Lots of good conversation going down on the
post about the Parents Television Council stats on violence against women on TV. GayAsXMas says the numbers aren't useful without context:
It's like the Republicans saying that the deficit has grown X amount since Obama's inauguration, therefore he is a fiscal disaster and ignoring the previous eight years.
Bingol, who is working on a novel with a female hero who gets knocked around some, asks if there are some other statistics that might help with an interpretation:
I wonder how the percentages of women as perpetrators of violence have changed. And what the overall percentages are (instead of just the increase). If women comprise a majority of victims of television violence, that'd make me extremely uncomfortable.
This stuff is tough, from a storytelling viewpoint, if one is writing in a fairly violent (or 'action') genre. If you're making an effort not to be sexist (at least not in the same old-fashioned way) you try to make a good many of your protagonists female, a good many of your antagonists female, a good many of your perpetrators female, and a good many of your victims female.
And Toolbit, who writes me actual letters in comments (which I love), has a bunch of unrelated-but-worth-considering points about
Family Guy and buffoonishness, and then this point:
One other thing that bugged me about the study is that it totally ignored male violence. Apparently they're just fine with violence against males and its portrayal in our media.
I should have said a bit more about this point in particular. Obviously, there are gender dynamics involved in violence. The average man is bigger than the average woman, and so if it's just fists, the damage is likely to be bigger. But there's no reason a dead, injured, or abused man should be any less pitiable than a dead, injured, or abused man. And our addiction to blood, no matter whose it is, is disturbing.