my only sunrise

• Cimiterium •

Melaten-Friedhof, Cologne, Germany

the op linked the study in the replies & i’ve been skimming it & it’s actually rlly rlly interesting to think abt

in the appendix (which you can find by scrolling down) CA:TWS is listed as having one torture scene, which immediately made me wonder because there are two that I can think of.

further on in the appendix when the authors are discussing the criteria for including torture, they give the vault scene in CA:TWS as an example of a scene that isn't torture, with the justification that Bucky seems to comply with his captors, and given the information shown on screen we can't conclude whether or not Bucky is a willing participant in the "wipe." Willing participants cannot be tortured, therefore the vault scene is not counted as torture

That is a WILD take on that scene. "doesn't fight back" does not equal "not being tortured" come on now

now, I could see disqualifying the vault scene as being a torture scene on the basis that the purpose of the "wipe" is not to inflict pain, it just happens to be an extremely painful process.

That's an interesting take. Is doing something incredibly painful or distressing to a person torture when there is ostensibly a secondary purpose to the painful thing, even though it also clearly doubles as a way of inflicting suffering and asserting power? This is a really important question to answer, since a lot of instances of torture and mistreatment in prisons and military situations etc. seem to fall under this. e.g. a strip search is nominally for "security" purposes, but it is also forced nudity which is a common form of sexual violence inflicted as part of torture.

But disqualifying the scene because there is not enough evidence that Bucky is being coerced to do it is nuts, since immediately prior Bucky gets slapped in the face for not answering a question and doesn't retaliate, and immediately before that Bucky gets a bunch of guns pointed at him when he acts up

That's another important question. Does being forced to comply with or participate in your own torture disqualify it from being torture?

The answer is, to me, obviously no, and in fact this seems like a relatively common feature of torture: e.g. forcing prisoners to dig their own graves requires a good amount of compliance from the victim and that's a major reason why it's so distressing

This study made a lot of assumptions about torture I don't know if I agree with, and the more I think about it the more disagreeing I am. For example, It also split torture up into punitive torture vs. torture for information, but I think that misses some significant motivations behind torture, which are torture out of sheer hatred or contempt, or torture to enforce power and dominance over a person.

It seems similar to the way rape is discussed: it is assumed to be motivated by a certain thing (sexual desire) and to have a certain context, which narrows the ability to recognize sexual violence in the world when it has the pretext of some other motivation, or when it happens in a situation that isn't expected.

When doing some academic reading on torture (inspired by Jacob Geller's video essay) I came across a quote that was like, "All rape is torture and all torture is rape." I think there's a reason those are different words and it's useful to have them both, but it gave me something to think about.

I think I don't quite wrap my head around why hazing happens yet, but it seems on an intuitive level very connected to other forms of mob violence/ violence perpetrated by a group. It is inherently connected to the idea of in-group and out-group, and by experiencing the violence you become part of the in-group, which means you get a turn at perpetrating it.

The Reversal of Desire "The Tools" — Phil Stutz