Grand Theft Common Sense

So I'm listening to the radio this morning and I hear that Wal-Mart, among a bunch of other chains, has yanked Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and that the game has had its rating elevated to Adults Only. It's now illegal to sell one of the most popular video games of all time to anybody under eighteen. The game's manufacturers say their net sales will drop by $50 million dollars this quarter...small potatoes, since they've already earned revenues of over a billion dollars on the franchise.
This is the first product to have its rating changed after it entered the market. What prompted the change? The ol' American double-standard.
Everybody knew Grand Theft Auto was violent. It depresses me to no end to concede that this violence is obviously a huge draw. As far as I'm concerned, to even act out stealing a car and using it to run over people, including police officers--to derive any enjoyment at all from pretending to do such things--marks you as mentally disturbed. And spare me any of the "it's just a game!" claptrap. So's Tetris. So's The Sims. So's Halo, which at least couches its violence in a military context.
But despite this maniacal level of violence, the Grand Theft Auto franchise passed into the market unhampered by anything more stringent than a ratings system whose only function is to communicate to pre-teens what the really "cool" games are. (And, yes, proceeded to sell over five million copies--must you remind me at every turn how sick society is becoming?)
But then the pornography was discovered.
Or rather, some hackers discovered what is reportedly a fairly explicit sex scene embedded in this latest installment. To access the scene, you have to download a piece of software from the Internet--it won't come up in the course of spattering blood and brains on concrete.
Well, that's that. Nothing wrong with realistic carnage, but we simply can't have our children observing s-e-x, now can we?

Just so you know what kind of strange creature is writing this blog, I abhor violence in any form. As a child, I used to cry when the Swedish Chef threw pots and pans around his kitchen on The Muppet Show. Any child who has seen pots and pans flying around his own kitchen in the midst of a heated domestic dispute can probably relate. Yes, I am perfectly capable of distinguishing the fantasy-visions on the screen from reality. But I have a very well developed "what if" gland that renders such violent comedy immensely unfunny. What if that pot hit you in the head? You wouldn't laugh then, would you? So why do you find it funny when it hits someone else in the head?

Now, I've never played Grand Theft Auto in any of its incarnations. But so far as I can tell, the violence in these games is served straight up, with no attempt at humour. Yet teens I've talked to say they find it hysterically funny. This scares me, I don't mind admitting it.

But back to the s-e-x. George Carlin once opined that he'd rather let his child see two people making love than the same two people blowing each other's brains out. I wholeheartedly agree: the sooner this world realizes there's nothing sinful, or shameful, about the human body, the better off we'll all be. As it stands, by age sixteen the average child has seen over thirty thousand killings on television--and that's supposedly okay. But seeing even one portrayal of bare skin is wrong, wrong, wrong?

I just don't get it.