by cmsellers » Tue Jun 16, 2015 9:59 pm
So, on my walk, I had an epiphany about why I found the existence of "hurtcore" so shocking.
I think the last time I had this visceral of a reaction towards descriptions of sexual violence when I was a teenager and tried to read 100 Days of Sodom, because I figured it was only shocking by 19th-century Catholic standards. Boy was I wrong; I think I only managed to get like 1/4 of the way through, and even then I was literally nauseous. But I figured that, "hey it's only the ramblings of a demented French nobleman." Recently, I started watching Game of Thrones with Ramsay Bolton and that guy Arya killed in the latest episode, but come on, that's obviously fiction.
I've read plenty of descriptions of horrifying sexual violence in parts of Africa, but I chalked that up to "hey, they're brutal warlords, they're literally evil incarnate; yes it's utterly fucking horrible, but it only happens in extreme circumstances." I read the article about being a sex-slave in modern America, and I've read stories about parents abusing their own children, but I chalked these up to these being isolated cases of the most terrible, evil, demented people in society, cases that make the news precisely because they're so rare.
Realizing that "hurtcore" is a thing was like realizing that 100 Days of Sodom and the sexual sadists of Game of Thrones are closer to "based on a true story" than anything that uses that phrase. Realizing that there's a fucking community of people who gave this sort of thing a fucking name and built a fucking wiki about it means that it's not limited the worst sociopaths in anarchic societies and a tiny handful of serial-killer-type freaks in ours.
So though I was still feeling shocked and slightly nauseous, I went and finished the article. Even going in with my revised expectations, the remainder of the article still managed to shock me again and again. I'd swear some more, but I don't think there's any profanities in any language which can do my feelings justice.
I mean, for one thing, look at those numbers. 60% of these people enjoy "hurtcore" to some degree, and many of the remainder treat it as a "live and let live" kind of thing. And look at the raw numbers of people on that poll. I've never seen a forum on the regular Internet with that many people answering questions. And 80% of people on Tor are using it to share their love of molesting children? I'd always thought that Tor was mostly used to commit piracy. And considering how big piracy is, the number of people who are using it for that must be huge.
For another thing, I always thought that child molesters were either powerful and charismatic men asserting their power, men like Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Jimmy Saville, pathetic worm-like creatures, often with severe mental retardation, or money-grubbing "pornographers" in countries with lax laws. Instead, I discover that most child molesters are better at internet security than I am, that incestuous rape is insanely common, and that there's a whole subculture of these people. Not the pedophile-support communities (which I already knew about), but actual communities of child molesters.
In short: wow.
Again, I don't think that the English language has the profanities to express how I feel. So suffice to say that in the future, I will try not to use "shocked and appalled" to describe anything as trivial as political corruption or sleazy marketing tactics. Because really, "shocked and appalled" seems like the only phrase that can adequately describe my feelings.