Fiction Makes the Culture

It's stronger than parenting... and always was

In the 80s and 90s, there was a popular trope in movies, TV, and church-related improv groups that played out as follows:

• Nice Kid is being bullied by Mean Kid

• Nice Kid asks adult for help with harassment and physical assault

• Adult tells Nice Kid that Mean Kid is abused at home / is an orphan / saved puppies from a fire. Adult advises Nice Kid to make friends with Mean Kid.

• Nice Kid apologizes to Mean Kid (for being so punchable, I guess) and makes overtures of friendship.

• Mean Kid accepts. “I guess we’re not so different after all.”

What absolute psychopath decided this was the message that a generation of kids needed to hear? And why did the thousands of people across the media and cultural landscape go along with it?

It’s a good question to ask, especially now with the overt brainwashing people in the entertainment industry have been perpetrating on children and adolescents. Who exactly is informing your child’s morality?

It’s Not Just “Youthful Ignorance.”

If you’re a parent of an older child, you’ve probably had the moment when your kid says something completely contrary to the way you raised them.

“Where did you hear that?” you ask, baffled at this ridiculous, uninformed opinion that they seem so certain of.

“Everyone knows that. You’re just ignorant!” Your previously loving child might say.

Who is everyone in this scenario? Probably their friend group… all of whom consume the same media—a movie or a show. Or TikTok.

Unless you’re very careful, media has more time to communicate directly with your child than you do. Works of message-laden fiction have the power to mold your child’s mind in ways you wouldn’t want. And even though you’re grown now, and probably intelligent, these messages still influence you too.

The effects of these messages are not short-term.

The Same Story Told Repeatedly Becomes Truth

A few weeks ago, I told you about how I had undergone surgical sterilization in my 20s. At the time, I was not married or even dating. There was no chance I would fall pregnant. So why was I so set on that permanent preventative measure?

Because the 1990s (when I was an adolescent) was a rare moment when the religious right and the left-leaning entertainment industry agreed on a social issue: Having a baby will ruin your life.

Churches and religious organizations, in an attempt to dissuade teens and unmarried young people from having sex, emphasized how a woman’s life would be ruined were she to fall pregnant.

• The man who impregnated you would leave you. Or abuse you. Or both.

• No other man would want you because… ew

• Your friends would also leave you, as you’re no fun anymore with that baby

• All your dreams will crumble to ash because the baby will take all your time.

These sentiments were bolstered by schools, both in sex ed classes and in the essays and educational videos they assigned. Again, targeted at reducing or eradicating unwed teen pregnancy.

But the real kicker was the entertainment and media industry. They piled on with their rotation of Monday Night Movies of the Week (now playing on Lifetime Movie Network), which emphasized that men would either abandon you outright or use your baby as leverage to continue abusing you.

Feature films like 15 and Pregnant emphasized the mistake of teen pregnancy, but there were many more that showed adult, married women being destroyed by having a baby as well. Glossy mags targeted at girls (Teen, Seventeen) extolled the virtues of single, unwed, and childless women and how happy they were, while telling nightmare stories of abusive boyfriends and the horrors of being abandoned after having a baby.

The message was clear and universal. Having a baby will ruin your life.

Intentional Messaging

The film and media industries aren’t falling into these ubiquitous messages accidentally. It’s quite intentional, make no mistake. And as humans, we are all susceptible to that messaging… even if you’re a religious person.

Even if you’re in church leadership.

Though I am still religious, I have a great deal of loathing for 90s purity culture precisely because it took its cues from the anti-child, anti-family media landscape at the time, trying to be hip and cool as it burdened a generation with lies.

Christianity has always been firm that sex is something only to be shared within marriage. Anything outside of marriage is sin. It’s not a new rule or one confined to the 90s, when I was a teen. What was unique to that time (I think), was the emphasis on pregnancy as the PROOF you had sinned, rather than the avoidance of sin itself.

Pregnancy was a scare tactic because if you got pregnant (and you definitely would, according to them), you wouldn’t be able to hide what you’d done. Pregnancy is bad, not just because of the shame, but because of the baby that would result.

The baby itself was painted as punishment for the sin of premarital sex. “You don’t want to be like those sad girls in the movies, do you?”

Those lessons don’t fade away after you grow up and get married.

I’ve said many times that fiction makes us better people. It personalizes morality and philosophy in ways that spur emotional growth.

But it can also lie to us, to make us feel like everything is hopeless and rotten, and we may as well give up. Which is why choosing what you consume is of utmost importance.

That bestselling book might not be good for your kid to read. And that blockbuster movie not be good for you to watch.

Never think you’re above the brainwashing, because none of us are.