RPT is a joint-project between another philosopher and myself. The project is not really philosophical at all, but more psychological/sociological. This piece is my own work, and my own opinion about what RPT is, and I hope he will agree to a large extent with it, or be able to clarify some points that I will then agree to. I will begin by stating how the project began and will analyse what it means to me now.

To begin with, between us we discovered many videos online of bizarre actions and behaviour, usually extreme in some sense and breaking some social taboo. We had encountered this to some extent before even meeting. As we went onwards we found more and more extreme videos. At that point I think we were just looking for things that were “extreme” in many senses of the word. We usually only allowed a video to qualify as RPT, and not pictures or texts describing an event.

At a specific point several months ago, we decided to give a criterion of “extremeness” to the videos we had up until that point seen, or at least the ones we could still remember. Previously we had only speculated about whether a video was low, medium or high RPT. We decided on a scale of 1-10 to best describe the extremeness of these videos. We each gave a score to every video, and the average scores were taken. We had a few differences of opinion, mostly regarding whether a video was low or medium RPT, but we had quite similar views regarding the highest RPT videos. On the original list there were 25 videos, each one showing an event we both find very likely to have actually happened somewhere in the world. We don’t think any of them have been faked. I will briefly describe a few of the events we witnessed to give the uninformed reader some idea of what kinds of things we saw, and indeed, are available on the internet.

Low RPT:

A man who has sex with very realistic-looking dolls, and talks of the advantages of having a relationship with an inanimate object over a real person.

An extremely hairy woman is portrayed as sexually attractive. I think that video culminates in somebody having sex with her.

A man who has sex with a pizza, or rather, uses it as a masturbatory aid.

Medium RPT:

A man who defecates three undigested sausages in a row, which had clearly just been inserted into his anus for this purpose.

A man who inserts a screwdriver into his urethra and appears to engage in some form of masturbation while doing so. (Also related to this were videos showing men using cacti, hammers, clamps, batteries and long metal rods in conjunction with their erect penis.)

A man who eats the raw ingredients of an omelette, then makes himself vomit what he has eaten into a frying pan, where he cooks the omelette and eats it again.

High RPT:

A woman shoots a bear from a tree. A man then has sex with her on the corpse of the bear while other male hunters stand around and watch (and film).

A man films himself while he defecates onto a plate. He is also wearing a gimp mask of sorts. He then crouches down and eats the faeces.

The corpse of a baby is being analysed by surgeons. They cut the baby’s torso open to find that it has been stuffed with hard drugs, presumably an attempt to get them across a border unseen.

Highest RPT: (although we still haven’t concluded whether this is higher than “Drug Baby”) A man bends over as a large stallion with erect penis is guided on top of him by another man. The horse’s massive penis enters his anus and he lets out a blood-curdling scream and the horse ejaculates. At the time there was a story going around saying that the man had died as a result of internal injuries.

What do all of these things have in common? The answer (in my opinion) is that they document extremely shocking human behaviour. It isn’t enough for these videos to be shocking and to involve humans. We have encountered very graphic violent injuries on the internet, particularly the results of suicides, military battles, violent assaults and serious motor accidents. Neither of us find these to be RPT, although they are often very shocking. The reason, I think, is that to injure or kill someone may be the desire of a person in a very complicated mental state, but the fact is that it is a very simple desire. The most devastating carnage can be caused by somebody with this simple desire. I once saw a video about a very badly-mutilated baby, which I genuinely thought was very high RPT, but after researching it I realized that this was a condition that occurs fairly regularly amongst children, and is well-known in the medical profession. Some people (doctors and nurses) have to witness this phenomenon regularly. We are interested foremost in studying deep perversions and fetishes, and the most complex extremes of human action. We are not interested in studying the actions of God. As great a designer as God is, I think He may be an even more perverted and sadistic agent. As we are atheists we regard these events to be the result of chance, and therefore not related to intention, on anybody’s part.

