No, that’s common BDSM, not true sadistic fantasy. Anonymous surveys show the dangerous stuff mostly in offender/clinical groups.
So the specific kind of fantasy shows up in offender/clinical groups and not in other groups anonymously surveyed, with good assurance of the anonymity?
How is that kind distinctive?
Indeed, it’s distinctive because it’s almost absent in anonymous general surveys yet common in offender/clinical groups, which is a big statistical red flag. Remember, it’s not a direct cause-and-effect, just an indicator — and we’re talking about chronic, repetitive fantasies here.
How accurate are the surveys? You’d have to ask a research psychologist, which I am not.
I mean, you’re clearly distinguishing something about this type from the type in BDSM scenarios. What distinguishes it from that type, other than the use of safe words?
The difference is intent and emotional tone — BDSM scenarios (with safe words) are built around trust, roleplay, and mutual pleasure, while sadistic/torture fantasies focus on real, non-consensual harm, with the arousal coming from the victim’s suffering, not a shared experience. Not that I’m speaking from experience — I just remember what my grandparents told me over milk and cookies.
With sexual role play, the participants have full knowledge that the other person is thinking sexual thoughts about them. They are willingly consenting to be thought of in a sexual way by their partner. When they are acting out a teacher/student scenario, the student wants the teacher to think sexually about them. But that’s not the case in an actual classroom. For the most part, students in a real class don’t want the teacher to be dwelling on sexual fantasies about them. Even if a student enjoys teacher/student role play in the bedroom, they probably don’t want to worry that a real teacher is thinking about them in that way in the classroom.
Another aspect is that in consensual sexual role play, the person does not feel shame about their thoughts. They can freely share their sexual thoughts about the other person without worrying that the person will be offended (within limits, of course). If a real teacher were tell a student that they were the subject of their sexual fantasies, likely the student would be very offended and consider it a form of sexual harassment. A teacher fantasizing about a student would likely understand that those thoughts were bad or shameful in some way, and that could make the teacher feel negatively about themselves.
But even with consensual role play, people still have their limits. Someone may enjoy teacher/student role play, but would be very offended if their partner was thinking about rape fantasies. So even in a BDSM situation, there would still be some sexual thoughts that would be good and some that would be bad from the other person’s perspective.
Yes, I understand the difference in actual behavior. I was asking about the difference in fantasy. Maybe it’s the same – maybe you’re saying that people fantasize BSDM scenes as a scene, not as what the scene would be portraying if not a scene?
I think part of it is looking at the emotional effect it has on the person thinking the thoughts. If they feel good about them and don’t feel shame in sharing those thoughts, then that’s probably okay. But if they feel shame about the thoughts and would be reluctant to share those thoughts, then those thoughts are probably bad for the person to engage in. If the person feels shame about the thoughts, that is likely going to negatively influence how they feel about themselves and how they treat others. And how would the other person feel if they knew about those thoughts. Would they be fine with those thoughts or would they be offended?
Someone in the BDSM community can think about fictional BDSM scenarios in a positive way similar to how people think of any hobby. The people in the fantasy would typically be people who enjoy the activity. Someone who is thinking of torture fantasies as a way to actually hurt or control someone is really thinking about negative actions. They aren’t thinking about a consensual scenario where the other person wants to be there and can stop things at any time. They are thinking about a scenario which would actually be harmful and terrifying if it were to really happen. Both people can be having fantasies where they tie a student to a bed and have sex with them, but the BDSM person is having fantasies where the tied up person wants to be there while the other person is having fantasies where the person is actually being raped.
No, the torturing of a child is evil, and that is the outcome, already defined. What you are now doing is assigning blame to appropriate bystanders. By refusing to interfere, the bystander who can see and hear has some measure of blame; I’m not sure whether his attitude to children makes for more or less blame than if, say, he was just a coward, but refusing to interfere is an action based on his thoughts. The bystander who cannot see or hear is clearly blameless, even if he also hates children.
There’s no concept of restraining or controlling thoughts in my Zen practice, however I agree that meditation is a good way to enhance concentration on whatever skillful quality you want to develop. Mostly when I do it, it’s to become aware of the present, including my thoughts, and not get too engaged with those thoughts.
As I’ve explained before, but maybe I need to be more clear, killing in a story is not killing. It represents something else. It is an abstraction. What’s most important in a story, from an ethical perspective, is its theme. My novel is decidedly anti-violence by showing the real costs of such violence in trauma and how such acts perpetuate more violence. Of course my book takes place during a war and concerns individuals who are not enlightened beings. But I do find it satisfying to write stories where I kill violent rapists. Not because I’m violent - I’m an extremely chill person in that regard, not the least because I was raised by an incredibly violent person and dread becoming anything like that - but because that rapist I imaginatively killed in my novel is symbolic of rape, and in the scene I’m talking about upthread, rape as a systematic war crime. Rape is a thing I would like to see destroyed, if only symbolically.
Certainly I’ve had to think about the kinds of messages I’m sending in my work, and it was that influence that had me write a shamelessly violent character who learns about how to be compassionate from a woman doing humanitarian work.
My pastor friend once described my work as “profane, but meaningful." (I really need that on a business card.) Sure it’s prurient and gritty in some respects, with all the fun of a sexy action story, and it’s also very much, very centrally, about the transformative power of love. I think you can only get to love of that magnitude through radical acceptance.
