Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And sometimes it is a chainsaw.

     Suppose we accept as a given that the rise of torture porn in the United States coincides, strangely enough, with the re-emergence of the puritanical view that graphic portrayals of realistic and consensual sex have little to no place in mainstream films.  Torture porn films then, like their puritanical brethren the slashers, are like community-level campaigns to desensitize particularly male audiences to highly sexualized violence against the body.  Applying a psychoanalytic eye to these advertising campaigns upholds Dyer’s (2002) assertion that we look at the world through ideas of male sexuality and reveals that such films tend to focus on visual symbols substituting male sexuality and the ruination of the human and/or female body.  For Dyer, male sexuality informs our construction of narratives, and he raises an interesting point: “What is significant is how sexuality is symbolized, how these [narrative] devices evoke a sense of what sexuality is like, how they contribute to a particular definitionof sexuality” (90).