From edge work to death drive : the pursuit of pleasure and denial of harm in a leisure society

This chapter discusses the relationship between leisure societies and emerging forms of social harm. This contribution scrapes away the veneer of civility, narratives of declining violence and notions of tolerance to examine the harms associated with pornography, videogames and sex tourism. Common to these examples is how new media systems generate experience-spaces that proliferate within everyday social conduct but whose harms tend to be denied. Such spaces are characterised by the representation or engagement of (un)willing subjects and dehumanising scripts. The mechanisms of these spaces are explored, their increasing everyday quality and mainstream social position and the kinds of social harm that may be linked to what is described as a kind of ‘murder box’ of enclosed, brutalising image-spaces. The chapter discusses whether leisure societies both create the conditions for the emergence of these boxes, and also the denial of harms associated with them.