Ero Guro and It’s Misogyny Problem

So I would like to start this off by explaining ero guro and a little bit of its origins as best I can. Ero Guro translates to erotic grotesque for the sake explanation is art that evokes eroticism with gore. By this you are likely wondering how art like this would have a problem with pornography if erotic is in the name. Well here comes me to explain the origin of this kind of art to show why there is a problem with the pornography. In its early days guro was never used as pornography it was always used as shock art with little reasoning. Art to basically provoke an emotional response of shock.

One of the biggest artists that drew ero guro would be Shintaro Kago. His art in particular never evoked a response of "this is porn". A lot of early ero guro artists had a similar way in drawing. Not to be pornographic but nonsensical.

Now with the small history lesson out the way let us get to my reasoning for writing this piece. In recent years guro has made a turn for the worst and I mean that bluntly. Guro has gone from an outsider artform to shock the viewer into a pornographic dumpster fire for misogynists to masturbate to. You might be saying to yourself “wow these are very wild accusations to be making!” Well I am making this from the perspective of a guro lover myself. To support my claims I will turn to the subreddit known as r/guro which has around about 49.8k members (as of the moment me writing this) and I am of this number.

So in hindsight you could say I am not the only member in this subreddit that is more a fan of the nonsense side of ero guro and has a disgust for the pornography. But to go in detail on the problems with this subreddit a majority of the content posted on there is pornography. You will get more of the nonsense guro at rare times and with those rare posts there is not as much interaction as the porn gets. So with that you can conclude that the sub is mostly populated by gore fetishits.

Now with that explained let us get to the misogyny problem. So to start a majority of the posts on the sub are pornographic and looking to entice the viewer. Going into more details on these pornographic images they tend to depict things from women being suffocated to have their heads on spikes while unidentified males insert their penis into their eye sockets.

Yes very gruesome stuff I am aware and you likely noticed that I only brought up women. Well that is a majority of the pornography being depicted just women being brutally murdered while their corpse is violated. I do not only mean fictional women either. The subreddit has had images of dismembered women that oddly resemble the female rapper Nicki Minaj. This isn’t even a case of “there needs to be more guro with males being killed” it is a case of an art style turned into mostly pornography mostly depicting women being brutally murdered and raped.

For me this is a disgrace to the original artform and something I just cannot stomach anymore of. It disgusts me to know this artform has been tainted and I get no pleasure from typing this out. So with all that being said goodbye.