Two of human kind’s most innate motivations are death and sex. Yet the United States operates under a complex social system that systematically denies both. Mass denial of death hinders human thought and movement through the world, and the incessant refusal to acknowledge sexuality in its array of forms impedes healthy, respectful engagement between humans.

Like an ulcer that feeds off of stress, emotions that are persistently ignored will eventually manifest in some form or another. Thus, in the United States, at the intersection of death and sex denial lies a mutant combination of the two – a lustful and perverse obsession with murder, blood, gore, and violent death. Blood-spattered films, graphic video games, and rampant rape on college campuses have become the new pornography.

This insurgency of eroticized death and killing is what naturalizes the actions of young children, like Miles, who talk of “bloody murder” during show-and-tell, but not of “kissing” (Patron, 144). Schools across the nation practice emergency shooting drills routinely, yet fail to provide adequate sex education. While school-shooting preparedness does enter a subtext of death, it addresses the universal and ever-growing fear of death, rather than death itself.

Perhaps the eroticization of death in response to the nation-wide silencing of both sexuality and mortality is a defense mechanism used to protect one against the knowledge of one’s own mortality.