I have to admit that one thing bothers me about the game Grand Theft Auto III. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s one of the single most perfect console games ever created. But let me see if I can express my discontent accurately. In Grand Theft Auto III, the following scenario is a quite realistic possibility. Heck, if you play the game for more than a week, it’s almost inevitable.

You will guide your little digital avatar down the street. Suddenly, some homey walks by and says, "Ya damned pussy." Deciding to role play out the offense that your exceptionally violent, sociopathic representative would probably express, you pull out your baseball bat and beat the miserable fucker to a worthless bloody pulp. As the blood slowly trickles out of his head, a passing police officer catches sight of your violent act and demands that you surrender to him. As you move towards the poor fool to give him a taste of Louisville, you cross through the small pond of pooled blood, leaving little red footprints behind you. You beat the cop into submission, then you take his revolver and shoot his prone body a couple more times for good measure (and to watch the sad bastard twitch). You then grab his car and go burning away at full speed. This makes it difficult to hit pedestrians, but you try your best anyway, calmly watching some granny with a walker bounce off your front hood even as you role over another hapless college student. Suddenly the cops are on your tail, so you open fire with your uzi, filling your opposition’s car with lead which, eventually, causes the engine to catch fire and explode, ideally killing everyone inside.

You haul ass to the nearest friendly place, have the car fixed up and repainted, the cops are off your ass and after all that work, you want to wind down in the caring hands of a trained professional. You notice some busty black bitch walking down the street dressed to whore with a look of competence and confidence on her face. You pull up, she hops in your car, and you take her down to the park where you engage in a little nookie, free market style. But wait, what’s going on? She’s just sitting there. The car’s rocking, but she hasn’t even lifted an eyebrow, much less her shirt, and the excessively proportioned manhood of your digital counterpart has yet to enter any of her fairly paid for orifices.

I know for a fact that I’m not the only person that notices the problem here. The trouble is that, even among those that do notice it, their emotional habits tend to not keep up with their rare intellectual responses. Sure, they talk a good game when discussing the notion in the abstract, but when it comes to real life, they’re as fucked up and repressed as everyone else. Simply put, most people, even smart people, have a far more negative reaction to sex, something that should engender a positive reaction, than to violence, something which should engender the most extreme negative reaction.

I’ve noticed that when looking at, as an excellent example, mods and edits for a variety of games, from Halflife to Morrowind, there is a large faction that openly opposes any display of nudity or sex at all. In fact, there are many sites who openly insult and attack anyone who might create such a thing. Many declare right out that if you stoop to sex, you’ve just lost your ‘creativity’. I remember one line from a Halflife decal site (decals are little pictures your first person avatar can spray on areas to signify his presence, rather like a complex virtual version of peeing on things) which read "And no porn. If you’re an artist, then show some creativity." Here’s another, slightly more polite version of the same sentiment from a GTA moder I ran across.

The message here is clear. If your artistic material leans towards the erotic, sexual or even downright smutty, you’ve somehow lost your integrity and creativity. But if it’s a photo of some popular icon with their head and brains smeared all over the wall, well, hell, that’s artistic and clever to boot. If you’re a player who enjoys tempering the excessive violence of video games with some perfectly healthy lovin’, then somehow you’re operating at a more base and reprehensible level. I’m so glad that the gaming community has reached such a vaulted social wavelength that I can sully the purity of their repetitive killing and maiming with the mere mention of the act of love. (and what I want is to watch little digital people get it on, fucker. You got a problem with that?)

What kind of cancer has been festering in our society that mindless violence is encouraged, something that is openly and obviously detrimental to society, but that sex, something we should enjoy and encourage, is demonized? Sex isn’t wrong. It’s RIGHT. People LIKE sex, or they should if they aren’t genetically cross-wired or completely fucked up by some aspect of their society or environment. Liking sex is natural. Enjoying watching the nude form of members of the opposite sex or even the SAME sex is what your body is SUPPOSED to do. Further, we are openly encouraged by many facets of society to indulge in this response. And yet, to display this, to admit to it, to use it artistically, this is attacked, this is ‘wrong’, this is badgered like it somehow threatens our society, even though the only, the ONLY negative thing about the act of sex, even the act of mindless, animalistic fucking, is the stigma a fucked up society has imposed upon it.

In our society, public displays beyond a hug or a light kiss on the cheek are discouraged. This makes no sense. The behavior that best expresses a true fondness for others, an emotional state that promotes love, lust, cooperation and intimacy is openly attacked while states of being that promote hatred, violence, isolation and unhappiness are supported. What is it about sexual intercourse, nudity, etc that we find so threatening, so offensive? Any number of half assed explanations can be offered, from a defensive mechanism that people erect (heh, I said erect) against the display of something that most people get less than they’d like of. Another possible excuse is that sex requires a level of trust and respect that most people, especially we in the states, seem to have a lot of trouble engendering (heh, I said engendering).

