Chloe is just finishing her shower. As she rubs the water off, she reaches up and stretches. She jerks her hand back. It feels like something bit her hand, or stung her. She looks up at the ceiling over the shower. There are no insects up there. She reaches up again, hesitantly. There is an air conditioning/heating duct in the ceiling over the shower, so the ceiling is low enough to touch. When she touches the vent, she gets that sting again. Hmm... What's going on here? She touches it again. It tingles. It's an electric shock. Apparently there is a short somewhere, and the vent has an electrical charge. Fortunately, the water is already off, otherwise Chloe would not be here to tell the tale. Fortunately, also, the charge on the vent is not at the full line voltage. If it were, just standing in a wet tub and touching the vent would probably be fatal. But she doesn't know that.
She reaches up and touches the vent again. She tries moving her feet closer to the drain. The shock gets stronger. When she stands farther away, it is weaker. She can adjust it by moving back and forth.
She has been torturing herself for years, mostly by burning herself, but also in other ways. She puts alligator clips on her nipples. Sometimes she heats them in a candle flame first. When she had a dorm room with steam heat, she would let her tits dangle over the heater, just barely touching it. One day she caught a wasp. She put it in the freezer for a few minutes, to knock it out, then took it out of the freezer and tied it to the web of a tennis racket. When it came back to life, she stung her tits with it. This turned out to be more trouble than it was worth, but she will try anything. Tit torture is her consuming passion.
Electric shocks are the final frontier. She dreams about being tied up and having shocks applied to her tits. Shocks are the ultimate torture, but she has no idea how to do it. She is clueless about electricity. She is afraid to use wires straight out of the electrical outlet. She knows it's dangerous, but how dangerous? She doesn't know, and doesn't even know how to find out.
Now, in the shower, she has shocked herself, and she is still alive. She has crossed a threshold. She knows it is possible to shock herself and not die, because she just did it. (She doesn't know how lucky she was. If she had touched the vent with the shower still on, that would be another story.)
A thought forms in her evil mind.
She has some speaker wire left over from when she was setting up her stereo. She puts alligator clips on the ends of the wires. Two wires, four ends, four clips. She gets an old rag about three feet long and puts it in the tub, running from the drain to where she was standing. She clips one of the wires to the rag, and the other to the vent overhead. The other ends of the wires run into the bedroom. She holds the clips in her hands. She feels nothing. Something's not working. Of course, silly, the rag is dry. She goes back to the bathroom and gets the rag wet - not totally wet, just damp - and puts it back where it was. Still nothing. She tries putting the clip closer to the drain. Still nothing. Maybe if her hands were wet? She wets her fingers, then holds the clips. Aha! The same shock she felt in the shower. You have to get this just right to make it work.
She tries moving the clip to different positions on the rag. Just as before, the closer it is to the drain, the stronger the shock. And she is still alive, even though she is getting a pretty hard shock when the clip is close to the drain. But what if she puts the clips on her nipples? Is that more dangerous than holding them in her hands? Maybe, but there is no stopping her. She is not going to get this close and chicken out.
She goes to the bedroom and lies down. She puts a pillow under her back so her chest is thrust up. With her heart pounding so hard it feels like she is about to explode, she takes a deep breath and touches the clips to her nipples.
She doesn't feel a shock. It's just like when she first held the clips in her hands. Skin resists electricity. She licks her fingers and rubs her nipples to wet them. Then she touches herself again with the clips.
She almost faints.
The feeling is indescribable, and yet somehow familiar. She has dreamed about this. She touches herself again and again. She puts the electrodes aside and rubs her tits. Then she continues. She imagines being tied to the bed, with someone pressing the electrodes onto her nipples.
So far she has just touched herself, not clipped them on. She tries clipping them on to her tits, below the nipples, at the edge of the areolas. The shock bites into her. She rubs her nipples. Her body is quivering. She takes the electrodes off and clips them onto her nipples. She reaches back and holds the headboard, as if she is tied. The quivering becomes a full-on orgasm. The shock is getting stronger the longer she leaves the electrodes on. She barely has enough strength and presence of mind to take them off before it's too late. She lies there for a long time, with explosions going off in her head.
Electrodes on nipples is the most amazing concept in the universe.
It is the only thing as absolute as crucifixion.
