Why are you such sick perverts?

Great Debates
1

(Deliberately provocative title.)

There was a thread recently (which I can’t find, but then the SD search engine and I have never been friends) about films that make you squeamish or uncomfortable or something like that. There followed a list of films that I’ve never heard of, let alone seen, where Dopers discuss the most obscene nuances of torture porn.

This is you, folks. Not deprived or depraved members of society, but intelligent, humane fellow beings. Yet you obviously enjoy the displays of excruciating pain and dismemberment.

I’m not a terribly strong adherent of the principle that what you see and think about, you do. But the viewing of child porn is supposed to have a correlation with the actions of pedophiles. Stanley Kubrick banned the showing of A Clockwork Orange due to copycat violence. If there was the slightest hint that someone was to emulate what they’ve seen in a torture porn movie, it would be horrifying beyond belief.

This is like an extreme version of slowing down while going past a road traffic accident, or not such an extreme version of watching an execution or hanging, drawing and quartering in the past. But that was when we were less sophisticated and more brutal - wasn’t it?

This is not a very good example of humanity. Why do you, and they, do it?

2

Yeah, and why not outlaw everything you personally find distasteful while you’re at it? Don’t like eating apricots? Then why should anyone else have the right to eat them?

3

:confused: Doesn’t everybody?

4

:rolleyes: Yeah, because that is exactly what the OP called for, outlawing stuff. :rolleyes:

5

Will this crush Dems chances in November?

6

Torture porn? Like horror movies such as the Saw, Hostel, or Hills Have Eyes series? No idea. Having read a bit about them when I peruse the movie reviews, I have no desire to watch anything in that genre.

I don’t know why anyone would want to watch that sort of stuff. I like a good scary movie, but not gross-out torture, pain and gore. I prefer skilled use of suspense. “The Changeling” kind of movie works for me.

Actual porn with pain and torture? Not my cup of tea, either.

7

Why do you assume it people enjoy it? That is not the emotion that comes to YOU when you see it…why would you think the majority would feel any differently than you do?

8

This doesn’t apply to me because I don’t watch, and have trouble even stomaching the ads for, these movies. I can’t detach myself from them enough to be entertained by what’s going on instead of just nauseated by the idea of that stuff happening, let alone watching it. But regardless, most people can tell the difference between fantasy and reality - and in many cases I think those people are able to use fantasy as an outlet for impulses that even healthy people have, and know they should not engage in.

A statement like that really calls for a cite.

We like to think so, and it’s true in some ways, but people are people. A lot of really basic things about humans hasn’t changed, and a few centuries isn’t enough time for it to change. People have some really brutal impulses. They haven’t been extinguished just because we’ve developed agriculture and text messaging. Our social codes have changed, so a lot of people wouldn’t admit they’d want to see a guy drawn and quartered, but in the right case there are plenty of people who will tell you they’re okay with it. Read a thread where people talk about punishments for child molesters and you’ll see what I mean.

I don’t. ‘They’ do it because it makes money.

9

You can’t be serious! You saying eating apricots is on the same level as torture porn? Come on!

10

No, I don’t. Do you?

11

I didn’t call for the outlawing of anything. I was wondering why people want to watch that stuff.

12

I believed - correct me if I’m wrong - that people go to see films like that for pleasure.

13

Indirectly, I think. People go to see films like that to experience horror and suspense, which they may get a thrill from. Adrenaline, you know. Sometimes, if the victim isn’t a sympathetic figure, they may get a thrill from seeing a villain or mere jackass get his. Most, I think, watch this stuff to just experience something that would never, or at least ought to never happen in their daily lives.

14

The point, *Shirley *( :stuck_out_tongue: ), is that who cares what someone else likes? No one needs to justify their likes to anyone.

15

I don’t see them. Not a single solitary one of them. I think that using gore to get a response in a movie is yawn inducing. I only have to watch the shorts to know that I will give it a wide berth. And I go to about 80 - 100 movies a year.

16

Why is torture porn that is made by consenting adults for consenting adults morally worse than indulging in that most unseemly of fruits?

17

First off, child porn is not something that your garden variety porn fan watches. It’s a different animal, it’s not available except via underground connections, and it is usually not lumped into “porn” in the general sense. Ever.

Secondly, violence and dismemberment (with or without the sexual component) has been around forever. It involves imagination and lots of different emotions. Most of the people I know who watch violent movies do it because they like to be horrified…not because they find these images “enjoyable.”

18

I haven’t got one, but isn’t that a general opinion? And, no, I appeciate that the masses aren’t always right!

Good point. I sometimes do wonder why our humanity doesn’t seem to develop at the same pace as our technology.

19

Well, movies, depending on their genre, generally aim to elicit a reaction from the viewer – romances make you go ‘awww’, comedies makes you laugh, horror films frighten you and gore films gross you out. Those are all part of the human spectrum of experience, though often taken to extremes one is unlikely to encounter in real life, which accounts for part of our fascination: we’ll likely never be faced with romantic tangles on a Casablanca level, nor will we be in a situation where we’ll have to pretend that the corpse of our boss is, actually, still alive.

Yet, we still have the ability to emphasize with the extremes of those situations, and accordingly melt into tears or burst into laughter.

Basically the same goes for the over-the-top slasher/gore genre: it’s a way to exercise our reactions to situations that never occur in real life, to experience by proxy what we won’t (and in these cases, hopefully wouldn’t want to) experience directly, shielded by the bullet-proof window of fiction.

Obviously, then, there needs to be an incentive to experience such within us, which might seem weird at first – who’d want to experience such cruelty and disturbing images?

But then, who’d want to be so sad as to cry, who’d want to be frightened, who’d want to be mad and angry? And yet, there’s movies for each of those, and nobody seems to think anything much of it – everybody likes a good scare, or cry, now and then. If we didn’t, there’d only be pleasant, happy movies.

Perhaps we occasionally need to experience even bad things in order to, well, appreciate the good? And if we can do so with the comforting notion of ‘it’s just a movie, nothing real’ in the back of our heads, then all the better.

20

I agree. But you can get an adrenaline rush from a roller coaster or Star Wars. Isn’t torture porn a bit…umm…*extreme *?