Sex Educator
To Speak Here
"Human Sexuality, the Flow and
the Ebb" will be the topic of a talk to
be presented here Tuesday, Feb. 15,
as one of the nation's pioneers in sex
information and education addresses
the university's Council on Aging
and Human Development.
The speaker. Dr. Mary S.
Calderone, is founder and president
of the Sex Information and Education
Council of the U.S. (SIECUS), a
non-profit, privately-funded
organization which describes itself
as "a resource center and catalyst for
change providing materials and
information for professionals in the
field of human sexuality and sex
education.
She will speak at 4 p.m. in Room
1504 of the Gerontology Building.
Dr. Calderone is a graduate of
Vasser College, the University of
Rochester Medical School and
Columbia University's School of
Public Health. A prolific writer, she
has received numerous national
awards and honorary degrees,
including a citation in 1971 as one of
the nation's 75 most important
women by "Ladies Home Journal."
DR. MARY S. CALDERONE
What Is Cinderella's Stand on Violence?
For Green Thumbs
The Botany Department
Greenhouse is having a surplus plant
sale tomorrow beginning at 10 a.m.
in room 073, Biological Sciences
Building.
Items for sale include tropical
foliage plants, ferns, succulents,
bromeliads, orchids, flowering
plants and some rare plants not
found at commercial outlets.
Proceeds will be used for
greenhouse supplies and the
beautification and modernization of
the facility.
By David Williamson
Are Snow White and her seven
short friends turning children into
tomorrow's lawbreakers?
Is Rumplestiltskin spinning a web
of evil over their futures?
Could Cinderella be in part
responsible for the United States'
having a murder rate 35 times higher
than the second most violent
country?
A psychologist here who has
studied aggression in fairy tales of
three cultures might not go that far,
but he says he can prove that the
tales most read to children in this
country are significantly more
violent than others he has examined.
Dr. Doyle Gentry, professor and
head of the Division of Medical
Psychology, analyzed an equal
number of randomly selected fairy
tales from japan, India and the
United States.
He found that the popular
Grimm's fairy tales, including Snow
White, Rumplestiltskin, Cinderella
and the Frog Prince, depicted twice
as many acts of aggression as the
Indian tales and four times as many
as the Japanese.
More Human Aggression
He also discovered, somewhat to
his surprise, that although
aggressive content was widespread
throughout the fables of all three
children, the Grimm's tales
contained 50 per cent more human
aggression than did the others.
"Over half of the aggressive acts
were followed by either a positive
consequence or no consequence at
all," Gentry said. "Aggressive
behavior was displayed equally by
Multi-Media Show Begins Tonight
What happens when the
imaginations and talents of dancers,
writers, musicians, lighting and
audio designers, sculptors and actors
are turned loose to work together?
The result is "Synergy — Cube
Roots."
The three staged pieces and two
lobby displays will be presented in
Baldwin Auditorium on East
Campus Feb. 11,12,18 and 19. Doors
and lobby displays will open at 7
p.m. and performances will begin at
8:15 p.m.
Steve Turner, an associate in
medicine at the medical center, is
audio director for the program.
The project is organized and
created by the Synergic Foundation
for the Arts, presented in
cooperation with WDBS/FM and
cosponsored by the North Carolina
Arts Council and the National
Endowment for the Arts.
Tickets for $2.50 are available in
advance at the Page box office and at
Baldwin Auditorium on performance
nights.
'good' and 'bad' characters, almost
all of whom were central figures in
the tales."
For purposes of the study, an act of
aggression was defined as "behavior
which was transitive in nature and
which involved the delivery of
noxious stimuli, insult, threat, pain,
injury, death or destruction."
Examples he cited included an
elephant trampling a man's head, a
crab cutting a crane's throat and in
Snow White, the wicked queen
salting, cooking and eating an
animal heart she believed had been
cut from the murdered heroine.
Why would a psychologist who
spends the greater part of his days
treating emotionally disturbed
patients want to study fairy tales?
Why Is U.S. Most Aggressive?
"In terms of homicide statistics
and other violent acts, the United
States is clearly the most aggressive
culture in the world," Gentry said.
"A great many people are trying to
find out why that's true."
Hundreds of papers have been
written in the past 10 years on
violence in the media and how it
may affect children. Gentry said, but
no one has examined fairy tales in
the same light.
"Fairy tales are important
transmitters of culture, found in
virtually every society possessing a
written heritage," he explained.
"They are read to children at an early
age, often before the child has
developed the capacity to
distinguish between fiction and
reality and before the child has been
systematically exposed to other
forms of media such as TV and
comics."
More Questions Than Answers
"Whether fairy tales are going to
have any harmful effects on children,
like psychologists have suggested
cartoons and movies do, I don't
know," he said. "This study, which
is purely a descriptive one, poses a
lot more questions than it answers.
"I do think, however, that if
certain things make a difference in
the level of violence in our country
then at some point we have to
identify them and rank them in order
of their importance," Gentry said.
Probably an even greater problem
than any direct relationship to
violence is what observation of
aggressive behavior does to one's
tolerance of aggression, he added.
"A lot of social scientists and
psychiatrists now feel that we see so
much violence early on in our comic
books, in our television programs
and its movies that we become more
accepting of it as a way of resolving
conflict.
Certain Mentality
"Of course the availability of
weapons in this country probably
accounts in a large way for our
homicide statistics, but then again
there is a certain mentality that pulls
the trigger," Gentry said. "Where do
these people come from?"
Studies have shown that tolerance
of violence is indeed high in this
country, the psychologist said. The
man in the street is not upset that
there was a war in Vietnam, for
example, but only that the United
States didn't win it.
After the shooting deaths of four
students at Kent State University in
1970 a disturbingly high number of
parents with college age children
expressed their belief that the dead
young people only got what they
deserved, he said.
Gentry said he believes the
atmosphere in the home is the single
most important factor in
determining how an individual will
tolerate violence in his or her own
hfe and in society in general.
Influence of Parents
"Cleary, if a child sits and watches
everything violent on television, that
has nowhere near the influence as
parents who fight and throw things
at each other," he said.
Gentry, who said he doesn't allow
his own small children to watch the
Saturday morning television
programs despite the fact they have
been improved in the past two years,
said his brief study of fairy tale
violence has motivated him to take a
closer look at their reading material.
Sometimes he "tones down"
certain words and situations.
Still he doesn't know whether his
concern will have any effect in the
long run, he said, because
"psychologists don't have any easier
time being parents than anyone else
does."
Gentry's study was published in a
recent issue of Psychological Reports.