Sexual violence.

[Lynchenberg]

Do you have any thoughts, feelings, or opinions about sexual violence in modern culture?

[Neon Black]

Perhaps you could elaborate a little in what you mean by that?

[Lynchenberg]

Do you feel our modern culture encourages deviancy and anti-social behavior by blending sexual imagery with violent imagery?

[Velvet D'Coolette]

I think it's driven more by the Internet and the availability of adult material there. A lot of it is free, and it's not always regulated so just about anything you can think of is available. Perhaps that encourages people to go looking for the next unusual or more extreme thing they can find, and that can so easily lead to looking at violent imagery.

I don't think the search for the Next Big Thing is restricted to sexual imagery - we like to find newer and more extreme versions of most things.

That said, I think there are lots of other factors that I'm not really able to go into now but include factors that make people less likely to be sociable in modern times, a sense of things getting more intense (e.g., when I was a child, hippies worried about the local tree being cut down. Nowadays we're not so worried about that, more so that we'll do millennia-long damage to our planet), miscellaneous bits of politics (the womens' rights debate is flaring quite a lot right now), and more.

Yeah, this is starting to turn into an unstructured braindump so I think I'd better leave it there.

[Neon Black]

One thing I find interesting about modern culture is that as violent and sexual imagery becomes more prevalent and easier to maintain than ever, actual violence and cases of sexual assault is trending down.

Studies have shown that almost from infancy, people have very little trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality, and adjusting their behaviour to suit - that is, at the moment. Lately, virtual reality has started to take off again in the form of the Oculus Rift and similar devices in development, and, having experienced it myself (I own one of the prototypes), I can say the feeling of presence experienced through VR is very different from looking at a screen.

What I found most shocking about it wasn't the experience, but rather the memories of having tried it; in retrospect, my recollection of scenes from VR feels much the same as how I recall moments of my actual life, the only real difference being that I remember which parts were real and which weren't because of the absurdity of the scenes themselves. That said, things might change as the fidelity of virtual worlds increases and the feeling of presence becomes stronger.

I think if there's any consistent cause of violent behaviour in people, the strongest tie seems to be with trauma experienced in childhood.