necroporn, necro-porn, necro porn, cable tv, movies, reality tv, morgue, sex, freeze-frame, frame-grabber

The comments below do not focus at all on web necro-porn, of which there is much. Although we love to say we aren't in favor of censorship, we are in favor of women refusing to play dead. And they should. In photos, in videos, in films. Playing dead for money is aiding and abetting sick fantasies.

Assuming that the women in all the web pictures are "actresses" with no feminist consciousness at all, and not physically as well as psychologically dead, we have to ask why any woman would become a co-conspirator in creating violent anti-female fantasies for disturbed women-hating men. Fantasies of mangling the body that should be attractive to him. Unending echoes of American Psycho.

Indeed, as if often the case with web necro-porn, why would any women consent to play at being either the slashed or the slasher? Wouldn't she wonder who she was being employed by--and what deeper fantasies might find her too, finally, once she has consented to become part of those fantasies, even briefly.

Depicting a women--alone--torturing and killing or sacrificing another woman is a gateway appeal that psychologically softens the attractiveness of such violent acts for men (and boys) who are still in a transitional stage, moving from uncomfortable antagonism and fear to viciousness and cruelty.

If feminists hope to make any ultimate gains at all for anyone other than lesbians, they must take this issue head on, so to speak.

Why so little fuss about this, feminists? Necro-porn. The increased sexualizing of dead women. And no, I'm not going to name all the shows I'm referring to. I'll mention just two movies, one supposedly high-brow and the other a grade B thriller: EYES WIDE SHUT and POSTMORTEM. Any of several reality shows on HBO, such as AUTOPSY, and those crime investigation shows on information channels. These are not purest examples of necroporn (which I won't show) but they point the general direction. I'm not mentioning the many others to avoid promoting them.

Forget the fictional pretense (killer catching) in each show that 'justifies including these necroporn moments. Focus on the body scene itself and the uses it can be put to by those with non-traditional, morbid sex-violence interests.

We could also be talking about any number of rental videos, but they don't make it into the home as readily as cable does.

More and more in cable movies and reality shows we are shown the dead, sometimes battered body, of an attractive woman. The object of attention to the men in the scene, and ours too.

In a movie after movie, to the point of cliche, she is a corpse at the crime scene or on the morgue table, naked. She is particularly good looking, and if alive, has an attractive body. Of course the scene's implicit point is that dead she is still attractive. No, she can be sexually stimulating. Often she has an overtly sexualized body, with implants, etc.

(After all, we viewers know she is really just pretending to be dead). Or, at least, most of us in the audience think that way. Others want to think of her as dead, or at least totally immobilized by drink, drug, whatever. But mostly, dead. Hence, necro-porn.

Sometimes her body is in pristine condition (but dead). At other times, bruised, battered, maimed (and dead). She is beyond the pain that brought her there, but not beyond being further abused.

Because she is on a morgue table (we are lead to believe) her naked body must be looked at by the various men in the room (detectives, of course, with worthy reasons for being there to look--and providing us an excuse to be there too).

Unlike scenes of the killer's attack and torture so prevalent on cable, the dead woman's body is all that left of the process. There is no action now. The killer is present only implicitly, through his handiwork. Because he is not in the scene, not in any of the shots, either in movies or reality shows, anyone can fantasize his own way into each shot.

The most totally unnecessary shot is always the one from above, looking down upon the naked immobilized body, stretched full length and ready to be acted upon. But no-one else is in the shot. It is extraordinarily open to anyone's fantasy.

Very little is different in reality shows, which are supposedly about crimes and criminals but which increasingly provide fleeting or extended images of real women's bodies at crime scenes or on the table, or out of the files.

These women are not pretending. Their lives have been viciously ended--and their bodies show it. That careless sprawl of the dumped body. The half flexed hand. The loosely angle foot. The bruised neck But these views are fleeting. Over almost before you can see them.

True--if you're not videotaping the show. We all know that vcr's can do freeze-frames and that those freeze-frames can be copied over--for extended viewing--onto another videotape. And now frame-grabbed onto computers, even uploaded to the Web.

Stumbling over these images in a show, and considering the nature and quality of the show as a whole, I sometimes suspect that most of the show has been assembled as a mere pretext, a cover, a glossy package to shelter the main attraction, those savagely exposed moments.

Who is the real audience for these moments?

Have the producers of these images accidentally--or intentionally--provided such high-quality necro-porn images to feed the fantasies of that...let's say, specialized... audience? An audience spread across the U.S., perhaps the world. An audience, not unlike pedophiles, who would have had an extraordinarily difficult time acquiring and consuming such explicitly literal images during any but the most recent part of the 20th century.

Cable offers gateway images that ultimately lead to the darkest male fantasies on the web, which can only carry more and more women--young and old--into that darkness.