Death+and+Porn

 Overview
If the subject matter of this wiki post sparked your interest, welcome to the club.

There are a number of behaviors and interests that up until the advent of the internet would have been considered deviant and morally reprehensible, reserved, in our social consciousness/conscience for sociopaths and dirty old men in dingy x-rated shops. But with the accessibility and popularity of everything from pornography to terrorist tapes of beheadings and pictures of dead celebrities, it seems harder today to judge these things so harshly--the fact is that whether it is a case of culture or "human nature," people are fascinated by these things, and the internet has forced us to shake off any remnants of Puritanical pretense and acknowledge that fact. A [|reported] 70% of men between the ages of 18 and 24 visit porn sites in a typical month, the average age when people encounter their first porn site is 11, and 25% of all internet search terms are pornography related. In a tiny blip on our cultural timeline, the advent of the internet, viewing pornography went from being a highly stigmatized, deviant activity to being mainstream. My sense is that this cultural shift, and the accompanying renegotiation of moral standards, has already been internalized by our generation--I think there may even now be a stigma against someone our age, especially male, who //hasn't// seen internet porn. This particular cultural shift, though, may not come as any surprise to anyone who's not stuck in the 1950's--people like sex and, given the ever-present availability and anonymity of internet pornography, it seems relatively natural. So perhaps its more interesting to shed some light on some of our darker impulses--violent videos and images abound online, videos of actual death and pictures of mutilated bodies--and while statistics on just how many people viewe morbid videos and images are hard to come by, I don't think anyone will disagree if I say that enough of our peers have seen and talked about these types of videos/images that most of us are at least well aware of their existence. There were a series of terrorist tapes of the beheadings of U.S. citizens that were popular for a while, and pictures of dead or dieing celebrities are uploaded regularly, among many other more disturbing images. What in previous generations probably would have been imagined as the demented entertainment of potential serial killers became something that guys in my high school watched and talked about for shock value. Because the internet made it available, we now know that this has either always been a latent desire of some people, or at least it is in our culture. Certainly this phenomenon has not become as popular or as porn in today's society, and thus we have probably not fully undergone a shift of values that accompanies a massive change in behavior like we have with porn. I know personally that I still avoid disturbingly violent images or videos, and that I have passed judgment on people who have seemed giddy at having seen the latest beheading video. And yet, though I've tried to avoid it, I've seen a guy with his limbs torn off by a polar bear because a friend came across it and quickly showed it to me. Another friend of mine was on Facebook the other day looking at photos in a group about Planned Parenthood and out of the blue came a series of pictures that someone had posted (for random shock value, or for some poitical point that is lost on me) of mutilated body parts and people with their heads blown off. So the point is that whether you want to see this stuff or not, you probably will. According to a [|CBS study] in 2007, of the 42% of kids ages 10-17 who reported seeing porn in the past year, 66% of them claim it was unwanted--pop-ups, spam e-mail, etc...or unwanted images of the erotic or morbid variety can be shown to you by a friend, as in my case with the polar bear pictures, with little warning or as a trick. To give an example that has both the erotic and disturbing elements--recall, if you haven't repressed it too deeply, the 2girls1cup epidemic three years ago. If you somehow managed to avoid this shock site meme, rejoice and give thanks, and don't go look it up. Trust me. But for those of us who were exposed to it, and for everyone who has been exposed to something like it, we are well aware that we have been exposed to intense material that in previous generations, even as recently as twenty years ago, only a small minority, if anyone would have been exposed to. And our culture and moral standards surely have, and will continue to change from it.

**History**
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**Opinion**
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**Future Trends?**
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