WW: So, how did you come to think of this project?

MST: It was in the course of the discussions we have been having recently online about men’s natures, their propensity to be creative torturers and death-dealers. The search terms were used as merely one example of men’s depravity and specifically how creative they can be with their subject matter, things women would probably never even be able to imagine because we are not creative when it comes to violence and this is true historically across time and place. When women are violent it is out of necessity, but with men it’s like an art form. So that’s where the idea came from, I knew there were plenty on my own blog and that other female bloggers likely had a treasure trove of the same shit on their blogs too. So I got started on my own and asked for contributions. That’s how it started.

WW: That’s interesting you say that it’s to show that men are creative about their depravity, and not to “just” show they are depraved, because that we already know.

MST: Yes that was what was striking about it to me. I have known for a long time that there is no way for women to know all the details of what men do because they are always outdoing themselves and things are getting worse. As feminists and activists we want to know the truth, and so in the beginning I exposed myself to a lot of these “truths” about men, especially what Dworkin had to say about them and about porn, and the ways men torture women. But I soon realized that the details were traumatizing me and there was simply no end to them, and that’s when I realized there’s no end to the details because this is a creative pursuit for them and also an industry, where they make gains and leaps of thought like in other industries. So I started to think about the details. Specifically, how useful it was for me or for anyone to try to know them all, when this is impossible. And what it meant that men were so creative in this area of torture and violence. It’s not just that they are violent, the violence has elements to it that are interesting and thought provoking – in a bad way obviously.

WW: I guess doing the same violence again and again would bore them. In order to maintain levels of arousal, they have to seek new forms of violence. We see this in pornography, where pornographers constantly find new ways of humiliating and torturing the female victims so men will continue to buy it. And it’s based on an escalation of violence too.

MST: Yes which makes you think there’s more to it than just violence for its own sake, or for survival or something like that where it could be the same thing again and again and still serve its purpose. Obviously this is different. There are some common themes though, and this is what was revealed when I had amassed a lot of search term data to review. Like the search terms were creative in the details, but when you blow it up and look at the bigger picture, they don’t stray from certain themes even as they are being creative within those themes. So we ended up with I think 18 categories of search terms, and even though we ended up with almost 1000 different search terms, they all fit pretty comfortably within those 18 categories. You can see the 18 categories on the blog. And now that we are done, I can report that the 18 can probably be narrowed down even further, maybe even to one. The one overarching theme is necrophilia.

WW: It’s interesting that you don’t usually find such evidence of what men think when we’re not looking or when they’re not pretending or modifying their behavior to make themselves somewhat presentable. Now that men can look for porn privately on the internet, their search terms on our blogs are in fact one of the few areas where we get a direct insight into this. And desires formulated by themselves, in their words. Given that their search terms must represent a large proportion of all internet search terms, it is definitely easy to assume that porn/ necrophilia is what men use the internet for.

MST: Yes that does seem to be the case. The one downside to this “private” internet browsing where we see what men really think is that it is “private” and we don’t know for sure it’s really men doing it. But the thing is that even though we can’t probably “prove” it, we know it’s true. There is so little chance that women are looking for these things online, especially for pictures and videos of abuse which women especially find abhorrent and triggering. So this project will be of limited usefulness to everyone except to radical feminists. Because everyone else is so interested in male standards of proof and in making excuses for men, giving men the benefit of the doubt, and strictly adhering to “equality” principles so much that they are actually claiming that women are the same as and certainly no BETTER than men in this specific area: the area of sexual and reproductive abuse. But that’s ridiculous, obviously. In other words, critics will say that there’s no way to prove that “men’s search terms” is what it says it is, and they are right about that. Even though we all know it, we aren’t supposed to say it. And that’s what we are doing on this blog.

WW: Did many bloggers participate in this project to submit their search terms? How have women responded to it?

MST: I would say that about 10 bloggers contributed to this project but I didn’t count. There were a few more who contributed but the bloggers were unknown to me and I wasn’t able to verify whether they were known and trusted in the community so I didn’t use their contributions unfortunately. The project was open to “known radfem bloggers” only and that was to avoid the project being sabotaged. But in general the response was positive and female bloggers thought it was a great project and were happy to contribute. The feedback I received was that the collection was enlightening and eye-opening about men and what they think about, even though it was porny and triggering. And women thought it was a good idea for our own sanity that the project was confined to a one-month submissions period and then archived.

