People have always complained about the pernicious

influence of popular culture, but until recently, it was considered a fairly minor menace. Reading Superman instead of Shakespeare or choosing Chuck Berry over Beethoven might coarsen your taste or stunt your intellectual growth, but it certainly wouldn't kill you.

These days, we're not so sure.

Concern over the amount of sex and violence in television, movies, pop music and video games -- from "Basic Instinct" to "Mortal Kombat" to "NYPD Blue" to Snoop Doggy Dogg's "Doggy Style" -- has escalated beyond outrage to public protest. At the same time, citizens are shocked by a record-breaking arrest rate for children and a national homicide rate that's growing six times as fast as the population.

Is there a connection between entertainment and anti-social behavior?

A lot of people think so. Pressure to put an end to sexist and violent entertainment has increased during the last six months, as action groups like the National Coalition on Television Violence and the National Political Congress of Black Women have issued statements and organized protests to help put an end to murder-filled TV shows and misogynous rap records.

Meanwhile, Illinois Sen. Paul Simon and Attorney General Janet Reno have threatened that if the entertainment industry doesn't clean up its act, the government will do the job.

Unfortunately, sex and violence aren't as easy to define as the activists and politicians would have us believe, nor are the supposed links between such entertainment and anti-social behavior quite so clearly drawn.

In fact, despite the urgency with which this crusade to clean up popular culture is being presented, there's reason to wonder if it represents anything more than just another cycle in the continuing conflict between America's government and its entertainment industries.

That's not to say that popular culture is entirely without blame, or that the problems posed by this sort of entertainment aren't worth examining. But unless we put the issues into context, we'll never have an accurate sense of the impact fictionalized sex and violence have on American culture.

THORNY DEFINITIONS

What do we mean when we talk about sex and violence in popular culture?

It's not as naive a question as it might seem. Movies, music, television and video are all representational forms -- that is, they use images and metaphors instead of physical reality -- and as such deal with these topics both explicitly and implicitly. Consequently, what we see may be as obvious as a bare buttock, or as subtle as a cocked hip and sly smile.

Nor is the audience impact necessarily gauged to the degree of explicitness. Some movies show battle scenes where soldiers die by the score, and all the audience registers is the slight excitement of noise and action; others may suggest a slap by offering only a sound and a cringing reaction from another character, and leave everyone in the theater with a racing pulse and raging emotions.

Most talk of regulating sexual and violent content ignores such subtleties, though. What we get instead are tote-lists and incident-per-hour counts that reduce content to an undifferentiated mass of "sex" or "violence." That kind of approach may make sense if you're talking about the amount of fat in foods, but not when you're dealing with something as complex as popular culture.

Take TV violence. "During the gulf war, we saw all kinds of vicious imagery being commented on in chortling fashion by Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell," observes Frank Lentricchia, the Katherine Everett Gilbert professor of literature at Duke University. "Watching these bombs go down chimneys, watching the reporters laugh at the quips of Powell or Schwarzkopf. And there was humor along with it.

"I'm not saying I didn't enjoy the humor myself. But is this OK? Or should we censor this as well?"

It's not just an idle question. Although anti-violence activists speak dreamily of a ratings system and even a V-chip in TV sets that will automatically screen out violent programming, it's worth remembering that much of the violence depicted on broadcast television these days arrives in the form of news-based programming -- anything from "48 Hours" to "America's Most Wanted" to "Cops." In fact, if you take reality-based programming out of the equation, the TV-violence rate is at its lowest point in almost two decades, according to xxxxxx. So if we cut back on violence, do we then censor the news?

Likewise, some of the sexiest stuff on the tube these days isn't programming, but advertisement.

"[Movie director] Brian DePalma makes the point that 'if you're going to censor me, you'll also have to censor Calvin Klein,' " says Linda Kauffman, a professor of English at the University of Maryland. But as she points out, there's far less pressure on advertisers to regulate content or reduce sexual objectification, because advertising is seen not as art but as business.

"The issue no one is willing to address," she says, "is that while tsk-tsking [sexual content], the culture's investments in disseminating these images are just enormous."

Just as sexual images in advertising are often ignored while titillating fare in TV programming draws fire, not all depictions of violence are received equally. Consider this plot for a moment: A teacher, gentle and beloved, is arrested by a corrupt military governor. He is beaten by soldiers, mocked by his enemies and then slowly tortured to death, only to rise from the dead in triumph.

