The researchers’ opinion, which Fondajane shared, was that these discrepancies owed to subjects’ ability to recognize the welling eyes as “crying” eyes and their inability to recognize the molested flesh as “molested.” That is (according to Fondajane and the researchers), the subjects who had high autonomic responses to welling eyes but nonetheless gave the welling eyes low beauty ratings deliberately underrated the beauty of the welling eyes because, in light of their ability to identify the welling eyes as “crying” eyes, they couldn’t help but develop narratives of suffering about those to whom the welling eyes belonged (e.g. “these are the eyes of someone who’s afraid” or “these are the eyes of someone who’s been hurt”), and thus believed that rating highly the beauty of the welling eyes would make them (i.e. make the subjects) seem sadistic to the researchers, whereas even though rating highly the beauty of molested flesh patches should, by the same reasoning, indicate sadism on the part of the subjects to at least the same extent as would rating highly the beauty of crying eyes, the flesh patches depicted in the photos were so divorced from their contexts (i.e. the unmolested portions of the haunches, bellies, and asses of which they were a part) that subjects couldn’t identify them as “molested” and so were unable to develop narratives about them, let alone narratives of suffering (e.g. “this flesh patch, darkening, has been molested” or “this flesh patch, having been molested, is painful to its owner”), and therefore didn’t fear (couldn’t have feared) that giving high beauty ratings to the molested flesh patches would indicate (to the researchers) that they (the subjects) were sadistic, and so they (the subjects) possessed no inclination to hide their positive responses to the molested flesh patches (i.e. via underrating them). To put it inversely: if the subjects who preferred the molested flesh patches had realized that the flesh patches had been molested, they would have been as resistant to giving high beauty ratings to those flesh patches as the subjects who preferred welling eyes had been resistant to giving high beauty ratings to the welling eyes.
The takeaway from all this, Fondajane posits, is that some (if not many) of the men who are turned on by seeing people cry are turned on not because of what crying signifies (that the crying person is suffering or afraid) but because crying eyes are, themselves, “more fundamentally, authentically, beautiful/arousing” to the men than are uncrying eyes: that some (if not many) men who prefer crying eyes to uncrying eyes prefer them in the same deep, helpless, and likely biologically driven way that, for example, some (if not all) people who prefer looking at penises to looking at vaginas prefer looking at penises to looking at vaginas.
She then spends a few pages going out of her way to assert that she isn’t by any means claiming that rape—which regularly produces crying eyes and molested flesh—isn’t a hideous, sadistic act, but rather that it is a mistake to insist (as had, at the time of FABRYTAYF’s initial publication, apparently been the fashion among critical theorists to claim) that the pleasure (some) men take in viewing rape pornography is necessarily indicative of their having a desire to commit rape, or even of a desire to see others commit rape, per se. Many (if not most) men who watch rape porn, Fondajane argues, aren’t doing so because the thought of someone being forced to have sex turns them on, but because certain, very specific elements of the sight of someone being forced to have sex (e.g. welling eyes and bruising flesh)—elements less prevalent in consensual porn—turn them on.
This line of thinking impressed and intrigued me, but it wasn’t til I’d started to watch A Fistful that I’d ever suspected I was invested in it. And although my investment surely wasn’t as major as, say, rape-film fans’ or mascara manufacturers’, let alone Porn Valley’s big movers’ and shakers’*, I guess it couldn’t have been all too minor, either, given how readily I recalled the above-described chapter in 2013, despite not having read FABRYTAYF since 2004.
In any case, that’s what I’d found myself doing that morning in the living room: recalling the chapter, the whole line of thinking, then abstracting it out to apply it to myself and the pleasure I experienced during certain disturbing parts of A Fistful of Fists. For example, I told myself that my having enjoyed seeing Scatty being tortured in the “Popsicles” clip didn’t mean that I was happy that Scatty had been tortured, let alone that I wanted to torture Scatty (or any other cure) myself. I told myself it was how Scatty moved while being tortured, and its facial expressions, and the sounds that it made which I had enjoyed—that I’d enjoyed that stuff independent of its context, independent of its cause. I told myself these things and didn’t quite believe them or disbelieve them.
Like I said, I felt compromised.
* * *
—
One thing was for sure: I’d have rather to have never seen the “Popsicles” clip—or, for that matter, the Barker clip (though I had, at least, closed my eyes before that one got gory)—and, since it seemed fairly safe to assume that the more I watched of A Fistful of Fists, the more “Popsicles”-esque clips I’d be exposed to, I determined it would be better to try to dodge the blow than take it on the chin, i.e. it would be better to lie to Triple-J. I’d say I’d watched the whole video, offer a critique consisting of a few reasonably thoughtful observation-suggestion combinations concerning the ways in which this clip or that clip served or hindered the collage on the whole, and then never have to watch any of it ever again.
The problem with this plan was that I so far had only one reasonably thoughtful observation-suggestion to make: that the clip of the teacher talking to his class about the word “overload” radically slowed the pace of the video and should thus be cut down, if not cut out. A couple or three more thoughts like that, and I’d be in business, sure, but try though I might to come up with such thoughts, I just wasn’t able, for I had no idea what Triple-J was after; I didn’t understand A Fistful’s narrative, wasn’t even sure it possessed a narrative. I had to watch more. As little as possible, yes, but more.
I punched Play on the remote and lit a fresh Quill. The little girl onscreen popped Percy’s head, the Chameleon trials started, and, once D18 broke its neck on the carrot, I assumed I’d gotten the gist of the clip, and skipped ahead to the disc’s next track: Woof, of Burnsy&Woof. This one really threw me, partly because Woof was so charismatically sad, but more because it was the second time the pace of the collage so radically slowed, which suggested Triple-J intended the collage’s pace to shift, and, if that were so (i.e. if the shifts were intentional), then for me to propose that the clip of the teacher be cut, or cut down, would, at best, signal that I’d been insensitive to Triple-J’s artistic vision and at worst lead him to suspect I hadn’t watched the whole collage. So it turned out I had zero sufficiently intelligent observation-suggestion combos. I didn’t give up, though.
Woof continued speaking with no sign of letup, so I skipped ahead after a minute or two, watched “Cuddlefarmer Harvest” up to the hobunk part, then watched the first half of the clip of the Middle Eastern(?) kids and the soldiers, skipped ahead again, watched the Bitchy Elvis P.A.L. Brothers clip, then watched a minute of the interview with the campus spidge dealer (which reinforced my conclusion regarding the inappropriateness of critiquing the pace shifts), skipped ahead once more and watched the leader of that overload cult getting booed and harassed on Philip Daley Alejandro, and then, at last, “Flick&Look.”