Common wisdom has it that violence in media is aimed at the adolescent male. While I found this to be true in my own experience, I wonder how common the exceptions are.
Doper ladies: Do any of you ever actually enjoy the visceral violence so often depicted in movies, games, TVs, even books? Do you ever get a rush watching it? Do you ever enjoy partaking in it (if a game)?
And by “enjoy”, I don’t mean “Yeah, fine, my SO is watching this silly action movie so I’ll go with him,” but more “YeaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAHH! KILL 'EM ALL!!!”
Would you ever partake on your own?
As a side note: I’m most interested in your perspectives on violence of the mass, faceless sort (i.e., combat) but understandably, most Google results were about sexualized, genderized, or domestic violence; it’s fine if the conversation heads towards that, but I would also appreciate your thoughts on the former – if you make a distinction between them. I know that personally, there’s a big difference for me between violence of the “Lord of the Rings” sort and something like “Boys Don’t Cry”.
I don’t like it in video games, and I hate those true crime TV shows, but sometimes I enjoy it in the movies. I liked Straw Dogs, some movie where Patrick Swayze was a Chicago cop from Kentucky or something, and most everything Clint Eastwood has done. However, those movies are so old the violence can’t compare to what’s in the movies now, so maybe I just like violence-light.
Sure. I love thriller/horror movies. I’ve always read books about serial killers and true crime type stuff. Scenes of stylized action/violence are often one of the coolest parts of movies (Kill Bill, The Matrix, Inception, etc.)
Dexter & CSI are two of my favorite TV shows. Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs & Se7en are among my favorite movies. I like to read Stephen King, Jonathan Kellerman & James Ellroy.
I play MMORPGs and enjoy killing beasties, but I don’t much like war scenes or big action scenes most of the time. I don’t like gore, and I think some of my aversion to a lot of violence in film is a combination of that dislike plus a dislike of loud noises.
What a weird question. Of course we do. If we didn’t, there’d be no female fans of horror movies or shows like BTVS, Legend of the Seeker, Supernatural, or True Blood, all of which have very strong, if not predominant, female fan bases.
I like the Borne series as well as the new Bonds with Daniel Craig although the hunky leading men don’t hurt.
My husband put on Crank and I had to turn it off because I was disgusted (as soon as Bai Ling showed up I was done).
For games, I’m terrible at the war games - like I literally miss everything I try to shoot at, so I don’t care for them, although we have Deadliest Creatures and I like kicking the crap out of the snakes/spiders/etc. I’m not sure if that counts.
I find the question a bit odd, too. Most horror movie audiences are full of women, and they’re not being dragged there by their gore hound boyfriends. If women I know express disgust over violence, it’s usually when it’s misogynist and/or hypersexual. Obviously women are taught to identify with male protagonists much more than the opposite, so they can slip into the skin of a violent hero and get a rush from it as much as anyone else, but when a character starts assaulting women or implying that he will, it can certainly take you out of the movie or show.
What elfkin and Cat Fight said. What does being female have to do with it?
I think a lot of the perception may be that often, (at least in American culture) guys are societally conditioned to hide any distaste when it comes to violence while women are societally conditioned to hide any preference for violence.
I don’t like “real” violence of any kind and don’t care to watch it. I only recently subjected myself to films of the 911 disaster. And I can’t strike another person or an animal.
But I watch and read both horror and thrillers and fictionalized violence, while I can’t say I enjoy it, doesn’t bother me. I don’t seek out violence for violence’s sake and it needs to be part of a plot that’s both fairly well written/acted.
My friends tease me and say I read and watch it so I don’t have to do it. Heh.
Agreed that this is a weird question. Two of my favorite shows ever are Buffy and Supernatural, and I can happily discuss my favorite violent scenes from each of them. (Buffy: Oh, so many. I think maybe the RPG v. the Judge. Although later in that same episode Buffy kicked Angelus in the balls, which was excellent on a different level. Supernatural: Definitely when Sam ripped Gordon’s head off with a freaking wire. That was AWESOME.)
Hell, I’m watching Shark Week right now.
I’m not a fan of video games, though. I find gaming in general kind of boring.
ETA: Agreed that I hate real violence, though. I find boxing awful, for example. I don’t want to see people beating each other up for real!
Well, I suppose I am a detractor. I’m not necessarily a fan and while it doesn’t gross me out or anything, I mostly find it used more extensively and graphically than it needs to be. Sometimes violence is far more effective when implied versus explicit.