Crucifixion is like waterboarding, in the sense that you can't breathe, but it's a lot worse. Birds fly up and land on your face, and peck your eyes. Boys throw rocks at you. There are flies and other insects. The thirst drives you crazy. But the worst thing is the struggle for breath. As long as you just hang loosely, your lungs can't fill with air. You have to pull yourself up every time you take a breath, and after a while your strength gives out.
I read an article by a man in San Francisco who experiments with extreme pain and extreme situations. He had somebody tie him to a cross, as if he were crucified. His first thought was, "How can anybody possibly deal with this?"
His second thought was, "You are not supposed to deal with it. You are supposed to
die from it."
It was not the crucifixion per se that had such powerful resonance. Thousands of men (and women?) were crucified all the time in those days. What gave it such power was the fact that the man who least deserved it died such a death. The crucifixion sealed everything because it was the most extreme possible event. It was the most unjust possible event. Sacrificing a lamb, an entirely innocent and harmless animal, to make up for the sins of the human community, is unjust enough. Putting an innocent man in place of the lamb, and executing him with a harrowing death usually reserved for the worst lowlifes, was unjust on another level.
So what about torturing breasts? Here again we have something entirely innocent and harmless being destroyed. The fountain of life itself being tortured. An infinitely tender, infinitely suffering thing, as Eliot said. This has the same magical force as crucifixion.
Even more.
One of the ignorant clichés people keep repeating mindlessly is "never use electricity above the waist." To take a recent example, here is what a self-styled expert on tit torture says:
"I would hope that we've covered the extreme risk that you're dealing with if you use anything remotely resembling household current. Many BDSM clubs won't even allow electrical play of any kind above the waist, battery or no. Make sure you know what you're doing. Make sure you use a low voltage, low amperage device, and make sure that both your wires stay on one breast or the other. I repeat, NEVER do anything that allows current to travel from one side of the chest to the other. NEVER, NEVER EVER! Get it?!"
I D I O T !!!
This is nonsense. There is no insulator separating the upper body from the lower body. Your body is full of salt water, and no part is insulated from any other part. Once electricity gets into your body, it can go anywhere. Electrodes on your nipples are no more dangerous than electrodes on your fingers or toes or anywhere else. No, doing one breast at a time doesn't make any difference. Putting two electrodes on the left breast is exactly as dangerous as putting one electrode on each breast.
In The McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, second edition, in the article on Grounding, there is a discussion of this point. The article says that there is very little difference between hand-to-hand shocks and foot-to-foot shocks. As long as electricity is flowing through the body, it's equally dangerous, regardless of the contact points. The same principle would apply to nipple-to-nipple shocks, but for some reason (I can't imagine why) the encyclopedia doesn't mention that possibility.
So how dangerous is it?
Let's apply a little common sense to this subject. Electrical torture is used routinely in hundreds of police stations all over the world. It happens to thousands of prisoners, all the time. When the cops are torturing a woman, you can bet they don't follow any rules about staying below the waist. Breasts are perfect for torture. Nor do they follow any rules about only doing one breast at a time. The prisoners don't die, even though the cops use much higher voltage than anybody would use in an S/M scene. In all the reports I have read (Amnesty International, etc.) I have never seen any reference to prisoners dying from shocks. One of the "benefits" of electricity, from the cops' point of view, is that it's relatively harmless. They can torture prisoners for a long time - hours, days, or even weeks - without killing them.
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I don't want to overstate my case, so let's apply a little common sense in the other direction. Obviously, electricity is dangerous. If you already have an irregular heart rhythm, even a small shock could kill you. If you are standing on a wet floor, or a concrete floor, it will probably kill you. That could happen regardless of where the electrodes are attached - one breast, both breasts, genitals, fingers, toes, whatever.
As I noted above, Chloe was taking her life into her hands, and she was a very lucky girl. On the other hand, I have to point out that the Chloe story is just barely fiction. The name is disguised, but the events are real, and it happened almost exactly as described, in an apartment in Austin, Texas. "Chloe" did survive. She not only survived the first experiment, she continued shocking herself, and still does. When she moved out of that apartment she had to stop for a year or two, but eventually she learned about transformers. She is one of those girls whose nipples are the center of their erotic universe. Nipple torture is the most intensely sexual feeling she has ever experienced - more intense than intercourse. She will always keep coming back to it.
As far as she is concerned, to have nipple orgasms is to live. Everything else is just waiting.
Some of the prisoners who are tortured with electricity probably die. When you torture hundreds of prisoners, with no limits, sooner or later somebody is going to have a heart attack. It may not happen very often, but I'm sure it happens. That's why some jails have doctors advising the cops on how far they can go. The point is, with most people you can go very far without killing them. The exception would be somebody who has a pre-existing heart problem.
