Originally Posted by Joe Obenberger

This thread title states a provocative message about whether the riot pictures appeal to the same kind of instincts that attract people to porn - and whether people hunger for depictions of violence in the same or maybe a related way. The idea's been around for awhile. Some time during the mid to late 60's, Playboy ran an article with the word "Gut Smut" in the title, maybe 1968 or so. It was mainly about a profusion of articles in the popular press at that time that recounted grisly details about injuries and surgeries, and maybe accompanying images. If I remember this article and its thesis from my junior high years - even then, once and awhile I got away from the pictures and read some of the articles - I think it set out the idea that porn was just a subset of a general human interest in extreme and intense images and that we have a force within us that always steers us toward the shocking/brutal/dramatic/unusual, that generally, most people (or men anyway, it's hard to remember after the many years) actually crave these things. He may have called it a bloodlust. If I remember, the author thought that people really watch football at least on some level waiting for someone to get hurt badly, that expressway traffic always slows down to cause "gaper's block" just because there might be some blood and guts to be seen, that videos/pictures of executions, murders, torture and death will always find an eager audience - and that pre-Internet author, if I remember, thought that attraction to hardcore porn was brain-wired into us through the same mental "circuits" that control how we behave and attract us to shocking and violent images in general.