RANT: BDSM Films are "Torture-Based" Porn?

One of the most offensive things to me is when journalists — people who are paid to get messages right — get things wrong.
Like here, in the San Francisco News, where they describe fetish films with bondage and sado-masochism as being “torture-based” films.

Talk about an economic stimulus. California taxpayers have paid $46,791 so that employees of the San Francisco pornographer Kink.com might produce more perfect web-based depictions of motorized dildo impalements on www.fuckingmachines.com; do a better job displaying women as they’re bound, gagged, and repeatedly electrically shocked on www.wiredpussy.com; and more effectively transmit images of, well, people doing pretty much what you’d imagine they’d be doing on www.whippedass.com.

That’s right: California’s government has been subsidizing torture-based pornography.

I’m going to ignore all the content in the article about government funding and who’s right and what’s wrong, because the only thing that matters is clarity right now, and on that count, SF News, from a city who KNOWS about kink, calling a little sexual brutality TORTURE is way off the fucking mark.
Torture is what happens to you against your wishes.
AGAIN, let’s remind the whole world how the kink and BDSM community work: It’s consensual. People not only agree to be beaten, bound, gagged, and whatever else makes your little conservative cockles shrink in fear — they BEG for it, DESIRE it, and SCHEME to get it.
THAT is not torture.
Let’s remember that language exists to allow us to communicate. It’s there for us to put to words what springs from our minds. WORDS matter. Precision counts. Especially in a motherfucking newspaper.
When we denigrate someone’s sexual preferences as being a fondness for “torture”, you belittle actual incidences of torture in places like Abu Ghraib, China, and wherever else inhumanities occur.
Mary getting paddled while in leather restraints on film as she squeals and moans is hardly akin to high-value prisoners being water-boarded and deprived of basic human rights while off-the-record and on the hush-hush.
So let’s open our fucking dictionaries, editors & writers of the world, because what’s a blase and catchy little term for YOU is something that’s subjecting whole demographics to judgment and ridicule. Learn a little professionalism. It’s the least you can do.

7 thoughts on “RANT: BDSM Films are "Torture-Based" Porn?

  1. richfinck

    Reminds me of a girl I used to work with. She would tell me that its been so long since she had sex, she forgets how to get tied up. I would tell her I was a boy scout and knew alot of knots.

  2. TheGirlPie

    And you KNOW it’s only because ‘torture’ is otherwise a hot word right now, with the memos out, and all. It’s a scummy grab for the limelight, it’s crummy writing, and it’s slummy reporting.
    That SF paper uses “torture” like it uses “News” — shamefully~! Thanks for keeping them honest, (and cancel a subscription for me while you’re at it ~ )

  3. Michelle

    You have become my newest heroine for posting this, and for stating your disgust with the misuse of words better than I ever could. Bravo!
    (P.S. I just started reading your blog, and I’m already completely hooked.)

  4. TheGirlPie

    Commenter #4: As if they don’t?
    (Don’t be a douche bag. Please. At least not in public.)

  5. Tony Letts

    Well I clicked on one of those links and found photos of a poor girl being tortured so much that she was smiling, laughing, and seemingly orgasming all over the place – so that screws up my definition of torture!
    Tony Letts’s last blog post..THEY ARE DIFFERENT UP NORTH

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