It's Torture! It's Porn! And It's Coming Soon to a Theater Near You!

It's enough to make you nostalgic for good ol', all-American porn. Hard-core, soft core, Peace Corps — doesn't matter. All I know is: bed hopping beats head chopping.

But bed hopping/head chopping is the worst.

Unfortunately, that's what America is in for, thanks to the newest rage in Hollywood: torture porn.

You know — movies where women are bound, gagged, tubes shoved up their nose and blood spurting out, and then they're hung upside down with a breast exposed. That kinda thing.

And you thought "Wedding Crashers" was crass.

While it is indisputably great to live in a country where freedom of expression is guaranteed, it is also indisputably vomit-inducing to hear that this kind of movie is becoming, ho-hum, just another cinematic genre. Let's see — we've got musicals, comedies, dramas and, oh yes, that new category where the star gets raped and disemboweled while the audience chomps its popcorn.

As reported in Advertising Age, the latest upchuck of this genre is called "Captivity," by the company After Dark. Billboards for the movie, banned by the Motion Picture Association of America, nonetheless went up all over Los Angeles in March, ostensibly by accident. (As if billboards go around erecting themselves.) The series of four photos featured a woman first with a gloved hand over her mouth, then in a cage, then with the bloody nose tubes and then partly nude and totally dead. As Ethel Merman sang, "Who could ask for anything more?"

Me. Your local, resident school marm. But you know what? School marms speak the truth. Go marms!

When you consider that "Midnight Cowboy" earned its X rating in the 1960s in part because it provided a peek of Jon Voight's naked bottom, look how far the needle has moved.

As I write this, my neighbor is blasting the soundtrack from another '60s classic, "My Fair Lady." What if Eliza Doolittle had been a kinky coed? What if Professor Higgins had picked her up, brought her home and instead of teaching her the Queen's English had kept her chained to his radiator for the next 17 years? Would that have been a better movie? Is that what this century has to offer us in the fruits of creativity department?

In an interview with Ad Age, the producer of "Captivity" admitted that he's despised, but so what? He's just riding the wave of movies like "Cabin Fever" and "Saw" — big-screen screams on mini-mart budgets, minting money.

It's the American dream, sort of like starting a successful whorehouse franchise. So let's call him what he is: a pimp with a heart of dough. He's abusing women and making a profit off it. That's that.

But what about us?

If we start accepting this kind of movie as just "extreme" horror, the baseline will change. What once seemed out of line will become mainstream.

It happened already with porn culture. The days when going to a strip club seemed seedy are long gone. Now porn queens write advice books and grannies take pole dancing.

Do we want torture to become mainstream, too? Are we eager for sexual predator reality shows? Looking forward to "Dismemberment for Dummies"?

If that's the world you want to live in, all you have to do is sit tight. It's coming. But if you'd like a different future, you've got to act.

Let's insist on a new rating like NC-25 when films involve sexual torture, so teens can't hand the producers their allowance. Or let's promise to boycott not only the torture movie itself — duh — but also any future movies the stars make, so they have zero incentive to appear in a film like this. Or let's just find the producers and hang them upside down and take out a dental drill and …

Oh, wait! That's not acceptable behavior.

Yet.

Lenore Skenazy is a contributing editor at the New York Sun. To find out more about Lenore Skenazy (lenore@lenoretown.com), and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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