Stop absuing torture porn

With the arrival of the Hostel and Saw franchises, a new term came into use for describing films which seemingly had no artistic merit other than to show off as much pain and suffering as possible. What had previously been called "exploitation cinema" for several decades, was suddenly dubbed "torture porn", and apparently this bucket of term applied to any film which showed as much as a drop of blood. This "torture porn"-genre was hailed as a new low in cinematic history by soccer moms and other censorship crusaders, who proclaimed it to be a sign of society's decline into extreme decadence and depraved debauchery. Nobody seemed to remember that torture porn was not at all new term, and that it had already been used to describe something quite different for several decades.

Because real torture porn has very little in common with horror, thriller, gore or exploitation. Torture porn is porn ... where people are being tortured(!)

Mind-boggling, I know. But this is a very real genre, and the most infamous examples are probably the Erotic Perversion films which were traded on worn vhs-tapes in the early 90s, and the fact that they have since been released on dvd only speaks of their popularity. These are basically pornographic films, featuring various naked women who are tied up, cut, burned and beaten, before, during and after intercourse. The victims are not actors pretending to be tortured, and there are no special effects. This is torture porn.

The BDSM porn scene has come a long way since then, and people willingly submitting themselves to the most extreme forms of torture is not at all hard to find by simple google searches.

The Japanese porn market is also notoriously over the top, and the pseudo-snuff scene regularly feature extreme sexual violence, like girls getting their limbs sawed off while they are being raped. These films have no story, no build-up of suspense, no plot-twists, nor credits. It's simply torture porn.

The definition of pornography as per Merriam-webster's dictionary is: The depiction of erotic behavior intended to cause sexual excitement. And while there certainly doesn't have to be close-up images of penetration for something to cause arousal, the key word here is "intent". If not for this intent, then anything that causes arousal to anyone, could be labeled porn. This would mean that just about everything on any TV-channel, at any time, would be porn. Commercials, reality shows, documentaries, the news... You name it, it would all be porn. And as for what consists of torture, it is also a highly personal matter, but Webster defines it as: Something that causes agony or pain. This means anything from Celine Dion to running out of toilet paper is torture in my book.

Food & furniture

Now, I understand that this new use of “torture porn” has nothing to do with actual pornography, but rather it's a symbolic phrase which implies that the filmmakers and audience get off on violence. Similarly, the word "porn" has become common when describing any piece of visual art that is over the top, and googling for "food porn", "furniture porn", "photography porn" and so on, will all give ample results, of which very few will feature actual sex acts.

However, the very word porn is also loaded with negativity, and as the French mastermind Gaspar Noe (director of Irreversible) once said: "Pornography is a degrading term for something that happens naturally". So while films being labeled torture porn implies they feature an abundance of torture, it's also a linguistic tool used to censor violence, by dismissing it as lesser worth than other art.

And as the movie industry constantly strives to lure more money from children and tweens by stripping away graphic violence and gore from what used to be marketed as adult genres like action, thriller and horror movies; adult audiences are also becoming alienated, to the point where any adult oriented portrayal of violence on screen is effectively stamped as torture porn so as to be ridiculed and ignored. This means that deep and meaningful films like Cannibal Holocaust, Irreversible, Martyrs or A Serbian Film, where the filmmakers use violence as symbols to convey their message, are effectively censored from the masses by being labeled as torture porn.

Even in the current days of 50 Shades of Grey being shown in theaters all over the world, the term torture porn is still being used about films which feature blood and gore, rather than actual porn where people are tortured.

No pain, no gain

X-Men: First Class

In this reign of PG-13 brutality, where it's perfectly acceptable to show a coin being shot right through someone's skull, as long as the audience is sheltered from feeling the character's pain, we steadily become more and more estranged from the physical and psychological knowledge of pain.

In the words of Danny Boyle: "There used to be adult films, with adult themes, adult violence, adult sexuality. But we've lost that. (...) These were the things we wanted to see as kids, and we wanted our adult lives to be filled with it, but today, the term "adult films" means porn, which is just terrible. Pixar makes great movies, don't get me wrong, they are very sophisticated storytellers. But they are family friendly, and that's the danger. If you put Star Wars, Pixar, and these big action movies together, they have violence in them but not violence that hurts. It’s a kind of costless violence.”

So what's more dangerous: showing audiences that violence hurts, or teaching them that it doesn't? The answer should be obvious, so please stop abusing the term torture porn, and bring on the valuable violence.