An Essay on Crush Videos
• Fetishes
Whilst searching the internet for BDSM keywords I stumbled into an extensive article on the phenomenon of crush videos which to my suprise I have never read before. Since I was about to make an entry on my latest thoughts about my own fetish I figured I’d combine the two.
A Better Mousetrap was written in 1999 and appears to have been published in ‘00, though I have never come across it before.
I have read few pieces on the crush fetish phenomenon, none of which were this long and thoughtful. Many have stuck up for the majority of fetishists, arguing that it is a mostly harmless fetish provided animals and other creatures are not killed/tortured (the line is blurred a little, is killing insects cruel?), though this one presents crush as a sort of act of bathing in and celebrating pathos - the ultimate loser adrenaline rush. There was no coda showing things from the fetishist’s point of view, just a damning layeth-the-smacketh-down style, cold-light-of-day summary.
In essence:
Every aesthetic form has its nadir. In literature, it’s novelizations of TV shows or the verse found in greeting cards. In sculpture, it’s Precious Moments figurines. In movies, Forrest Gump. Crush videos are the low point of pornography. They are depravity made pathetic, insignificance as shock effect. They’re so abject that they confound analysis. They’re the degraded form of a genre—videotape pornography—that is popularly assumed to be about degradation itself. This outer reach of pornography, disturbing in its petty sickness and banality, is so far below the level of anything that could be considered culture that it can barely be made to mean; it can only stand there as a reproach to whatever ideas we have about humanity.
I have always had a crush fetish to one degree or another, and I have downloaded crush videos, naturally, out of curiosity, and enjoyed very few of them because, as I have said before, no matter how much certain forms of destruction can be eroticized in my mind, the act of deliberately filming the torture of creatures - even bugs - left a bad taste in my mouth.
I had fantasies of being small and being crushed as a teen, and then reversed the tables for a long while, but now, with the advent of a real, deep, interpersonal relationship, and the medium of BDSM and even art as an outlet for my sadism, ‘crush’ seems mostly trite. I also believe that I was to some degree depressed when I was younger, a depression which has been slowly lifting and correlates to my lessened intensity of interest in this fetish world.
As I think I have said before a residue of my fetish remains. I feel a little twinge when I have to stomp a cockroach in fetish boots (me, not the cockroach), but any attempt to linger on the moment seems… it doesn’t work for me. The thought of my weight bearing down on a submissive man is more exciting.
Next is the issue of softcore crush. In a slightly dubious stroke of reasoning, the essay condemns this as even more pathetic than hardcore crush, because it’s watered down and even more ‘wimpy’. Insert rolling eyes smiley here.
In this spirit of commodification I present what I call crushies—”safe,” or “dry,” crush videos—inspired partly by a Web site I saw while conducting research for this article. It featured a woman squashing a banana on a glass table with her butt, and there was another one where they had a girl running over a teddy bear in a car. No animals hurt here, only sensibilities. Those are examples of early-stage crush video commodification, and they were even more pointless than the real thing.
The real thing? Real thing? Something I think the author fails to recognize here is that a crush fetish is a purely abstract thing. There is no ‘real thing’ other than that crush fetishists find the destruction of various articles, dead or alive, by body weight, as sexy. To say that animal snuff is the real thing is to miss the point entirely.
Ultimately, fetishes arise out of no logical reason. It’s nice to theorize that the act of stepping on a soft toy is some kind of “fetishized adult destruction of childhood”, but all this fancy theorizing and occupation of the moral high ground may be ultimately too intellectual for it’s own good.
Maybe some people just have, for one reason or another, erotic connections with squashing, being squashed, or seeing something get squashed, and the subtleties (meaningless to most) which arise out of this.
So in conclusion while I do agree with much of the article, and cite it to a certain extent as the reason why I didn’t pursue the crush fetish into higher and higher levels and instead seemed to almost turn my back on it, I wonder if it goes a little too far in claiming to understand the more complex and subtle nuances of the fetish.
As for my personal feelings: Object crushing with an appreciative audience is probably the only truly erotic part and ‘art’ of crush for me anymore. I had private feelings, exposed myself to the online community, and eventually didn’t like what I see. I don’t condemn the more crush-active people, or feel morally superior to them in anyway. I think some of them showed signs of ugliness whilst others seemed kind and intelligent… but mostly this is just about who I am and where I want to go.
Comments
Setting up a false dichotomy like ‘real’ vs. ‘unreal’ crush videos is a common academic trick. As if men who want to see a cat crushed are more sincere or engaging in a more authentic experience than a man who enjoys seeing a veggie flattened.
You know how our relationship has diminished some of my most extreme fantasies. And from talking to others is seems a natural adaptation to being able to live your fetish needs and not just dream about them.
Posted by: Richard | March 18, 2006 12:11 PM