this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2024
50 points (91.7% liked)

No Stupid Questions

36109 readers
1348 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I just kind of wonder with how casually people express these thoughts. It's a little disturbing how normalized it is to entertain such notions, given how other types of fantasies are very stigmatized.

Like when discussing char.ai, acting out sexual or romantic fantasies is something a lot of people do, but it's considered embarrassing. While people freely discuss violent roleplays without any shame.

And then there's the cliche of fantasizing about killing one's boss or coworkers.

Are these really common thoughts for mentally sound people to have?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

That's a difficult question to answer since the research into "fantasy" of any kind is minimal overall, and doesn't specifically delve into the "dark" fantasies outside of people that are known already to have them. So you end up having trouble finding reliable information, and even that's for a given value of reliable since replication efforts in psychology and psychiatry aren't exactly booming.

Then, the specific question you asked has "violent sadistic" as a combined criteria. It's definitely possible to have violent fantasies without sadism, and sadistic fantasies that aren't violent (unless you're one of those assholes that insists on stretching what the word violent means far beyond sense).

With all of that said, I can only give anecdotal information regarding people I know well enough to have the kind of honest talks that they would admit this kind of thing. In the way you asked, based on that, I would say that the incidence of violent sadistic fantasies is low. I would say the same about sadistic only fantasies. But violent fantasies?

If you include things like wanting to punch someone just one good time, I would call that fairly common, with the frequency decreasing as the level of violence goes up, and/or the duration of the violence goes up. But does that actually reach the kind of ideation that wolf be called a fantasy.

Myself, I say not usually. A fantasy is a conscious thing in most usages. It's something you think about, imagine, and focus on. The kind of violence most people have in their head is impulse driven, or stress driven. That isn't really conducive to fantasy. It's like wishing you had a nice cup of coffee isn't the same as imagining brewing up a pot of excellent Jamaican blue mountain when you get home and just sitting on the porch drinking it while the sun goes down. One is a passing though/impulse, the other is a fantasy.

Same analogy (or is it metaphor? Damned if my brain is pulling up the difference right now), but using sex. A passing thought that someone would look good naked isn't the same as picturing them naked and imagining what you'd do together. The first is not a fantasy, the second is.

Thus it is with violence. A sudden urge to pop your boss in the nose isn't a fantasy. Imagining beating the shit out of them is a fantasy. Until you're constructing the scene with intent, I say it isn't fantasy at all.

Now, me? I'm prone to violent impulses. My PTSD stems from violence (civilian) in childhood and as an adult. You get attacked and injured enough, you react differently to perceived threats. Someone cuts too close to me when driving, there's a flash of wanting to kick them in the nuts/twat. But it's a flash. For me to seriously want to fuck someone up, it has to reach a level of threat or problem much higher. Even that isn't sadistic in the truest sense, since it isn't about me enjoying the process, but that's splitting hairs. There are people in the world that I would enjoy beating the fuck out of, but it's my experience that I'm kinda rare in that. Most people would avoid it even if they knew they would get away with it.