The fact that you are tempting death is part of the excitement of it. I'm not into the "safe and sane" bullshit that you get in politically correct S/M scenes.
However, you aren't tempting death very much. (Unless you do it in the shower, or stand on a conducting surface, or plug yourself directly into a wall socket.)
When prisons execute prisoners by electrocution, the prisoner does not usually die instantly, even though he is in an electric chair that is designed to kill him. Killing somebody with electricity is not easy. It's a messy operation that usually takes some time.
I have been using electrodes on nipples - both nipples, with the current running across the chest - for many years. I have done it more than a thousand times. Nobody has died.
As long as we are on the practical, safety aspect of this subject, I should point something out for the benefit of beginners: you must use A/C current, not D/C. Let me repeat that for emphasis: D/C is not good for you. If you don't know the difference, you shouldn't be doing this. Of course you shouldn't be doing this anyway... but I assume people who read this page are going to do what they are going to do, like Chloe, and they need some advice. You have to use an adjustable transformer. Start with a low voltage and work your way up. And you have to understand that your skin resists electricity, but the resistance breaks down over time. A shock that you can barely feel at first will get stronger the longer you leave the electrodes in one place. That's why Chloe had to take the clips off after a minute or so.
I am adding these four paragraphs in 2011, about a decade after the preceding discussion was written.
After a while your pec muscles start having spasms. That is when you know it's getting close to your heart. This will not just happen in an instant. It won't catch you by surprise. You feel it coming. You have a few seconds to remove the electrodes or turn the switch off, assuming you control it yourself. If somebody else is in control of the electricity, it's up to him or her to back off before your heart seizes up. It takes experience to learn how far you can go. They lose a few prisoners while they are learning.
We probably lose a few, too, "we" being people who experiment with electrical torture in a private setting. I said above that I have been doing it for many years and nobody has died. This is true in my case, but it is not always true. Some people do electrocute (i.e. kill) themselves. The thing is, when the shock gets too intense, it tends to paralyze your muscles. By the time you realize that it's getting away from you, you may not be able to control your fingers well enough to take the electrodes off or turn the switch off. If somebody else is in control, that individual may not have enough sensitivity to pick up on the fact that you are about to go over the edge.
So yes, you are tempting death. I have never heard of any specific cases of people dying from shocks, but I'm sure it must happen. However, as I said, that is part of the excitement of it.
Legal disclaimer: consult your physician before attempting anything like this. "Doctor, should I clip electrodes onto my nipples?"
In the 1950's and 60's, torture was everywhere. There were pictures of torture in the Sunday comics. "Steve Canyon," a comic strip about an adventurer, was the one that appeared at the top of the front page of the comic section of the paper (until "Peanuts" replaced it). In one episode, Steve is in some barbarian country. He gets captured by the evil Queen, a svelte woman with raven black hair and tight black clothes. She has him tied to a wooden frame, shirtless. She is standing there with a whip. She says "We're going to kill you, but first lets see how much you can take." Yes, this was front and center in the Sunday comic section.
There were stories about torture on Cowboy-and-Indian shows addressed to boys. On one episode of Hopalong Cassidy, the bad guys are trying to make a rancher tell them where the gold is hidden. They take his boots off, tie him in a chair, and put a lighted candle under his foot.
There were magazines with titles like "Man's Action" which showed women (and sometimes men) being tortured. (The illustrations were drawings, not photographs.) These magazines were available in any drugstore, and anybody could buy them - there was no age limit.
They were Jewish magazines, and the torturers wore Swastika armbands or Nazi uniforms. These Jewish lies defined National Socialism for the postwar generation. Of course I didn't understand that aspect of it at the time. None of us did. Even now, most people are just beginning to catch on about the pervasiveness of Jewish lies. But I digress.
Then about 1968 or 69, torture became an "adult" thing. Torture essentially disappeared from TV, comics, and popular culture generally. That was when adult bookstores started opening, and you had to go into an adult bookstore to find pictures and stories about torture.
In the 1990s, when the internet became available to the masses, bondage porn became easily available to anybody with a modem. However, it was still sort of an "adult" thing. The internet has an ambiguous status. It's not part of public space in the same way that magazines and TV are. Nevertheless, that was when torture started to emerge into the open again. People could look at pictures in their homes - even if they lived in small towns where they didn't even have adult bookstores.