I don’t like it at all. LOST was about as much as I could stand, and I turned away for some of that if I could tell it was coming.
I never thought of is as a female thing. I just assumed it was another reason I am weird.
When I was younger I think I tolerated it fairly well; as someone else said upthread, sometimes it’s necessary for the plot.
Now that I’m an old bat, I have no use for it whatsoever. I don’t find it entertaining in the least. Don’t enjoy horror movies at all.
One of the worst things about TV stuff nowadays is the screaming. I hate to be trying to do something in an adjacent room when somebody is getting tortured or killed or scared on the TV; the endless screaming and screaming and KILL THE POOR WRETCH ALREADY!! GAH!!! STFU !!!
So my answer is no, not only do I not like it but I actively dislike it.
What NinetyWt said. I hate graphic, gory, or gruesome violence of any sort, especially if there’s the feeling that the violence is supposed to be relished. That’s repugnant to me. I can basically only stomach violence if I know that no one is actually getting hurt (e.g., a fictional movie) and it’s implied-to-straightforward (like if someone gets punched once or someone is shot but it’s over quickly). Actual, real-life violence – from boxing to TV news footage of people getting into fights to war footage to home videos of people falling on their heads set to canned laughter – is unwatchable. People getting hurt for real is never funny or entertaining to me. If you slip on a banana peel in front of me, you can be assured that I will not laugh at you.
Violent video games are okay if the violence is clearly fantasy violence (like, I have no problem blowing up Super Mutants in Fallout 3). Realistic violence is out. Violence against women like in the GTA games is in the “not just no but hell no” category.
Yep. I actually used to devour True Crime tv shows like Forensic Files once upon a time, but then they started upsetting me more and more, especially after I noticed that 95% of the episodes were about women being raped and murdered (usually by their husbands). I said enough, and from then on, I stopped watching those shows and the fictional rape/murder programs like Law and Order: SVU. I don’t want rape, murder, and “woman being hurt” stories in general to be my sources of entertainment. The Lifetime network is banned in my house.
As long as it fits in with what its creators are trying to achieve and it’s executed reasonably well, I can enjoy it violence in media in any form. And when the violence is the result of good art, makeup, foley effects, required extensive choreography, or is tied well with good drama or dialogue, I appreciate that too.
I’m a fan of true crime dramatizations, horror movies (like a well-done zombie movie), comic/superhero movies, sci-fi, and action/adventure, none of which are genres that shy away from violence and gore.
This delicate flower here sometimes puts on her pink negligee and sits down all aflutter, holding her teddy bear, to watch a nice romantic comedy. Then this delicate flower will watch True Blood, Shark Week, The Matrix, or Kill Bill #1 and #2 and manage to NOT faint dead away. Nothing wrong with a little cathartic kick-ass violence… Sadism, gruesome for the sake of gruesome, banal violence against women because they are always always the victims - uh, no, I find that sickening and offensive, to say the least.
I love over-the-top unrealistic fast-action violence. On my top ten list of All Time Great Movies are Kick-Ass and Kill Bill Vol. I & II. I’m a huge fan of martial arts and absolutely adore martial arts movies and other films where the combat is choreographed like a beautiful, violent dance. When I play RPGs I’m always a melee character and the bigger the sword, the better. I love the carnage and prefer hack n’ slash to turn-based (though I turn off excessive blood features.) One of my all-time favorite best scenes in Angel is when he
totally threw a big-ass knife at Lindsay and lobbed his fucking arm off.
I am extremely uncomfortable with realistic violence (find first-person shooters really unsettling, for example), protracted torture scenes or movies where characters suffer terror and grief. For example, while Pan’s Labyrinth was an excellent movie, I had to leave the theater twice due to how disturbing I found it (the magical horror scenes were fine. It was the fascist torture fiend scenes I couldn’t deal with.) So ‘‘torture porn’’ movies are out. It might as well be a documentary for how upset I get.
Yep, this - though for some reason I seriously enjoyed Seven. (Go figure.)
World of Warcraft sucks up more time than I care to admit, and that game has a whole ton of killing. I played fighting games in college and after.
Oh, and my all-time favorite Valentine’s Day gift from my husband was two light guns and the Area 51 shooter game for whatever version of the Playstation that was. I’m not into Valentine’s, but that was just awesome of him.
