Tipper Revisited
- Jean Shields Fleming
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
Do the stories we consume create the world we live in? And follow up: Can we get some better stories?
Editors Note: This essay includes crude language, and references to gun violence and rape.
I devour stories. All kinds. War stories? Hey, I married an ex-Army guy. Rom-Coms? Of course. Like anyone, I want to believe in love triumphant and happily ever after. Spy stories, police procedurals, exalted literary masterpieces and pulpy westerns. I’ll eat them all. My tastes are catholic, equal parts Raymond Chandler and Raymond Carver.
As a storyteller myself, I've been known to opine that stories are hardwired into our homo sapiens DNA. Not only that, stories are good for us. They help us filter and process information, and make sense of the world. Stories burrow in so deeply and are so difficult to irradicate because they bind information to emotion. Our brains are evolutionary wonders, layers of development coiled in on each other. And smack dab, center coil, in the oldest, almond-shaped part of the brain, there you’ll find emotion. All stories start here.
Lately, though, I’ve been questioning this rah-rah belief. In fact, I’ve been wondering if Tipper Gore was right.
Remember Tipper? Her unfortunate nickname makes her sound like a reject from the Barbie pantheon, but she was America’s second lady from 1993-2001. Among her good works, Tipper tilted at a major windmill – the music industry – after her young daughter started listening to Prince. Alarmed by the lyrics in “Darling Nikki,” she advocated to have labels added to explicit pop songs. These days we’d call it a trigger warning. But back then, everyone from John Denver to Joey Ramone excoriated her for suggesting that what we consume shapes how we think.
I remember thinking how square she seemed (remember that word?!), with her Lilly Pulitzer dresses and Junior League hair. But her efforts were part of a larger push to understand whether violent and/or sexualized media had a negative effect on children. A fair question that didn’t get a fair hearing. On the one side, writers and musicians and filmmakers, and the industries that profit from them, stood for freedom of expression, no matter how lurid. On the other stood a concerned mother, albeit one married to the second most powerful man in the world.
Then, in 1999, a shooting happened at Columbine High School, leaving 13 students and one teacher dead, and 20 more people wounded. It’s hard to remember now just how shocking that was, since it has become a sad template for the tragic shootings that followed. But it was shocking.
Don’t get me wrong. I loved Prince. Still do. I saw him perform in 1983, and His Purpleness was mesmerizing. Touring with him were Morris Day and the Time, and Vanity 6, an all-girl band who performed in lingerie. At the time that seemed normal, but when I look back from here, all I can think is how uncomfortable those outfits must have been. And also, ick. But that was Prince. He smashed taboos, singing about giving head and a little red corvette, a song that is not about a car. But it was all in good fun.
Right? Entertaining.
Two years after the concert, I was teaching middle school in Hayward, California. It was 1985, and this was my first real job out of college. The community was vastly different from the midwestern university town where I grew up. Hayward was a lot poorer, for one thing. It was also a place where immigrants landed. Newcomers, in the school’s polite terminology, and my classroom was full of them. Kids from war zones in Afghanistan mixed with the ones who’d walked from Guatemala all the way to El Norte. Easily 16 languages were at play in any given class. It was amazing.
Then there was Aaron.
Teachers usually won’t say this out loud, but in every class there’s one kid you hope will be absent. For me, it was Aaron. Blond and blue eyed, he was in my fifth period English class, the drowsy post-lunch slot. Tests told me Aaron read at a 12th grade level, which made him a reading rock star. Most of the other kids were at least three grade levels behind, and one sweet girl was still working out her ABCs. So Aaron had a lot going for him.
Unfortunately, a lot was going against him, too, the likes of which I wasn’t privy to, except in the ways he acted out. And act out he did.
We started each class with Sustained Silent Reading, so that these kids from war zones could “cultivate the habit of reading for pleasure,” as the curriculum guide blithely put it. It seems ridiculous in retrospect, but it actually worked. The kids loved it. They could choose any book they wanted and sink into it for 20 minutes. It was as serene as a group of squirrely 13-year-olds could get. That is, until Aaron began to fart.
Flatulence needs fuel. So at lunch, Aaron would chug carton after dinky carton of milk. By the time he arrived in class, his lactose intolerance had kicked in, and right in the middle of SSR, strategically timed, he let roar. Loud, gassy, noxious. So much for silent reading.
