You condition a vulnerable boy at puberty to become aroused by brutality. It's the violence, not the nudity. Frankly, I wouldn't mind if every teenage boy had a subscription to Playboy. They'd be looking at attractive naked female bodies while they masturbated, not eviscerated female bodies.

You condition a vulnerable boy at puberty to become aroused by brutality. It's the violence, not the nudity. Frankly, I wouldn't mind if every teenage boy had a subscription to Playboy. They'd be looking at attractive naked female bodies while they masturbated, not eviscerated female bodies.

With rare exceptions, people are responsible for what they do.

I do think a lot of sexual violence stems from experiences in childhood or at puberty. Some people become sadistic after suffering early abuse at the hands of parents, relatives or friends. But for others, the seed is planted in the formative years by the conflation of images of violence with those of sexual arousal. Magazines, TV shows and, especially, slasher movies are masters at doing this.

One of the few times I'm hit emotionally is when I listen to the tapes sadists make of torturing their victims. There the person is currently suffering, you can hear them suffer, and that calls out for an empathic response. But when they're dead, when they're no longer suffering, when it's over, it's hard to feel empathetic for the corpse.

Counter to the public's thinking, the celebrities who attract the largest number of stalkers - and typically it's not "if" a celebrity has a stalker, it's "how many" - are neither the most glamorous nor obnoxious, but rather the ones who seem the sweetest and most wholesome. They appear approachable.

Psychiatrists are usually very well imbued with the clinical role, where helping the sick person is the goal. And that's quite incompatible with the truthseeking role. That's probably true of the other fields, too, but maybe more so of the personalities that gravitate toward psychiatry. They tend to care about people and wish to be helpful.