Large Fierce Mammal

WARNING: Links contained in this article will take you to EXTREMELY ADULT websites that may be disturbing to some readers.

The taking captive of another human being for the purpose of doing with them anything your little heart desires is a recurring theme in history. Torture, running the full gamut from titillation to full on state sponsored activities done in the name of the so called war on terror, is as big today as it ever was while the Grand Inquisition was in business. Tonight’s dark sentiment is about torture’s dark allure. We’re as entertained by it today as we ever were watching it done as a public spectacle in ancient history.

What is it that makes seemingly ordinary, balanced people derive pleasure – even sexual arousal – from having another person under their complete control? Being able to make them feel any sensation at a whim for as long or short a time as the captor desires? To be honest, I don’t care, because the phenomenon is so evenly distributed throughout the global population that I chalk it up to whatever passes for normal wherever I’m standing at the moment.

Totalitarian governments have traditionally employed torture to beat their citizenry into line. The result – the need to arrest and torture more people because the population has lost respect for the government, and nobody will cooperate with the police. Interestingly, there are proponents of torture by US law enforcement agencies under specific conditions that would justify the issue of a “torture warrant”. Such a thing doesn’t exist right now, but it’s interesting that it has been openly discussed.

If you’re not just doing it for fun, torture is usually employed to:

1. obtain information;
2. extract a confession; or
3. teach a lesson to the group to which the victim belongs.

Something most people don’t understand about torture is that it can be time consuming, and from a law enforcement perspective, inefficient. The inflicting of pain over time can be counterproductive in that the recipient often comes to experience it in ways that are far different from what the torturer expects, resulting in the need to escalate the brutality to a degree that risks rendering the prisoner insensate or dead. Well, that’s helpful. Unless your subject is easily frightened, if you need accurate, useful information NOW, torture should be your last resort. If you’re dealing with a psychopath or any other brand of nut job, success is all the less likely.

If you’re after a confession, torture will yield great success, as long as you want confessions of guilt from innocent people. The Inquisition realized massive success from torture, even from prisoners who knew they would be killed horribly if they confessed. People will turn others in, even knowing they are innocent, and accelerate the end of their own lives, just to end the torture. Once again, a waste of time.

Teaching a group a lesson, now that one can be made to work, but only for a time. Hatred of the perpetrator inevitably spreads and leads to a lethal uprising.

So what’s the good of it? Is torture like war, good for absolutely nuthin’? Nay! Far from it!

First off you’ve got the genre of movies referred to as “torture porn” – the Saw series for example. Sure, it’s all make believe, but it’s realistic make believe and audiences that include soccer moms, your kid’s Grade 3 teacher, and one particularly hot woman who occasionally presents the news on Canada AM eat that shit up. In literature we have the Marquis de Sade and, even better, the incomparable Anne Rice with her Beauty series and Exit to Eden; literature as real as your imagination can make it. This type of material represents big money, but there is still a demand for the real thing.

A lot of sick, reprehensible films exist in the world driven by the lunatic fringe who crave such things as snuff movies and films featuring people having things done to them that they clearly want nothing to do with, all catering to a market that screams for decapitation. This is not what I’m talking about.

The most successful franchise in torture entertainment these days is Peter Acworth’s Kink.com. As it turns out, all you need is people who look good naked, are prepared to be filmed having painful, humiliating things done to them for real, and both begin and end each of your films with an interview of all the actors together so it’s clear nobody was coerced, and that no matter how much the one(s) being tortured might have screamed, everybody had fun and there are no hard feelings. Well, some hard feelings … oh never mind. You get my point. This is not judgement. It’s reportage.

Kink.com brings us such attention getting titles as Ultimate Surrender, a female wrestling competition in which the winner gets the loser – literally, Device Bondage – like a hardware store gone berserk, Divine Bitches – a world with women always on top, and Men in Pain that kind of speaks for itself. The company’s mission statement says “We demystefy and celebrate alternative sexualities by providing the most ethical and authentic kinky adult entertainment.”

Should you be worried about just how much business these websites are doing? Only if you insist on believing that on one side there are perverted deviants, and on the other side there’s you. Truth be known, little has changed between these days of 21st century enlightenment and back when people enjoyed blood sports in the arena 2000 years ago, or folks in more recent times turned out with the kids and a picnic lunch to watch bear baiting, a hanging, or a public flogging.