The following is an exceprt from an interview of Orson Scott Card, conducted by Claire E. White, that can be found in its entirety in the September 1999 issue of Writers Write - The Internet Writing Journal. I'm posting this here because Orson Scott Card's views on violence and sex in the media, as well as censorship, echo my own precicely. I have added emphasis to the points that I most strongly agree with.

CEW: Do you believe that violence depicted in computer games, TV and films have an effect on teen violence, such as that which occurred at Columbine High School?

OSC: Serious studies have shown that for those who are violence prone, depictions of violence can raise their level of likelihood to act violently. This is hardly a surprise -- if our entertainment media did not cause us to be more likely to act in imitation of or admiration for what we see, advertising would not work and so those arts would not pay (grins). However, common sense also tells us that the violence-prone managed to do plenty of mayhem before television or radio or movies or computer games existed. That's because all these are is storytelling media, and before these media existed, we still had stories. Check out Jack and the Beanstalk and the grisly events in Homer. We have stories about hunger, love, and death because that's what we care about in our lives.

So the problem isn't that we have these new media which give us stories we've never had before. The problem is that the new media give them to us with a level of realism that we've never had before, and the filmwrights and gamewrights are so lacking in taste, proportion, and social conscience that they treat both violence and sexuality with a prurient fascination that has long since passed the boundaries of wackoland. Is there anyone in the audience who needs yet another graphic depiction of sex or violence? Is there anyone who ever needed it? You can have the threat of violence and the promise of sex without ever showing them -- and they're almost always far more effective presented that way than they ever are when graphically displayed. It's bad art, and it has a bad effect on those who are most vulnerable to it. But unfortunately, most of these arts are practiced by people who have not grown out of the adolescent stage of wanting to shock people in order to seem cool -- even though, like adolescents, they can't think of a single new way to shock anybody, so nobody is actually shocked at all, they're just embarrassed or bored ... or, if they're marginal personalities, excited in a sick way.

There is a myth that "expressing" or "fulfilling" an emotion makes it go away, as if humans were balloons that need to vent these gases or explode. But the opposite is true, and we've known it all along, despite the bogus "experts" who told us repression was bad for us. If you act out your anger, you get angrier. If you act on your lusts, it takes even more to stimulate them next time. The more violence and sex we get from our entertainment, the angrier and more violent and more perverse and more sex-obsessed we become. Repression caused us no discernable harm beyond temporary frustration -- and as any good lover knows, temporary frustration is the essence of the art of satisfaction. But massive "expression" of the "truth" of violence and sex has caused us great harm.

Of course, the boundaries of taste are drawn in different places for different people. Things that offend me might not offend you, or vice versa. That's why the idea of government meddling in censorship is so bad -- from the first moment, the censors always go straight for things whose "evil" is visible only to them, while ignoring the things that are truly awful. The trouble is that when there is no self-restraint, governments eventually get involved. If smokers, for instance, had merely been courteous and kind to others, there would be no anti-smoking laws. It was the shameless rudeness of smokers that led to them being fenced around with law, and I have no pity for them.

Likewise, if we get government censorship it will be wholly because of the irresponsibility of storytellers who cared not a whit for the effect their work might have on the community they live in. They have fouled the nest; if they don't clean it up themselves, they probably aren't going to like it when somebody else cleans it up for them. I hate censorship; but I hate having to raise my children in the culture these irresponsible people have created and are creating for us. When the balance tips, it will tip hard and far, and I personally resent the all-or-nothing crew who, by adamantly rejecting all self-restraint and celebrating the most vile stuff as "edgy" and admirable, will someday provoke the puritan backlash that will clean my slate along with theirs. They'll whine about the censors, but I'll know that it was their own excesses that led society to prefer the censors to them. The only consolation is that the public can only stand censorship for a little while. Within a generation, the theaters reopened in England; the people of Iran are already wishing for more freedom. But wouldn't it be better to use good taste and a sense of decency and public responsibility to keep the censorship from ever seeming necessary?