Sounds gruesome, doesn't it? And it's easy to imagine the grisly result if Clive Barker or David Cronenberg decided to film it. But the story described above is actually the Passion of Christ -- a tale most Christians find enormously uplifting. Do we sacrifice that to the V-chip?

GANGSTA AND GANGSTERISM

It's also worth remembering that different media work in different ways. When Ice Cube rapped about gunplay and gangbanging on the N.W.A. album "Straight Outta Compton," he may have been speaking with an intent to do violence, or he may have just been talking trash. But because all we had was his word, it was up to the listener to decide how literally the record should be taken.

But when Cube appeared in the film "Boyz N the Hood," that ambiguity disappeared -- we actually saw the gun in his hand and the anger in eyes as his character shot three men to death at the end of the movie.

So "Boyz N the Hood" is the more violent of the two works, but that doesn't necessarily make it the more pernicious. Although the violence in the film is more explicit, it's offered with a moral in mind -- that killing has bad consequences, whereas there's no moral in N.W.A.'s bloody braggadocio, just mindless titillation.

Of course, there are those who would argue that both are equally bad, since they "glorify" a gangster lifestyle that claims thousands of lives annually. That point is repeatedly made by the National Political Congress of Black Women in its drive to push gangsta rap off radio and out of record stores. And there may be some validity to its argument that the language used on such recordings cheapens the tenor of life and adds to the atmosphere of violence in African-American communities.

But before drawing a connection between gangsta rap and gangsterism, think about this: Al Capone loved Italian opera, and as any opera fan can attest, there's quite a bit of bloodlust in the plots of "Rigoletto," "La Traviata" and "Lucia di Lammermoor." But would anyone have seriously suggested keeping opera out of Italian-American neighborhoods as a means of cutting back on crime?

Of course not. Opera is seen as high art, elevating the listener, whereas rap is considered low art, presumably demeaning its audience.

Trouble is, it doesn't always work that way.

It's easy enough to find anecdotal evidence of the link between dramatized violence and the real-life variety.

In Texas, a 19-year-old convicted of killing a state trooper claimed as part of his defense that a recording by rapper Tupac Shakur inspired him to pull the trigger. In Britain, a judge sentencing two youths for the kidnapping and murder of a 2-year-old suggested that video violence fueled the youngsters' bloodlust. In Kentucky, a group of youths went on a car-theft-and-shooting spree that they said was the result of watching "Menace II Society" on video.

Finding concrete evidence linking fictional and actual violence is another matter entirely.

In the last three decades, more than 3,000 studies have looked at the relationship between televised mayhem and anti-social behavior, and while these studies have produced reams of data on changes in viewers' attitude and inclination, there's precious little evidence that a steady diet of televised shootings, stabbings and savagery will automatically turn the average child into a rampaging monster.

At this point, the closest any study comes to making a direct connection is in showing that children growing up in violent environments who watch a lot of TV mayhem are unusually prone to violence. But whether television is the trigger or simply one of many factors at play is almost impossible to determine.

"The extraordinary proliferation of violent images may be read in two ways," says Lentricchia, the Duke University professor. "It may make them so banal that we walk by the stuff without ever noticing. We become inured to it. It has no effect. So the repetition of violence drains the power of these images.

"The other argument would be that the proliferation of this stuff goads people into it, that it domesticates it so that it feels natural and OK to do these things. I'm not one to say that there aren't people out there for whom these images are goads to rape and murder; I don't know that, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were people who did do rape and murder because of these stimuli.

"But the question is, can you stop these people from doing it for some other reason? Why wouldn't they be goaded by something else? Who's going to say that this was the single thunderclap of a cause that created the effect of rape and murder?"

CAUSE AND EFFECT?

What Lentricchia has touched upon is the notion of "direct causality," a familiar mantra among those who would set restrictions on the content of popular culture. What direct causality posits is that a specific stimulus -- be it an Arnold Schwarzenegger shoot-'em-up or a Nina Hartley sex flick -- will induce a specific, anti-social response in the viewer.

"Direct causality" sounds scientific because it's modeled on the sort of lab experiments chemists use to prove a point. But to observe that chemical X, when mixed with chemical Y, produces reaction Z is relatively easy; chemical properties are relatively easy to isolate and define. Human nature, on the other hand, is infinitely more variable, and Lentricchia is appalled at the glib confidence with which this cause-and-response equation is applied to entertainment violence and sex.

"That's one of the uglier conclusions of a society that has thoroughly rationalized and secularized itself," he says. "It's the most foolish and naive kind of thinking. A lot of people are rushing into an area where there is ignorance, and maybe there can only be ignorance."