WW: Yes and as you said, the details are unlimited so showing a fraction of it is enough to get the point I guess. Once you understand the pattern in other words.

MST: Yes I think so. There’s really no point in continuing this particular project after a certain point. And frankly that’s one reason I decided to go ahead and do it, because I have learned not to start these never-ending writing/criticism projects in general. They just don’t work beyond a certain point, there is no more to be gained, and yet there are still risks in doing the work and exposing yourself to this gross material. I think it was very enlightening to see that all or nearly all of these search terms, as creative as they were, and while also falling into more specific categories (like bestiality, pedophilia and rape) also fit pretty comfortably within the larger context of necrophilia. I think the number of search terms was perfect for that, and in fact I still have a couple pages of search terms to go through but I don’t think I’m going to bother. So to clarify what I said above, we easily have 1000 unique search terms, but I stopped posting at about 675 I think. There was just no more point.

WW: What were the search terms that struck you most? Those that stayed with me were those where men were looking for a pill that would get women want to be raped (“fucked” or “have sex” in their terms). I thought [that] was really representative of what everything men do to women: so women “want” to have PIV or appear to want to or forced in a situation where we can’t refuse it.

MST: Oh god. Let me think on that a second. There were some that stuck with me while I was posting them, but then the next batch I did I had something else that stuck. The one that was “women’s breasts ripped off videos” was striking to me for obvious reasons. It was so horrible and so violent of course, and obviously targeted women’s sexual/reproductive function (the breasts) and this has been done to women by men for a long time. Women’s breasts were mutilated, removed and yes “torn off” during the witch trials for example, and this is done in war. But the very fact that someone wanted to see a video of it made it obvious to me that this was a man, and that he was looking for porn.

WW: I didn’t know that about the torn breasts.

MST: This was not legitimate research, such as for medical or statistical purposes for example and there is no way you can even argue it “might be” with a straight face. And it’s definitely nothing a woman would ever want to see. So that one really encapsulated the entire project for me, where the point was to expose what men were really thinking about and what they wanted to see other men doing in real life. That there is a relationship between groups of men, where men who are looking for this stuff are relying on and hoping that other men are really doing this stuff in real life so others can jerk off to it. There are no “good guys” in other words, they all depend on the ones who are really doing it, and the ones who aren’t really doing it wish they were or wish they could, or something is stopping them from doing what they really want to do to women and children.

WW: Well, most of men’s researches are highly warped and distorted to fit their lies.

MST: Speaking of twisting research to fit lies, I also noticed that some of the search terms included “drawings of” or “simulated” which made me think that whoever was doing these searches was trying to minimize his culpability for whatever was returned in the search and for what he ended up downloading and viewing. So if he searched “drawings of” XYZ and the search returned actual XYZ and he looked at it, he could say that he didn’t really mean to see it happening in real life, he just wanted a fantasy of it. This made me think that they might’ve gotten legal advice actually, or that there was a real reason that they were doing this that would get them off the hook somehow.

WW: I hadn’t thought of that.

MST: Well it’s nothing that I could prove of course, but it’s just a feeling and a suspicion I had like, what would be the point of including those terms? Would it really narrow the result? Would it really exclude certain things? Certainly they did it for a reason, so what’s the reason?

WW: I’d also guess that they want to keep the illusion to themselves that they’re not like those very bad guys.

MST: That is possible.

WW: Another reason is that in drawings you can actually get the victim to do what you want and look like you want

MST: Or if their wives and girlfriends found out he could say he was just curious and wanted to see drawings of it.

WW: And in drawings you can create surreal situations that men find arousing too.

MST: Yes that’s true about drawings in general. And he could go to therapy or something for having weird “curiosities” or even be completely forgiven for having a perverted taste in art or something which is so common it hurts. But I have to wonder, for example, with the case of child pornography. In the US, “actual” child porn is illegal but simulated child porn isn’t. So there is a specific relevance there to asking to see one over the other.

WW: Yes that’s true.

MST: But in the case of an internet search, you don’t only get what you ask for, you see. You get other things too. Anyway my spidey sense was flipping out over that one.

WW: Yes that’s a very good point. There’s another thing that this project makes me think about, on blogging as a female. When we comment on other radfem’s blogs, we usually get a safe, male free and troll free space, where the blogger has done all the modding before. How does it feel to have to deal with reading such horrible search terms and trolling comments on your blog?

