Engaged Resistance

Engaged resistance is a term coined by a group of citizens, the Motherhood Project. It denotes the attempt to minimize the worst effects of mainstream or dominant culture through acts of individual or familial initiative, such as curtailing the number of hours the television is on or boycotting a particular vendor, combined with acts of civic engagement, such as collectively pressuring advertisers or petitioning corporate CEOs or public officials.

Popular culture in late-20th- and early-21st-century America has clearly become an increasingly potent force. Many observers, from parents to social critics, express worries about the power the media has gained over everyday life as well as the extent to which earlier forms of authority—-even the limited authority of individualism—have eroded. In her book The Plug-In Drug, for instance, Marie Winn expressed her dismay about the displacement of traditional modes of socialization by the mass media, arguing that the extensive viewing of television by children has a potentially disastrous effect on their psychological development. From Neil Postman to Jerry Mander, media critics have written with alarm of the effects of the media on the social world and inner functioning of children. Psychologists and others agree that everyday bonds with people and places play a crucial role in the formation of children's intellectual, creative, emotional, and spiritual well-being.

Worries about the influence of new forms of media technology have been largely drowned out by promoters and beneficiaries of the high-tech boom of the 1990s and those rapt consumers eager to embrace what seems to them to be unstinting progress. Dissent has often taken the form of objections to overly explicit sexual and violent content in particular genres, from daytime and prime-time television programs to movies, music lyrics, and video games. For some groups and individuals, however, these objections are a launching pad for their broader resistance to the role of popular culture in socialization.

One of the most noted critics of explicit sexual and violent content in music lyrics was Tipper Gore, wife of Al Gore, vice president and then Democratic presidential nominee in 2000. In the mid-1980s, when her husband served as senator, Tipper Gore became aware of the widespread impropriety in popular culture forms aimed at children and put forth her views in testimony before Congress. In 1987, she published a book called Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society, helping to set the groundwork for the uniform labeling system for music CDs instituted in 1990 by the Recording Industry of America. As a result, some CDs were rated “Parental Advisory—Explicit Lyrics.” Gore and others drew attention to the inappropriate content of many television shows, video games, Internet sites, music videos, and advertisements, as well as music lyrics. In her book, she argued against censorship but in favor of “individual and community action” as a way to get across shared moral standards.

By the year 2000, it had become clear to many that the new rating systems for music CDs, like those previously inaugurated for movies, did little to diminish the overpowering effects of popular culture messages that often violated even minimal standards of decency. Parents, in particular, lamented the inescapability and callousness of the messages purveyed by the popular culture, messages they often thought were the opposite of what they tried to get across to their children through example and instruction. A chorus of objections arose from a number of different quarters. The Parents Television Council, a conservative Los Angeles-based group, lobbied for social responsibility on the part of the entertainment industry in part through complaints to the Federal Communications Commission. Another citizen action group was Action for Children's Television, founded in 1968. It achieved some limited success, through, for example, petitions to the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission advocating restrictions on advertising—that is, until the 1980s movement toward deregulation. Still other organizations—the National Coalition on Television Violence, the National Citizen Committee for Broadcasting, the Coalition for Better Television, to name just a few—launched public education campaigns, threatened boycotts of programs and producers purveying offensive content, and pressured advertisers to boycott particularly abhorrent programs.

...