Why do we keep letting culture warriors’ idiocies distract us from real issues?

Social-mediaphobes’ utter obsession with teens and porn is truly disturbing.

Back 40 years ago when the Parents Music Resource Center was in peak panic froth that “pornographic” rock and rap music were driving teenagers to suicide, drugs, depravity, and violence (sound familiar?), the PMRC’s Tipper Gore (Al’s ex-wife and Washington morality cop) lambasted singer Ozzy Osbourne’s “Suicide Solution” for allegedly making Gen X teens self-destruct.

Tipper’s lurid “Rising to the Challenge” video invited 4 million viewers to gasp at Ozzy’s lyrics: “Breaking laws, knocking doors, there's no one at home/…Where to hide? Suicide is the only way out/Don't you know what it's really about?/ … Satan, Satan, Satan.”

Tipper was pulling a hoax. EVERY 1980s kid ages 8 to 18 I worked with back then knew Ozzy’s tuneless nasality wasn’t about suicide at all; it was a cautionary tale about his alcoholism. That was glaringly obvious in its opening lyrics: “Wine is fine, but whiskey's quicker/Suicide is slow with liquor/Take a bottle, drown your sorrows/Then it floods away tomorrows… Now you live inside a bottle/The reaper's traveling at full throttle.”

To selectively distort Ozzy’s lyrics, Tipper and her PMRC had to have known exactly what his message was. Yet, they chose to lie anyway, knowing no one would hold them accountable. Of course, no one did.

PMRC was wildly acclaimed by media reporters, professionals, and political leaders, winning congressionally-mandated warning labels on records. Once again, the same nannying insanity that leaders indulge to ignore the crushing poverty and abusive homes afflicting millions of kids with real-life dangers enables them to bellow that sardonic culture-manifestations like “Suicidal Tendencies,” “The Misfits,” and “I used to love her (but I had to kill her)” were the real crisis.

One little irony is that Tipper was hyping pop-culture’s supposed destruction of Gen X – yes, the 1980s teenhood of psychologist Jean Twenge, who now forges a 2020s career hyping identical, baseless terrors about social media and smartphones’ “destroying” Gen Z. Another irony: Tipper recommended kids listen to the “healthy, inspiring” music of a surely embarrassed Bruce Springsteen, whose songs back then featured legions of serial killers, gang shootings, heroin dealing, rampant sex, devil images, anti-authority ragings, you name it. She, like President Reagan, apparently enthralled herself with “Born in the USA” without listening to the lyrics.

Maybe “lying” isn’t quite the right word

The larger problem is that culture-warriors, from Tipper Gore to Twenge to Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel stable, are so panicked by whatever new media emerges in their day that they hallucinate apocalyptic menace in every message.

So what if Ozzy warned against alcoholism, so what if heavy metal tunes and violent video games reduce real-life aggression, so what if social media connects teens in positive ways and reduces suicide attempts and self-harm – they’re all Satan, Satan, Satan! To a Tipper, Ozzy Osbourne and his ilk are all danger, just as to a Twenge and Haidt, online culture is just porn, with heaping helpings of bullying and predators.

Does anyone else find those who incessantly obsess that teenagers might go online to wallow in “porn!” a bit creepy? Arch-moralist Anthony Comstock, whose 1873 Comstock Act outlawed all manner of public sexuality to “prevent degradation of youth,” admitted in his diary that he was really the one needing protection from being driven lustfully mad by these temptations. I’m all for establishing a registry for those who feel themselves personally harmed by social media/smartphone addiction and obsession to seek help and monitoring to keep them offline.

The landline telephone: “instrument of the devil”

Similar culture-war panics persisted for decades after the landline (voice) telephone appeared, including alarms of “rampant rudeness,” the “dying out” of “civility and courtesy,” dire warnings of electrocutions and explosions, widespread theft and sabotage of equipment, and preachers declaring that phones channeled the dead and the devil.

Researchers and culture critics into the 1970s warned that wives “addicted” to hours of impersonal telephone conversations were destroying healthy face-to-face friendships and marriages. These fears, many unhinged to begin with, overlooked that humans adapt to whatever real problems new technologies present. This is why newer research increasingly finds children and teens aren’t suffering the predicted harm from smartphones and social-media connections earlier claims alarumed.

Teens message friends TOO much!

A great example of the “Satan!” mindset infecting culture warriors is their panic that Snapchat’s “addictive” Streaks feature really “chains” teens to their “friends” “lockstep on a treadmill” and drives “anxiety.”

Yes, social-mediaphobes warn: teens using social-media platforms to connect regularly with friends proves their addictive evil. But wait… isn’t social media supposed to be causing an epidemic of teenage loneliness? Or an epidemic of teenage connections? Which is it?

What’s next? Surely, sites offering rewards the more books teens read is exploiting algorithm addiction. Or ones that promote eating more vegetables? Fun fact: the 2021 CDC survey shows that teens who eat more vegetables actually are more depressed – exactly the same correlation-equals-causation used to indict social media.

Anti-social-media sites rightly tout the growing-up value of “unsupervised” teens “taking risks” and dealing with “dangers” in the outside world (never do they mention the even worse dangers within families). They then turn around and quail in terror at the notion of an unchaperoned teenager going online. The double standards, while amusing, are dangerous.

How do culture warriors keep getting away with it?

Centers for Disease Control’s 2023 survey numbers show nearly all of the teens age 13-18 who report harming themselves and the 2 million attempting suicide also report growing up with violent, abusive, severely mentally troubled, suicidal, addicted, and/or criminally arrested (and usually multiply-troubled) parents and adults in their homes.

How – in an America whose authorities incessantly voice loud, agonized “concern” over the teenage “mental health crisis” – do culture warriors again and again succeed in banishing the harsh realities millions of children and youth face not just from political and media forums, but from professional ones as well?

How do they so easily keep dominating public discourse with panicked insistences that teens’ problem is just a horror comic, an Ozzy, a Snapchat, an Instagram or “manosphere” site? Seriously: do we have to keep going through these wildly hyped “save the children!” distractions every few years over every new technology?