What is morbid fascination?

i found myself wanking over every piece of footage & report

That's morbid!

*hangs self*

xpost

I consciously try not to indulge that part of myself. Whether that's trying to gloss over it or not, I don't know. I'm fully aware that its there, it just doesn't feel right to feed it.

Is it the same part of the brain that likes to watch horror movies, do you think?

I'm the same way. I almost posted 'people who slow down and stare at traffic accidents, impeding the flow of automobiles, aka rubberneckers' that in the 'things you hate' thread a few days back, but for some reason I felt that it would incite somebody.

I'm not saying it's right am I? When I say I look at an accident scene, I do not stop the car, get out & have a good look.

(x-post)

Tuomas - I meant rubbernecking isn't right.

I got over being slightly shocked at naked strangers when I started life drawing classes, and I got over seeing naked dead strangers when I started the anatomy component of my (art) degree, which was held in the dept of human anatomy with the results of the first-year medics' incompetent dissection. It doesn't necessarily make you callous, but you lose that horrified abjection to do with the insides of people's bodies being where you feel they oughtn't.

Blimey jeremy, I wrote that about nakedness before you posted. That sounds terrible. Obv. injured strangers are more likely to feel imposed upon than dead ones. Umm.

I don't usually get this morbid fascination thing - the last time I did was around the time of the Bali bombing, where I found myself drawn to all these pictures of people just before the bomb went off, was fascinated by the biographies, the random chains of events that had led to these particular people being in this one particular place at that one particular time, and how uncomfortable I felt with it.

On the Sniper News thread a couple of years ago I wrote:

Do we really need to gorge ourselves on stories of how some bloke had just proposed to his girlfriend and she'd said yes and they'd gone out to celebrate and they were only in the Sari club because they were two minutes too late to get into their first choice bar and both died, or whatever? I know we don't, but somehow I find my eye drawn towards these stories, the seeming terrible randomness of them (more so than on 9/11, when these were people going about their daily routine), and its something that I'm not comfortable with at all.

What would be a healthy response? I honestly don't know - perhaps the ability to recognise a dead body for what it was, and then let the thought out of your mind, rather than indulging it, or pushing it away. But hey, my responses aren't all that healthy. I never want to see a corpse and I know this is down to the fact that I couldn't deal with it so perhaps I'm not the best person to say what is right.

You see, maybe you have the healthy reaction... the reaction you're describing isn't morbid fascination, or it doesn't sound like it.

As for naked bodies - Odd that we're comparing the two. Its certainly possible to have a fascination with nakedness - but is that morbid?? Maybe, if its done for titillation - but then, don't most people like a bit of naked titillation?

I don't know if I don't have enough reaction to blood & guts, but I'm more or less comfortable.

On another note I have never experienced the loss of a close friend or relative and am not at all looking forward to the feeling or my reaction as and when this will happens (touches every bit of wood in sight)

That's just SICK!

Clicking on a C-Man thread.