After the invasion of Iraq, they discovered Saddam Hussein's torture chambers, and showed them on TV. That's a whole different level than the internet. They showed the torture chairs where the victim is strapped in, and you could see the electrical wires... This was on the network news. Since then we have had the Abu Ghraib scandal, which doesn't seem to have upset too many people. It wasn't really that much of a scandal. Those same torture chairs and electrodes are still there, and still being used, except now the cops work for the Americans. And everybody knows it. Torture is once again a public thing.
Does anyone seriously think they stay below the waist when torturing women? Does anyone seriously think they only use electricity on one breast at a time?
No. When they are torturing a woman, they clip the electrodes to both nipples. Obviously.
I saw an article in Playboy a few years ago which said two thirds of today's college students are into S/M in some form. That doesn't mean they are doing it, certainly not at the level of electric shocks, but at least they are intrigued by it. Apparently torture is an idea whose time has come.
As the political situation in the US disintegrates, we are going to get more and more torture right here, and it is going to be more and more in the open. In ancient Rome, you could go to the Coliseum and see people tortured in public. In early modern times, in Europe, torture was done openly. They would break somebody on the wheel and hoist the wheel on a pole, so the victim was on display right in front of everybody. When they burned somebody at the stake, the whole town would come and watch. Torture was a spectator sport. This sort of thing will happen again, probably starting with tasers. This is part of the End Times.
I am not saying this is a good thing. Far from it. Like it or not, this is the way it is. The world is going crazy on us. He who remains steadfast to the end will be saved.
Here are some torture stories that cross the line - not play torture - not fun
El alacrán - the recruitment of Carmen
At waist height in front of her was a metal bed frame. Lying on it was her friend Diana. Her arms were stretched over her head at an angle tied to the corners of the bed and her legs were similarly tied at the bottom of the frame. Her body was in the form of an X. Carmen saw that metal clips with toothed jaws had been attached to her friend's nipples. Wires led from these back to a box on table next to the bed where a grinning man sat. More wires led from this box to a socket on the wall.
The stillness was broken by a rattle of equipment and the girl twisted her head, staring frantically to her left to see what was happening. Her eyes opened wide and a soft, muffled scream came from her throat as she saw the polished wooden box with its side handle and brass terminals, the coiled wires and the plastic tray of clips, probes and needles on the battered top of the trolley.
Interrogation One: The Electric Crab
Juanita's hands were behind her back. Broad straps, the leather dark with sweat, had been cinched tight round her upper arms, dragging her elbows together and forcing her shoulders back whilst a single nylon tie bit viciously into her wrists. A single rope, leading from the wrist tie to a hook in the ceiling, was holding her up. The rope had obviously been deliberately over tightened, lifting Juanita's arms agonisingly up and away from her back, forcing her to bend forwards so her large, round breasts now dangled away from her body.
Please note, these stories are not realistic. Don't try this at home, kids. Remember what I said about wet floors and concrete floors. The same thing applies to metal bed frames. That's the last thing you want for electrical torture. Diana is not going to live long.
As I said above, when you leave the electrodes in the same place, the shock gets stronger. You cannot clip electrodes onto nipples and leave the transformer on for 10 minutes or more, as in some of these stories. That is not how it works. Apparently whoever writes these stories has never done it.
The stories are also unrealistic on a psychological level, like all porn. Here is a young woman whose trust has been betrayed, whose hopes for her future are disintegrating, who is totally alone with men who want to tear her apart like wild dogs... what is she thinking? She is probably praying, desperately trying to find some solid ground somewhere. Father in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven... Deliver me from evil... Deliver me from evil!!
That's what she does at first, as long as she can maintain a train of thought at all.
Then she loses it. I read a report about someone who entered a torture chamber in South America and found a woman with electrodes clipped to her clitoris and labia. She was totally out of control, crying and laughing hysterically. She was incoherent and having convulsions. But people who write torture stories just tune that out and pretend it doesn't happen. According to them, a woman can be tortured endlessly without ever losing her reason. She can still say "Oh no, please don't, I told you I don't know anything..."
She may even be able to say this in a sex-kitten voice. In these stories, the girls don't even cry. What bullshit.
On second thought, most of them probably do not say the Lord's Prayer. If they did, they might find that something completely unexpected happens. That has been my experience.
