really never been worthy of the name. There is no debate. The facts have been in for years. Ever since WWII, sex may come sooner in the plots, but it's the smash-mouth scenes of violence which have continued to soar. Smarmy bedroom action loses out 5-to-1 to gunfire, car crashes, fireballs, crushed faces and tortured bodies.

Good news or bad...? That's like asking are kids better gorging on writhing or on exploding bodies...? Norman Mailer once said, "There are only two things worth writing about: Sex and death." I've yet to find even Dante or Hemingway writing any paeans to the worth of raw violence.

However, Hollywood and television have! And do! In addition to the estimated 1400 acts of violence on television every week, movies have become an altar of indulgence to the gods of pain. Each director outfoxing the other in how ingeniously they can destroy human life in malevolent splendor. Purposeless gore may have had its brutish birth with "Clockwork Orange" in 1971, but the fiend-child has matured with the likes of "Rambo," "Pulp Fiction," "Natural Born Killers," "Gladiator," anything by Quentin Tarantino, and now the release of "Kick-Ass."

No one has yet been able conclusively to prove this relentless diet of media gore directly causes our splurge of street gore. And yet, San Diego State University psychologist Jean Wenge reports to Discovery News the "narcissism/self-centeredness levels" of students have surged from 18% to 34% in just the last 15 years.

Is there some connection here? While Self has always been hard-wired into our evolutionary gene pools, there actually have been times in our history when Other counted even more. When violence for violence's sake actually made far less sense than violence for the sake of a cause. Far instance, our wars. Against king, slavery, corruption, liquor, poverty, cancer, Hitler. Each tended to call upon the best in ourselves for the sake of others.

I think of this as I see milling crowds outside movie theatres featuring violence for its own sake. And I imagine the enormous body of potential human energy that hides just inside these crowds. If only someone or something might call their better angels to nobler actions. Actually, such calls are often being made; just not always being heard...