This post contains some fucked up shit. Please be warned and think carefully about whether you want to read it.

Everyone knows I went to peep some of the shit on Kink.com as a part of the research I did for my BDSM posts. I don’t make the claim that what goes on on their sites is representative of what goes on in the typical real-life BDSM relationship (I mean, fuck, how many people can afford to buy all that shit?), and I’m not really planning to discuss that website in relation to the wide world of BDSM, but I feel it necessary to discuss what I saw on that site.

I’m not easily thrown into a state of despair about the world unless I’ve been watching A Double Shot at Love or Bad Girls Club for over three hours (posts to come), but send me a story about human trafficking, about the abuse that women in war zones suffer, about the rampant torture of children by rape tourists in Southeast Asia, or about a submissive woman’s “journey” (brainwashing) and I’m likely to have to go lie down and think about moving to Mars for a few hours. And, of course, looking at images of women being tortured had the same effect, differing only in that it has yet to abate and it’s been over a month.

For those of you lucky enough to have never seen anything those piles of shit at Kink.com have put out, I’ll just characterize it as torture mixed with the most degrading sex acts possible. The variety of cruel and bizarre devices, contraptions, machines, and objects that the producers have accumulated for use on the women featured on the site is terrifyingly mind-boggling, and the entire vibe more closely approximates the contents of a nightmare than anything I’ve ever seen while awake: the logos for the site are designed to look like titles for a horror movie; the page backgrounds are dominated by black, gray, and brown to the extent that they remind one of that stupid Tool video; and the videos are nearly all taped in the site’s building at the Armory, a pretty dungeonesque joint by the looks of it. The text describing each of the sites is fucking petrifying. An example from the Device Bondage site:

Device Bondage is a BDSM sex Website with the best porn around. Our naked women in BDSM play are whipped, tied up, chained, fucked, and humiliated. Amazing things that happen on our site include kinky sex with tit torture, steel bondage, hard nipples, nipple clamps, rope bondage, girls being caned, torture sex [What in the FUCK is “torture sex”? ], girls being spanked, leather bondage, and other BDSM play. Girls are also pulled in and out of cages, their tongues clamped, their bodies pinned, and their arms and legs strapped. We also have contraptions used in countries such as China for torture. Our girls like to be tied up with leather belts and harnesses, spanked hard, punished, and humiliated. When the girls are done spreading wide for their bondage sex shoot, they have red asses, intense pleasure, and big smiles.

There’s footage and photos of naked women locked in cages too small for rabbits, of broken skin and blood, of women being waterboarded and subjected to other near-drowning tortures, of naked women being humiliated and tortured in public. Machines, metal, wood, electrodes, hooks, needles, hoods, and every other possible thing some sick motherfucker could come up with to use to torture a woman are in evidence on one or more of Kink.com’s sites.

Each of the galleries that the sites use to sell their videos features a shot or two of the woman’s face looking absolutely terror-stricken. And it’s those photos that bother me the most. I know why they’re there; the people who pay money to watch the shit on these sites need to see that the woman who they’re watching get tortured is hurting and is scared because she doesn’t know what is going to happen to her next.

The fact that the site owners always include a shot of the woman after the shoot looking happy doesn’t matter. The men who go to these sites aren’t there to revel in women’s pleasure, they’re there to see women tortured. They’re not watching public humiliation videos to fantasize about iconoclasm and bucking societal norms, they’re there to get boners thinking about degrading and humiliating human beings. These sites aren’t about “exploring our dark sides,” they’re about giving free reign to the sickest of human desires, desires that are inculcated by a sexually repressed and guilt-ridden society that has yet to figure out how to deal with the detritus of religious dogma and has thus intertwined fear and hatred with sex to create the misogynistic shit heap we now live in. This shit ain’t revolutionary, it’s so fucking obvious and stupid that I’d laugh if it didn’t look so much like RAPE. If exploring your “dark side” entails wanking to women being tortured, it might be best to leave it unexplored. Or kill yourself.

You know what I don’t want to do? Live in a world where people jerk off to women being subjected to “contraptions used in countries such as China for torture.” Know what else I don’t want to do? Listen to women (or men) tell me that the women who participate in the creation of these videos for these disgusting motherfuckers to jerk off to do so because the shit feels “amazing.” Nor do I want to hear how subversive the people who are into this shit are because they “explore the dark side.” First off, what person over the age of sixteen talks about “exploring the dark side”? Seriously. And why does “exploring the dark side” have to be such an unimaginative, tired, boring, intellectually insulting, misogynistic cliche?

But besides the ridiculous aspect of someone fancying themselves a revolutionary because they get boners from seeing women hurt or get orgasms from being hurt when we live in a society that encourages that shit like UFC encourages tribal tattoos, it’s pretty goddamned obscene. The way I see it, if you think you’re punk for getting off on reenacting the kinds of abuses that real women and children in this world suffer on a daily basis (and thus mocking their suffering), you can go fuck yourself.

Did I mention that Howard Stern is a fan of Kink.com? The end.