On Violence

[Rev. Rye]

I was just noticing that while violence may not be the best path to power, it sure does comprise a lot of our entertainment in movies and television.

It may be in the nature of art, but I think there is a certain truth to the idea that many, men particular, like violence and admire violent people.

Look at the recent admiration for Luigi Mangione, the HCU executive shooter.

Another example is rape porn. Why do people find watching someone raped to be titillating?

I’ve long known that there’s something in humanity that loves violence. Something that longs for an excuse to be violent. And I figure that celebrating the slaughter of a CEO as corrupt as the one who got shot is plenty for most people. I’ve written about this before and called it “The Dexter Hypothesis.”

As for the popularity of rape porn, I suspect that a lot of it has to do with sexual repression (either on a societal or a personal level). On the perpetrator’s side, I can find quite a few examples that can explain it, like from Nazi Germany, where porn was banned, but Die Sturmer’s constant flow of lurid stories of Aryan girls getting raped and murdered by Jews (still somehow going even as most of the area’s Jewish population was in no position to sexually assault anyone) were readily available. Or, a more recent example, Max “MrGirl” Karson (the man infamous for defending controversial 2020 Netflix film Cuties for all the wrong reasons):



Apparently, his mother (a closeted lesbian at the time) told him at an early age that when a man has sex with a woman, the woman inevitably gets hurt. He seems to have internalized that message and, frankly, given how much of a sexual dumpster fire he is, it seems like he decided “ Thou call'dst me dog before thou hadst a cause; But, since I am a dog, beware my fangs.”

I can talk more about what I understand about the victim’s side of things, but my belated birthday dinner just arrived.