MST: Honestly every time I read one it’s like an assault on my senses and on my space. The comments more so than the search terms I guess, since the search terms are compiled in long lists that I only review infrequently and the comments come in one at a time and so the impact is more immediate and stronger. But you don’t have to think about it very long to realize these fucking pervs were on my blog for at least the split second it took them to realize I wasn’t offering what they were looking for and they left. And when I say pervs I mean the worst of the worst. Rapists, sexual torturers, perhaps murderers, and men who want to see other men doing those things to real women and children in real life. It’s pretty gross. And just in case any women got there by doing legitimate research, or in any other way, I always have radfem resources for them to click on. But its true that women reading and commenting on my blog wouldn’t necessarily know what I had to go through to keep the space male free, or what goes on behind the scenes at all on any of these projects. If they don’t know or even suspect anything, then I guess I’m doing my job – until I tell them as part of my job. Which is what I did here.

WW: I’m sure the other bloggers must have been happy to have this outlet too.

MST: I hope so! Other bloggers are the only ones who know what this is like. And I appreciate them and I appreciate that they know, and that someone knows. And I like that we were able to use this material in a constructive way. There was certainly plenty of it, and it was just sitting there stinking the place up. And I’m glad it’s over now.

***

MST: I would just like to talk about the larger context of necrophilia for a moment so it’s clear.

WW: Yes.

MST: There was a category “necrophilia” that was used for things that were obvious references to necrophilia like fucking corpses, fatal accidents, and that kind of thing. And we also used it for disembodied body parts, which is necrophilic because a body cannot be separated from its parts, this is incompatible with life. So anything about feet, asses, pussies, that kind of thing, especially if it didn’t fit neatly into another category (like rape or torture for example) was put into the necro category because they clearly belonged there and I think that was the dysfunction (malefunction) behind searches for disembodied parts. But then when we got into the hundreds of search terms, and using the 18 categories it became clear that necrophilia was actually the larger context too. So what men know as “necrophilia” which is essentially fucking corpses is really only a subset of men’s general necrophilia which they act out in many ways, including but not limited to fucking corpses.

WW: Objectification for instance is a way of turning living women into corpses. Men always talk about women as “bodies”, not persons, human women.

MST: Yes about the use of the term “bodies” I hadn’t thought of that before! For example, autogynephilia is necrophilic because men are “putting on” women like a second skin. They often use latex masks and even full body suits that are “woman” to them, but skinning women and putting on their skin, or fantasizing about doing that is obviously necrophilic. So anything that was incompatible with life, or which obviously or even indirectly references death, can be seen to be necrophilic. And this includes violence and extreme violence, which is not compatible with life. So genocide, torture, rape (which were all smaller categories) all fit into necrophilia as well.

WW: Men are death-animated.

MST: Well I don’t think I ever quite realized it before, but there is something to this. Men’s context is a necrophilic context. And frankly even vanilla-PIV is necrophilic the way men do it because they are killing women and killing the entire world with unwanted and ambivalent pregnancies, and all of this is via the dick and what men call “sex”. So anything pornographic or related to “sex” at all is necrophilic too. As a category this was only helpful to this project in the very limited sense of “fucking corpses” because in the end, if we had categorized everything as necrophilic that was indeed necrophilic, everything would’ve been, so that’s something that can be analyzed and addressed at the end. Which is what we are doing here.

WW: I always thought death and rape and men’s general behavior was death-related. Death and life dismemberment is the logical outcome of their actions.

MST: Yes it certainly is. If you knew that early in life, you were ahead of me and most people I suspect. This is so well hidden, it’s hidden in plain sight. And it doesn’t help and is thought-terminating that they do have a word “necrophilia” and they do use it, but as usual their meaning is not the real or complete meaning as applied to themselves or to the reality they have created.

WW: And they themselves constantly paint themselves and raping as death-making. Their guns are metaphors for their penises, or swords as metaphors for their penises. They know their penises bring death for instance.

MST: Yes, they reference that all the time. This is my weapon, this is my gun. But we aren’t allowed to notice this, or say it. Its pretty obvious really, which is why it’s just not necessary or wise in my opinion to keep saying the same thing over and over in the same way, we need to do something with the information we have now. Information that has been gained by women observing these things and analyzing them. We know now, so whats our excuse for continuing to show the same thing over and over, instead of doing something with the information? With what we know about men and what they are, and what they do to girls and women around the world and they always have: it’s really the sum of what was gained by this project.

End.

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