Over the months, his disruptions escalated and we settled into an entrenched, low grade warfare. Me trying to transform him into the student I believed he could be, him determined to turn my classroom into the circus he knew it was.
Spoiler alert: he was winning.
Every day the kids were full of anticipatory excitement. What would Aaron do today? Sometimes driving home from work, I’d see him sitting alone on the pedestrian walkway above the freeway. It gave me chills, and not the good kind.
I tried talking to him. When that got me nowhere, I called his mother, a worn out woman who understood, but clearly was not equipped to help. When it got to be too much on any given day, I sent him to the principal’s office.
On it went.
As a first year teacher, I was naïve and idealistic. I brought in records and played songs I liked then had the kids write about them. Another regular practice was journalling. I put a prompt on the chalkboard (still chalk back then), they’d write about it, then I’d leave encouraging comments in the margins of their little books. One day, I gushed about an upcoming visit with my father, and Aaron seized the moment. In his journal, he wrote, “I bet you can’t wait to suck your dad off.”
His words, not mine. I wish I could forget them.
For this infraction he was transferred out, and I wasn’t sorry to see him go. Fifth period became a real class again. But all these years later, I still think about him, calling out for help that I did not know how to give.
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebald, the two high school boys who perpetrated the Columbine shooting, kept journals. In them they shared their desire to “go on a killing spree” (crazy that we use the same word for shopping). Klebald expressed shame at having a foot fetish, as well as his urge to rape women and eat them. Harris wrote a poem from the point of view of a bullet.
These details make me incredibly sad. I don’t share them lightly, or to imply that Aaron would have done the same, given the chance. I have no way to know and don’t presume. Rather, it’s to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth. We all have dark corners in our souls. Unhealed wounds, cruel fantasies, angry impulses, nursed grudges that can flower into hate. The works. Part of the storyteller’s job is to help us navigate these subterranean waters and come out safely, and maybe even better, on the other side. That’s why in ancient Greek religious sites, you always find a theater. They knew that stories, done right, provide catharsis, the experience of feeling and releasing these no-no emotions. And rightly, they recognized that such a journey is always sacred.
So yes. Storytelling can be holy work. And god knows, we desperately need catharsis. But we have forgotten the release part, doubling down instead on an infinite loop of dopamine hits jammed with cheaper and cheaper thrills. More serial killers! Celebrated cannibals! As Leonard Cohen said, we want it darker. And entertainment happily serves it up, tilting ever more toward the violent and perverse. It moves product.
My distant classroom is an innocent universe away from the toxic stew that pervades daily life now. Between violent movies, “first person shooter” games, internet executions, violent TV shows, online forums sharing violent how-tos, deepfake revenge porn (most of it violent), and of course, the violent news of the day, the 90s-style neutrality that sank Tipper Gore's initiatives is no longer sustainable. All in good fun isn’t fun anymore. Maybe it never was.
I just do not see how marinating in violence is harmless to anyone, least of all a sad and troubled boy.
So perhaps it’s time to revisit the questions Tipper raised. Not to censor ourselves. Not to smear happy paint on sadness or drive our darkness deeper into the dark. But to ask ourselves, as storytellers, for real, if this is the best we can do.
Ever more lurid, the only way forward is down. I don’t believe it.
Ok, then. If we can do better, what kind of world do we want to bring into being?
Because it turns out, stories do have power. Enormous, vast power. More than we realize, I think, for good and for ill. As for me, I won’t live anymore in a reified dystopian fantasy. Still naïve, I want flowers and birds and a green world that knows it’s loved. So I’ll keep writing, and so may it be.
Our words are spells, our stories make worlds.
Jean Shields Fleming is founder and editor-in-chief of Certain Age. She is the author of the novel Air Burial. Read an excerpt from her new book, All the Reasons Why.
Images:
La Vista Middle School photo and yearbook photo courtesy of the author.
Sega Master System II by Nik.
Jean, eloquently yet simply spoken/written. Thank you for bringing heart and soul, plus some common sense! into this topic. I intend to share this article.🙏
"Still naïve, I want flowers and birds and a green world that knows it’s loved. So I’ll keep writing, and so may it be." With you on this.
Thank you for the deep dive into the topic... I'll be thinking about this for some time.