Lest you think Lentricchia overstates the case against direct causality, consider this: In Japan, TV programming is just as violent as it is in the United States, and there's much more sex. Moreover, Japanese men regularly read manga (comic books) that virtually reek of sex, death and sadism. Yet the violent crime rate in Japan is a mere fraction of what it is here: 1.1 homicides per 100,000 residents in all of 1989, the most recent number available from the Japanese Embassy in Washington. Baltimore's was 23 per 100,000 residents in just the first six months of 1993. This suggests that -- contrary to what American crusaders insist -- a steady diet of sex and violence does not necessarily spark anti-social behavior.

Still, the concept of direct causality does have its uses, particularly since it leaves responsibility for action not with the viewer, but with the TV show, album or movie that allegedly acted as a "trigger."

This shift in accountability is anything but accidental.

Kauffman, who has just completed a critical study of obscenity and art entitled "Bad Girls and Sick Boys," points out that the biggest problem facing would-be censors over the last quarter century has been the definition of pornography.

"It's like the famous statement, 'I know porn when I see it.' But, in fact, no one has been able to define pornography," she says.

So the anti-porn activists shifted their focus from attacking that which they deemed obscene to attacking the alleged effects of obscenity.

"Partly due to the brilliant legal work of Catherine MacKinnon," says Kauffman, referring to the famed feminist opponent of porn, "they've shifted the paradigm of criminality to a viewpoint of harm. [MacKinnon] applied the strategies she used for sexual harassment to pornography. If you depict an image that I claim harms me, I can sue you. And all the producers of that image."

Anti-violence activists have taken a similar tack: TV or movie violence may itself be difficult to quantify, but the effect of such excess ought to be apparent to anyone. Just look at the juvenile crime rate, the activists say. Just look at this study. Just look at how much TV kids watch. Isn't it obvious what's happening?

LEAVE IT TO 'BEAVIS'

In fact, much of the anecdotal evidence supporting the case against pop-culture violence seems quite convincing. Take the "Beavis and Butt-head" case. In October of last year, an Ohio woman blamed the MTV cartoon program "Beavis and Butt-head" after her 5-year-old son used a cigarette lighter to set fire to the family's trailer. His 2-year-old sister was killed in the blaze.

"Beavis and Butt-head" was immediately condemned, and for what seemed like good reason. After all, it was a cartoon, and aren't cartoons directly targeted at kids? And didn't Beavis go around flicking his Bic and chanting "Fire! Fire! Fire!"?

Never mind CNN's report that the woman's trailer wasn't wired ** for cable, or the neighbors quoted as saying the boy was a known firebug; such details hardly mattered when the accepted wisdom was that MTV was a bad influence on kids. MTV, eager to avoid controversy, quickly expunged all fire references from the cartoon, a move which only seemed to confirm the show's culpability.

But did the show deserve the blame? MTV says 30 million people watch "Beavis and Butt-head" in any given month.

One in 30 million -- can you say "statistical anomaly"? (I knew you could).

THE CENSORSHIP CYCLE

How serious is the debate over sex and violence?

Although Senator Simon, who is leading the congressional attack, and Attorney General Reno talk about cleaning up television once and for all, Andrew Ross, the director of the American Studies Program at New York University, suggests that all we're seeing is the latest flare-up in a decades-old conflict.

"Congress goes through cycles of this kind of interest," he says. "Every so often, they have to have some kind of moral panic, and have it in a very public way."

Ross ascribes the struggle to the basic relationship between culture industries -- TV networks, record companies, movie studios and the like -- and the government.

"For the most part, the state's contract with these industries is that they regulate themselves in some way," he says. "But their internal regulation is challenged from generation to generation. So there's this kind of balance between state regulation and internal policing that, from the state's point of view, has to be continually redefined. Which is why, every 10 years, you have this spectacle that gets set up on Capitol Hill."

Ross doesn't think Senator Simon and Attorney General Reno are likely to follow through on their threats and legislate a solution, because they don't have to.

"The people who initiate these attempts at legislation always know they're going to fail," he says. The fear of legislation is usually enough to get the industries to censor themselves -- which, Ross argues, is all the government wanted in the first place.

"If you have your eyes on the prize of legislation, you bring in a regulatory culture, which is like a chilly air mass," he says. "It doesn't necessarily mean you get snow, but the chill sticks around for a long time."

J. D. CONSIDINE is The Sun's pop music critic.