In the discussion above I mentioned that when prisoners are electrocuted in an electric chair, the prisoner does not usually die instantly. If the executioner wanted to draw it out longer, that could be done. Just give him or her a jolt for thirty seconds, then turn it off, then another jolt... this could go on for hours, and then it could happen again the next day, and the next day. That's what happens in a real torture session. When they do that to men, after a while the testicles swell up to the size of cantaloupes, but it still goes on. I don't know what a woman's tits look like after several hours of not quite fatal shocks, not to mention several days of this, but it's certainly a long way from anything described in these stories. As for what her mind would look like, well, I'm not going there.
I read an article in Financial Times about girls in Thailand who are sold into slavery and work as prostitutes in Bangkok. One of them tried to escape, and the pimps tortured her to make an example for the others. They shocked her breasts with a cattle prod, and kept doing it until
it drove her crazy. Afterward she didn't know who she was or where she was from.
This is not erotic. A girl who has been tortured to the point that she doesn't know her name is no more interesting than a girl who has been run over by a truck.
And yet... torture is erotic when you approach the line. Or at least it seems to be. It may even be erotic when you cross the line. Death is fascinating. If they start burning people at the stake again, how many of us will watch? If you could watch the girl in Thailand being tortured until she lost her mind, would you watch? If snuff films were available on YouTube, many people would get addicted to watching them. We have not really left that behind.
Chloe is fascinated by the line between erotic torture and real torture. How close can you come to the line without crossing it? You are playing with something that can get away from you. When you cross the line, all of a sudden it's not a game anymore. It's like that moment when your car skids and you know you are going to crash, and there is nothing you can do.
When I was in elementary school, I saw the 'Hopalong Cassidy' episode that I mentioned above. They put a lighted candle under his foot. Soon after that, I had a dream. They were doing the same thing to a girl - burning her foot. At first she was young and pretty, but as the torture progressed she changed into a shriveled, gray old woman.
Is it possible to wake up from this dream? --before it's too late?
--
Is is possible to have real art about torture?
There is a scene in The Brothers Karamazov where one of the characters says that another character is a natural martyr: "She would have smiled when they burned her breasts with red hot branding irons." This is about two thirds of the way through the book, and at that point the reader knows those characters very well. But this is just a hypothetical statement about what she would do. Even Dostoevsky shies away from zooming in on it. In fact, she would not smile. Nobody would smile in that situation. Thinking about it, maybe. Doing it, no.
On second thought, if they worked up to it in the right way, if they got her far enough into subspace, she might smile when they burned her. I know some girls smile when you burn them in lesser ways, with hot spoons or cigarettes. It would be a big step from there to branding irons. The torturer(s) would have to have almost infinite tact to get her to that point, and most torturers are not even trying to do that. But a few torturers are trying to do that. Even in a real dungeon, in the Inquisition or in South America, there are some torturers who don't want to kill you or drive you crazy. They want to make you fly. When they get a woman who is a natural martyr... I wonder if it has ever really happened. Has Marilyn met Lyle in a real dungeon, and have they have taken subspace that far? If you look at the whole history of torture, in all the thousands of places where it has happened over the years, Marilyn must have met Lyle at least once, probably many times...
... and we have reached a space almost no one knows about.
The cool thing about electricity is that you can skip the branding irons. You can take her as far into subspace as you want, without doing any real damage.
If you look in a large library, you will find books about torture. Many of them were written in the 19th century or earlier. The authors are pedants who don't know what they are talking about. This also applies to the illustrations. Most of the drawings of torture chambers are stupid cliches, passed down from cartoonist to cartoonist for hundreds of years. They come from somebody's feeble imagination, not from the reality of what happens between a man and a woman in a torture room, not to mention what happens between a woman and a woman.
Commander Amanda Nightingale is the only book I know of that shows torture happening to a real woman. Amanda and her friends are fully developed characters. George Revelli describes Amanda's experience and shows the whole constellation of forces, i.e. who is doing what to whom, and why, and how it fits into the whole scheme of things. However, what they do to her is play torture.
The next step would be to do the same thing with real torture. That would be a hard story to write. In any case that's not the story I want to write, and not the story I want to live in. I think I have said enough about it, but I do want to add one more thing: it is a strange fact that torture happens. If you think about it, it's weird that the universe is set up in such a way as to allow it to happen.
