I wrote the following as a response to Jethra Black’s blog post Let’s Talk Torture. BRAIN STORM TIME!!!!. She’s doing a documentary on the way horror films have changed in post-9/11 American culture and asked for feedback on the torture porn trend. However, my comment ended up being too long for the reply form and I also thought it would make a great article to post here.

First I should say that before reading this post, I hadn’t made a connection between the torture porn trend and 9/11 at all. As a feminist who has been following those trends for years, I just took the appearance of torture porn as another sign that the way society views women is on the downfall. Along with the torture porn trend over the past few years, there’s also been a huge trend of rape apologists, the invention of the term “gray rape”, access to safe abortion and birth control has increasingly become scarce and abstinence only education has stripped many young girls of any chance of having a healthy sexual relationship. So my views here on torture porn will be more related to feminism than 9/11.

I think there are a couple of reasons modern torture porn is labeled as it is. The first you mentioned, the mere fact that they don’t tend to have much in the way of story to go with them, they’re just torture for the sake of torture. The main plot of the movie seems to be “how much gore can we put on the screen for the next hour and a half?”. It seems to be less about making any kind of social commentary and more about seeing how far they can push the limits of fuckedupedness (best “word” I could think of for this case lol).

The second is that the violence and torture (especially when associated with women) are often times sexualized. Captivity is a good example of this. It seems all about punishing a beautiful and sexy woman for being beautiful and sexy. And I think many viewers do actually get off on these movies where “women are put in their place”.

I should probably state here that I haven’t actually seen any of these films so I’m just going by the marketing for them. As a past victim of sexual violence, just the trailers for these movies are triggering due to the overly sexualized nature of them so there’s no way I could ever actually watch the movies. Whether the movies actually do this or not I don’t know, but the mere fact that they are marketed in a sensationalized, sexual way shows that it’s more about dehumanizing women than making a social statement.

And while you are correct that the real versions of these things are much more horrendous, I don’t think these films are totally harmless either. I think that these films are doing a lot to downplay sexual violence against women. It’s one more way for our patriarchal society to objectify women and turn them into nothing more than meat. I honestly don’t think these films do anything to open people’s eyes to the real life horrors of the world.

I think anyone who wants to use torture in a film as a social statement on real life torture and the psychology behind it has a fine line to toe. You have to show the horror of the situation without reveling in the violence and movies like hostel and captivity seem to be much more the later than the former.

I’m also going to post the letter Joss Whedon wrote to the MPAA about the marketing campaign for Captivity in case you find anything helpful in it.

From: Joss Whedon
Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2007 10:17 PM
To: Advertising
Subject: CAPTIVITY BILLBOARDS/REMOVE THE RATING

To the MPAA,
There’s a message I’m supposed to cut and paste but I imagine you’ve read it. So just let me say that the ad campaign for “Captivity” is not only a literal sign of the collapse of humanity, it’s an assault. I’ve watched plenty of horror - in fact I’ve made my share. But the advent of torture-porn and the total dehumanizing not just of women (though they always come first) but of all human beings has made horror a largely unpalatable genre. This ad campaign is part of something dangerous and repulsive, and that act of aggression has to be answered.

As a believer not only in the First Amendment but of the necessity of horror stories, I’ve always been against acts of censorship. I distrust anyone who wants to ban something ‘for the good of the public’. But this ad is part of a cycle of violence and misogyny that takes something away from the people who have to see it. It’s like being mugged (and I have been). These people flouted the basic rules of human decency. God knows the culture led them there, but we have to find our way back and we have to make them know that people will not stand for this. And the only language they speak is money. (A devastating piece in the New Yorker - not gonna do it.) So talk money. Remove the rating, and let them see how far over the edge they really are.

Thanks for reading this, if anyone did.
Sincerely, Joss Whedon.
Creator, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”