OK, the media here in the UK is in a frenzied state about this story - basically, nutcase bloke with disturbinfg fetishes strangles a seemingly normal schoolteacher while having sex with her, then keeps the body for a month, tries to hide/burn it etc…
Without a doubt this is a horrible tragedy for all concerned, but the focus of attention at the moment appears to be the Evil Internet - the murderer was apparently addicted to bizarre, violent porn.
My question is this:
Does the presence of such material on the internet generally fuel the behaviours of these individuals, or provide a harmless outlet for it?
I suspect the answer contains a fair bit of ‘it depends’, so perhaps we could take a coldly mathematical view: In total, would more schoolteachers be raped and strangled if we (somehow) removed all violent porn, or would the occurrence be less frequent?
Does the porn create the psycho, or does the psycho that already exists merely use the porn that already exists? Or does the porn encourage the psycho that already exists to do things he would not otherwise have done?
I wonder if people really do believe before porn, movie violence and interracial dating that humans lived in paradise where nothing bad happend.
Violence, rape, and murder have been a very very very common element in human history. Why would porn create more rape? It was already common before porn was even possible!
Sure, it existed before internet porn, but that doesn’t rule out the possiblity that additional cases couldn’t be caused or exacerbated by it.
(Not that I’m arguing either way, it just isn’t flawless logic to say that because cases of X preceded, and were uncaused by Y, then no current cases of X are caused by Y)
Murder, rape, etc would exsist without deviant porn, but I feel that hardcore and disturbing porn mixed with the right mindframe can lead to dubious acts. I am sure most viewers of hard porn are docile and nonviolent, but a select few might just be pushed over the edge by watching it.
I’m curious though, OfBlinkingThings - do you think it is equally possible that a small number of individuals capable of violent acts might actually be diverted from them by finding some kind of release in viewing porn? (Pushed over the edge in the other direction, if you like).
Look at places where porn isn’t easily available or forbidden. Clergy, who I’m sure aren’t big into watching porn, are big into molesting boys (many cases go back 20-30 years before Internet porn was around).
Studies have been done. They show that porn causes nothing. Generally speaking, sexual murderers can be shown to consume porn. So can several million other people.
Yes, I 100% agree with you that in some cases a person may be diverted from acting out a deviant sexual act by simply viewing it and living vicariously through the images, thus rendering them harmless. I would go so far as to say that this behavior most likely outwieghs the other drastically, but it cannot be denied that a very small percentage of hardcore pornography viewers will feel urged on to try what they see. A weak-willed or menatally disturbed person could easily get bored with just viewing and want to move on to actually doing. I am going to use my self as a case study, since I have viewed pornography before, just the average run of the mill stuff, and I will say that after watching it I have an urge to have sex that feels a bit stronger than regular old horniness. I can of course restrain myself from going out and finding someone to take my feelings out on, but I could see how someone who is deeply obssesed with deviant sexual activities could be pushed over the edge simply by viewing too much and having no relief.
p.s I;m not trying to be crass by illustrating my own experience, but I feel that it is relevent.
I suspect that extreme porn can expand the imagination of some devients, leading them to commit more bizzare acts when they otherwise would have comitted more mundane acts. Specially a person of very limited immagination who has a psychotic and devient nature might without external stimulus commit such acts as rape and murder. With access to extreme pornography they might do less common acts. But the less common act could be worse or better than the common acts (thinking they might include torture and imprisonment with the rape and murder, but then again they might chose bestiality or necrophylia).
Honestly, I think it could (and likely does) go either way.
Some people are more readily influenced by what they see than others. A handful of these people with the right (ha) inclinations will see something in hardcore porn which had not previously occurred to them, and seek to act it out. Why blame the porn, though? It’s the human mind interpreting it that will direct the offensive actions, not the tape in the VCR. If a person hasn’t got a firm enough grip on reality to know that it’s not OK to go around emulating whatever’s in the VCR, he was bound to fuck up eventually anyway. We can’t be constantly filtering media for content that might set off a crazy; if we did that, there’d be nothing to watch!
Then there’s others, that may have some fascination with a particular depraved thing and use porn as a release. I don’t know, though… what excites someone in porn doesn’t necessarily equate to something they’d otherwise want to do IRL. I was just reading in this thread that many women have rape fantasies and enjoy pornography including it, but I doubt that means with OR without such porn that they’d have any desire to really be raped.
Certainly a worthy subject for discussion but in fact, all the article says about this is the following:
The wording does not specifially state that the murderer was in fact addicted to bizarre, violent porn. Not that I’d be any expert on this anyway, but one would think that porn sites that traffic in fantasies of strangling would be few and far between, and without a clear statement showing that Coutts had in fact visited such sites, it would be a bit of leap, IMO, to conclude that viewing porn had somehow precipitated the murder.
Other media reports have stated that it wasn’t by any means ‘ordinary’ porn for which he has developed an obsession - they mentioned sites specifically catering for strangulation fantasies and worse (although how much of this is speculation on the part of reporters, I’m not sure).
Even so, it seems highly unlilkely that he was anywhere near normal to begin with.
This is one of those issues that just comes down to opinion. It’s like whether violent video games can lead to violent behavior – there are studies done that support both sides, with the results from any one study tending to support the initial hypothesis of those funding the study.
IMHO, extreme media can sometimes “raise the bar” on what someone might be willing to try. It’s like when there was an uproar about kids hurting themselves performing stunts they saw on Jackass – when I was a kid we expended that adventurous energy by building crappy ramps to jump our bikes off of. Seeing someone on TV doing bigger, more dangerous stunts and walking away unharmed and laughing raised the bar a bit for what some youthful adventurers were willing to try.
I am also skeptical when someone claims that something is a release for them. In many cases, it is true (for myself, listening to angry, hardcore rap music does help calm me when I’m angy), but in some, it is a deception. An alcoholic would claim a shot of whiskey is a release for his frustrations, and I suppose from a certain point of view that is true, but at the same time, it is also the fuel that drives him to seek release. I am far from a violent sexual deviant so perhaps my experience counts for little, but I find that viewing porn (boring old everybody has fun, nobody gets hurt king) increases sexual tension, not releases it. YMMV.
That’s a tragic story, but as has already been pointed out, it’s a chicken-and-egg problem. Obviously, a person who is inclined to commit such an act would also be inclined to collect depictions of such acts. A person who likes art might collect paintings, but collecting the paintings is not what caused the person to like art. It’s the other way around.
Perhaps the saddest part of the whole situation is that the family and friends of the murdered woman now look set to embark on a crusade against The Evil Internet; I know it is defeatist to say so, but I think all they will achieve is their own degradation; exposing themselves repeatedly to that which they find most objectionable and battering themselves against that which they cannot vanquish.
In this context, ‘sick’ has been used to describe snuff - the media have been describing it as ‘real actual images of real actual live killings’ or some such - about which I admit I am dubious - I’m not sure if a genuine snuff movie has ever actually been discovered.
I’m with Cervaise. Are we only talking about snuff-type material? Would porn where the woman was obviously being cooerced, or the nature of the acts is degrading,
qualify as sick?
Doesn’t it kinda say something about the person who wishes to consume this material? I mean, really, I doubt the scenerio where wee Willie surfs the net, only to come across some egregious gonzo porn, and is suddenly transformed into a buttless-chaps-wearing watersports-and-nipple-clamps enthusiast, whose gateway perversions lead him to a life of flashing soccer moms and molesting gerbils on Sunday…
I rather think it was Willie’s mother, who spanked his pee-pee when he was a baby, who fucked the poor boy up.