When a prisoner is being tortured - feet in the fire, or almost fatal shocks to sensitive body parts - he or she must be thinking "This can't be real. This can't be happening." But then the pain drills through all such thoughts and establishes its own reality. Yes, it is real. Yes, it can be happening. It is happening. It is always happening somewhere - at any given moment, right now, somebody somewhere is being torn apart by pain which cannot be comprehended, but which must be comprehended, because there is no escape. It goes on until it destroys your mind or your life itself - insanity or death. Torture is a permanent part of the universe, and if you get into that space, you're on your own. There is no circuit breaker. There are no limits. God did not create angels whose job is to step in and stop torture. God does not perform a miracle to stop it. He lets it happen. And it does happen.
The fact that the universe contains torture is a lot more weird than quantum physics.
It's also weird that my mind is set up in such a way that the idea of torture turns me on. Why???
And why is Chloe driven to do what she does?
On another part of the site I have a page which might be of interest to any writers who are reading this - or to anybody who knows who Dostoevsky was. Anybody who cares about real art, as opposed to bowdlerized art, politically correct art, dumbed down art, Muzak, etc.
On a lighter note, I want to mention the best tit torture sites on the internet:
http://www.gerardtitsman.com/CD.html
http://www.miop.com/menu.html
These sites are operated by the same man, known as "Gerard Titsman." This may be a little bit off topic, since Gerard doesn't use electricity (as far as I know), but his stuff is so good it deserves a plug. In the last few years, I'm afraid Gerard has lost his touch. Some of his new models are just ugly. But in the nineties, he took S/M to a whole new level. At his best, his stuff has a level of sensuality that isn't found anywhere else. I would particularly call your attention to two of his videos, "La Lettre 2" and "Hard Exercises," both featuring Isabelle. "La Lettre 2" is, simply, the best S/M movie ever made, better than "Four Lives of Cindy," better than "The Misadventures of Lois Payne," better than "The Sadistic Adventures of Annie and Maria"... It's the best, period. However, there is one scene in "Hard Exercises" - the whipping scene at the end - which reaches an even higher level of eroticism. It's the most amazing thing I have ever seen, and I have seen it all (and done it).
If you are a connoisseur of tit torture - or maybe I should say tit play - these videos should be in your collection.
Not only that, Gerard is a good guy. He's not a typical porn site operator. He doesn't do it for money (although I guess he makes a comfortable living), he's just doing what he loves to do.
Note added in 2011 (March)
I am writing this note after listening to incoherent modern music on a station that is supposed to play classical music. I don't want to be part of this. As I said on the burns page, isn't tit torture part of the same decadence?
Not necessarily. Torture has nothing to do with modernity or decadence. At the same time as the most beautiful music was being composed, the girls were getting their tits burned with hot irons.
In the early 19th century, when torture was no longer done in public, and not normally done anywhere in Europe, the crucifixion lost its force. Torture was no longer a familiar thing. It was just something you read about, or saw on crucifixes and stained glass windows. In earlier times, public executions were part of everyday life. People were broken on the wheel, or impaled, or burned at the stake, after being tortured. This was part of the world everybody grew up in. When they went to church and heard that Jesus was crucified, that was a vivid image. A familiar image. A chilling image. It was similar to the wheel, where the wheel is hoisted up on a pole and the victim is left to die. To say Jesus was crucified meant he died like that. Everybody knew what that meant. They had seen it.
After the French Revolution, and the spread of Enlightenment ideas to the rest of Europe, death by public torture was no longer a real concept. It was not grounded in everyday experience. As time passed, fewer and fewer people had actually seen a public execution (except hanging, which is a long way from crucifixion). Without torture, Christianity became unintelligible. People forgot what the Mass actually means.
Classical music had its roots in church music, particularly Masses. When the Mass itself became unintelligible, classical music started losing the thread. So the situation is the reverse of what I thought: torture is not part of modern decadence. On the contrary, incoherent modern music appeared when torture was no longer a familiar part of life.
What I am trying to do is connect this page, and this concept, with the rest of the site. Torture has to have something to do with the Singularity, however odd that juxtaposition may appear. This is what happens as we go through the Singularity. Torture is part of it.
Regardless of the Singularity, torture is part of life. There is no use trying to pretend otherwise. It does not have to framed as pornography and put into adult bookstores - or adult websites, as far as that goes.
I read somewhere, probably in a book about the history of art, that a thousand years ago, churches had murals with illustrations of hell. This would include sexual punishment for sexual sins. They also had pictures of Martyrs, such as Saint Agatha.
Next time you listen to Gregorian chant, think about the churches in which that music was originally heard.
(c) copyright Lyle Burkhead 2006-2011