A different tack, if I may...
It seems that folks who engage in our particular (perhaps peculiar?) fetish (fantasy?) --i.e., crucifixion of women-- fall into two groups vis-a-vie their attitudes toward females. One group seems to relish the suffering of the women on the crosses from a sometimes ill-disguised misogyny. I base this on their diction ("slut" "whore" etc.). Now, I may be misreading their role-playing of such an attitude. In other words, they may be only acting like they hate females. That may be a macho thing. (Only their therapists know for sure!)
The other group seems to appreciate the female form and even the suffering from an aesthetic perspective, albeit mixed with a hefty serving of lust. A good example of this view would be Tarquinius Rex's "Beauty of Crucifixion" essay on the home page of Crux Dreams (
http://cruxdreams.com/main.html).
I'm obligated to strongly disagree. I am not a misogynist. I am a sadist. (And occasionally an all-around misan
thrope, but that's another matter.) I quite
like women. Broadly speaking, I would probably say that I enjoy the companionship of women more often than I enjoy that of men- in part because some men feel a need to prove their superior status to fellow males, which I tend to find tedious and which makes it more difficult to lower barriers and create intimate bonds.
The characters in my fantasies and stories might well describe women disparagingly- but that should come as no surprise, because those characters are
torturers and
rapists, and, on occasion, murderers. For a human being to put themselves in a position where they can wantonly inflict harm to another human being requires them to justify themselves- to think themselves, in some respect, superior to the person they harm, and not to put themselves on an equal footing. This is well documented by the inevitable propaganda of wartime, up to and including the present era. If we are compelled to think of our enemies as thinking and feeling beings with motivations and ideals as meaningful as our own, it becomes much more difficult to wage war.
Portraying this is not pathology. It is simply a recognition of psychology. It would be far stranger to populate a story where women are tortured and murdered with torturers and murderers who go about their business while musing without horror about what Judith's family will make of her sudden absence or how they'll miss her sunny sense of humor about the office. Or equally, with "aesthetes" who regard nailing someone to a cross as nothing more than a purely aesthetic act like painting a canvas or wallpapering a room.
Moreover, this assumption does a broad swath of creatives and their work a gross disservice. Should
any author be assumed to imitate the mental state of their most despicable character? What would that do to the reputation of someone like J.K. Rowling, let alone someone like Stephen King? Should we refuse to examine ideas and fantasies, even in scenarios and images that are entirely fictitious? Should we
make our creators afraid to examine our and their darker impulses, for fear of just such assumptions?
I will state right now with categorical certainty that doing so would make us as worse off as a society. What I see, over and over again, is that the suppression of the ideas that some find distasteful does not make them go away. It either gives them the thrill of the taboo or makes those who cannot purge themselves of them so isolated and miserable that they end up destroying themselves or others. In the latter cases, it is often preceded by an alienation so intense that they start to think of themselves or others as something other than human- alien and unknowable, and thus they are no longer bound by the restrictions of human kinship.
It is far, far better for the like-minded to be able to commiserate and recognize that they are not alone, that their impulses are not so out of the ordinary, that they do not render them unknowable or unlovable. Far from making them likely to act out the most terrible versions they imagine, it reminds them of that kinship and makes their fantasies bearable.
Forgive me if I become strident and long-winded. With increasing frequency, I do indeed see people who imagine that by driving an idea or image out of the public space- out of conversation, out of entertainment media, out of notice- they are eliminating it, rather than sweeping it under the rug to fester. That punishing people who harbor them somehow means that they now agree, rather than that they now harbor resentments and wounds. That by refusing to examine something, they become more virtuous, rather than merely ignorant.
I enjoy the idea of the infliction of pain on members of the opposite sex. I am not dangerous, nor am I evil. These are not flippant conclusions; they took many years to reach. I would not see others who feel similarly- from any direction- suffer what I did in reaching similar conclusions. And I deeply resent those who would presume to make opposing conclusions with far less consideration.