Have you seen the Buddhist movie Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter? Where is there room for judgement in that? I think it shows very clearly that violence is its own punishment, and that the path to peace is through empathy for the people you’ve hurt (and yes, a ton of meditation.)
You are confident saying you can’t trust someone who wrote down a fantasy even though you’ve never met that person, and have no context for judging that fantasy. Since I know myself to be a trustworthy and kind person who is deeply thoughtful about my written work, I think that’s showing the folly of judging someone for their thoughts. You know how many hours I spent reading and grieving over Guantanamo Bay and the treatment of male victims of rape in Texas prisons - research I had to do to accurately depict the traumatic aftermath of such treatment? Do you know many years I’ve put into creating real-life safe spaces for rape and violence victims of all genders? I have dedicated my career to this issue.
Does that count? Or is that all cancelled out because I enjoyed writing a scene where a woman killed a man who violently assaulted and tried to rape her because of her status and ethnicity?
You see my point?
I’ve done stuff with people who totally get off on the evil part of the fantasy. The fact that it would be evil if acted out in the point, and they themsevles refer to the fantasy as evil.
I’ve also had to work with someone who didn’t realize that it was just fantasy, and asked me for the contact information for someone I had recently listed as an abuser on the “beware” list. My sub at the time even told me he predicted it would happen when I put them on the list.
Statistically accidents are always inept/drunk/reckless/distracted drivers. People call drivers hitting buildings “accidents”.
Your “loose stone” hypothetical without anyone responsible is constructed solely to beg the question.
True accidents, without a clear responsible party, are vanishingly rare.
Let’s change your hypothetical a bit, make it a mountain trail. The wax
No, it is not. the hypothetical I provided is quite clear and only contains one variable that is the variable you are arguing does not matter. If you have a coherent viewpoint, please apply it.
And certainly there might be other people in a broader scope who are responsible, such as whoever designed the stairs, or maintains them, but the judgment I am asking you to make is between:
- Someone who accidentally, unwittingly and without malice, causes an object to fall, resulting in the death of another human
- Someone who deliberately and with malicious intent, causes an object to fall, resulting in the death of another human.
The outcome is the same in both of these scenarios, and you assert that only outcomes matter, so how should society treat the person in each of these two scenarios? You’ve several times said that a court/judge/jury should decide; I’m asking you what you would expect a fair and just decision, made by a court/judge/jury should be.
Assume that in both scenarios, the accidental or intentional nature of the act is established fact - we’ve got multiple angles of high-quality CCTV evidence, eyewitnesses, etc. There’s no ambiguity about apparent intent.
I mean, if your position that ‘only outcomes count’ doesn’t have an application in this pair of scenarios, where the outcomes are the only thing that are the same, please feel free to say and I will stop labouring the question.
We are talking at cross purposes. All I want to say is that thoughts are the seeds from which actions grow. If a person enjoys sadistic fantasies, this will gradually be reflected in their behavior towards others. This prevents that person’s mind from growing. What the person does in their everyday life is irrelevant in this context. It might be helpful to talk to the Zen teacher about these fantasies and ask for guidance.
I didn’t come in here claiming to represent Buddhist moral authority. I expressed a conflict that I have between what I actually believe and what Buddhists are commonly taught. My perspective is conflicted because I am an artist who believes in the importance of free creative expression, and because I am scientifically minded and see little evidence that thoughts necessarily lead to actions.
But my main argument in this thread is that I don’t see the point of judging people for their thoughts. Even if we accept that it’s unhealthy or potentially could cause suffering (and I’ll allow the potential, in at least some cases, to cause suffering) adding judgements like “evil" accomplishes nothing.
I’ve been taught that everybody’s moral development is their own business. That means nobody looking over my shoulder and I’m not looking over anyone else’s.
Ideally. In reality I’m struggling with strong feelings toward people in my country causing massive amount of harm and suffering, and if there’s anything I’m going to put toward one of my teachers, it will be that. Not what I write in my romance novels.
I still don’t think it’s guaranteed that the fantasies will become reflected in the behavior towards others. They may be for some people, and may never be for others – especially for the ones who don’t actually want their fantasies to happen.
And I don’t see what that has to do with whether the person’s mind is “growing”. Seems to me that a mind could grow in all sorts of directions, most of them orthogonal to what they fantasize about. Unless the fantasy’s become so obsessional that it gives them no time to think about anything else, of course – I agree that that would indicate a problem.
And if what they do in their everyday life is irrelevant in this context, then how is their behavior towards others an issue? That behavior is something that they do in their everyday life.
A “true accident” isn’t one where there’s no responsible party. “Accident” doesn’t mean, “No one is responsible for this outcome,” it means “no one intended this outcome.” A drunk driver plowing into a school bus is still an accident, and it’s still something that is 100% the legal and moral fault of the drunk.
I can see certain thoughts or fantasies as being unhealthy, but I think that evil comes from our deeds, not thoughts.
I don’t know if a thought in itself can be evil but I know that persistently thinking evil thoughts can turn someone evil… obsessively thinking terrible thoughts sorta warps the brain. If you watch to any serial killer interview you’ll notice a common trend where they obsessively think about committing the evil act before they finally do it.
It’s sorta how the Darkside seduced Anakin Skywalker and turned his heart and mind bblak with his obsessions.. i know it’s fiction but that’s the best example I can think up.