In some instances, the industries that do promote sex demonize it in their own way, by perpetually associating it with crime, violence, jealousy and pain. Truth be told, in the rare instances where plot is a serious factor in pornography, one usually witnesses a potpourri of betrayal, violence, aggression, theft and so on, and in films where there is no plot, well, we’ve all seen THOSE films, and it comes as no surprise that watching unattractive people, often with surgically altered physical forms go through the motions of the sexual act while completely failing to convey any joy or desire in their behavior could create a less than positive response from many viewers.

But again, this is a stigma created, not anything inherently wrong with the culture, act or desire. There’s no reason for the culture beyond the negative stigma, and no reason for the negative stigma beyond the culture. It’s a vicious circle that makes no sense and serves no purpose. Ultimately, the dislike, the negative reaction to simple human intimacy, is irrational and unhealthy. The results of this unhealthy reaction abound around us. In fact, more than one study has shown a very clear link between our love of violence and our hatred of sex. I mean, think about it.

What’s most distressing to me, though, is when people who should know better, artists and intellectuals primarily, react negatively to peers (or superiors) who indulge in this realm. The subject of an artistic work cannot dictate the level of merit carried by the artistic piece. I mean, I’m one of the single biggest art nazis I’ve ever met outside of the social conservative movement and even I know that. Art doesn’t even need a theme for focus, it can be entirely abstract and self contained. Whether you like the message conveyed or not is irrelevant outside of that framework. I mean, I didn’t much care for the story of the movie ‘Fargo’. It depressed me. It annoyed me. As a result, I didn’t much care for the movie. But that doesn’t make the movie a bad movie. I’m certainly not going to scorn the people involved in making it just because the subject matter doesn’t truck with what I WISH I were seeing at the time. It’s still an excellent piece of art, even if it didn’t appeal to me specifically. So even were these uptight critics to have some rational grounds for their dislike of erotica, porn or smut, they still wouldn’t be in a position to demote art because of it.

Art cannot damage society. Art is a reflection of society. Art doesn’t begin revolutions, it merely manifests during them. Art doesn’t undermine a society, it merely frames its weaknesses. Art doesn’t create decadence, it can only illustrate it. Art is created by members of a society as a means of expression, displaying anything from personal emotional states to political ideology. The relevance of the subject matter itself, from an ocean full of boats to a woman crying to three guys in a locker room sucking each others’ dicks, relates to the viewer on a purely communicative scale. This subject matter is incapable of reducing the value of the art or the artist, except as an entirely subjective value in relation to the independent viewer, which is the case for all art regardless.

Therefor, to claim that a particular subject matter weakens an artist is an irrational and essentially absurd claim to make, akin to suggesting that masturbation will get you sent to hell. It’s an extreme and ludicrous negative association made to attempt to force an opinion that cannot be supported reasonably, which is really what this whole rant is about, namely, don’t insult my art or my interests just because you’re a mental case who has hang ups about sex (and don’t say "I don’t have any ‘hang ups’ about sex." If you’re trying to claim that people who indulge in depiction’s of sex, no matter how vulgar, are, by that token, less of an artist then you’re hung up about sex.)

Further, if you openly oppose depiction’s of sex or nudity in an artistic forum, then you are committing two errors. The first is that you are attempting to restrict a harmless idea and activity, repress it and those who, as a result of both their natural inclination and societal insistence, enjoy this harmless notion. Secondly, you are lashing out against something that you, yourself, should be inclined to enjoy. Certainly not everyone enjoys images of sex, but reason would suggest that such a dislike is counter to the natural state of most human beings. Therefore something must either be wrong with the artistic material or with the person themselves. Given the great variety of the former, this suggests the latter.

Attacks on art based on subject material are more a sign of personal neurosis than anything else, as is an aggressive opposition to nudity or sex. The correct response towards sex is one of encouragement. To have a problem with two people being physically intimate out of mutual love or lust is detrimental to them, you and everyone else who has to deal with it.

So you modders out their. The PC (personal computer, not politically correct, you jackasses) version of Grand Theft Auto III is out. Ignore the deriding comments of sneering basket cases and get to work. I want those nasty digital ho’s piling on top of my silent but violent liberty city representative in groups of three or more with all the grace and graphic vividness of Sorority Sluts XII. With appropriate sounds. Do not fail me!