Although we currently only include videos, I would like to think that an RPT only needs to be a description of an event. A video describes an event very well, and a picture often does not. I would like to include textual descriptions of events as RPT. There are surely more extreme events recorded in prose than on video, since the video events can be reported by text anyway. I would like to incorporate examples like the German cannibal into the RPT network, (and particularly the person who agreed to be eaten- a very strange suicide?). Stories like the Darwin Awards are also quite high RPT. Also in the news recently, an alternative comedian had surgery to have an ear grafted onto his forearm (I believe it wasn’t a real ear, but made out of cartilage). He plans to have a microphone installed in the “ear” so that people can listen to what it “hears”. This is certainly RPT. It would be more RPT if he had used one of his own ears and carried out the operation himself.

We currently have some on the list that I no longer consider to be RPT. These are remains, I believe, from the days when we measured extremeness, and often don’t express any perverse human action. These include Saddam’s hanging, a “two-headed” girl (conjoined twins). I am unsure about another video, known as “Rackem Willie”. This depicts a homeless black crack addict who says and does weird things. I’m coming around to the idea that he does those things because he is a crack addict, and I would do them if I were in his position. I don’t think he is necessarily freely choosing to act that way.

Only one event at a time can be RPT. To clarify my point, consider the following fictional story:

At 3PM Martin has oral sex with a duck in the beak. At 4PM he gouges out his own eyes.

This is two separate cases of RPT. I would estimate that they are both medium RPT. But if he were to do both acts in conjunction, presumably in order to satisfy some desire that requires them both to be completed simultaneously, then I think this is very high RPT.

Early on in the project we discussed that the degree of RPT is related to the concepts being used in the story, and particularly combinations of different concepts at one time. So a standard rape might be RPT 0.5. If it is a same-sex rape, this could elevate it to 0.7. If furthermore, the people involved are blood-related, this might raise the RPT to 4-5. Suppose the person being raped is paralyzed, pregnant, an infant, dead, an animal, a celebrity, killed after rape or a combination of these and it could be 5-8, possibly higher..

It was also noted how some of the things we had witnessed appeared to be so unique that there was an element of artistic creativity in some of the actions being carried out. Even though we were both quite acquainted with the ways of the internet, there was often something we would see that we actually hadn’t had the imaginative capacity to conceive of before. We are both quite intelligent, and we granted that to come up with some of these actions required to some extent, a degree of great imagination, possibly genius.

One can also draw a distinction between two kinds of RPT, which at a broad guess I would say each tends to crop up about as often. Some RPT acts are immoral, and some are amoral. By this I mean, that the former involve a human harming another human (or perhaps animal), and the latter involve a human not harming anybody else, although usually themselves. Personally I think that any action that does not harm anybody else is permissible, or any action performed by a group where each member of the group has agreed to perform it, and not harming anybody outside the group, is permissible. I believe the only counter-examples to this rule are cases where a person has a mental disorder. This is an issue that I find it very hard to correctly theorize about. On the commonsensical view, it seems to me that if we are ever right in saying that some person has a mental disorder that makes them act in a way that we should stop them from acting (and they are not harming anybody but themselves) then we can say the same about everybody and every action. If anybody has a mental disorder then everybody has a mental disorder, since there are no precise boundaries to being “mental”.

On the other hand, it seems we do have a responsibility to children to protect them from the things they appear to want to do. (I mean more than just the cases where the child fails to understand that the fire is dangerous, and we protect them from their stupidity. I mean cases where they understand the danger and want to be burned, and we are effectively protecting them from themselves) As far as I can see, when we stop a person doing something that does not harm anybody else, we are taking away their rights as a person: we are effectively saying they are not a person, or at least not fully a person. A child for example, would really be a developing person, a person to some lesser degree than adults. There are many rights we don’t give to babies. In many senses they aren’t people at all. It could even be argued that they are slaves or prisoners. I think it is always dangerous to proclaim that somebody is not, or not fully, a person. That is the road to genocide, slavery, forced-euthanasia, and every one of the worst things humans are capable of in large groups. But it may also be the best thing for these “people”. We have to ask: which is most important: that a person be allowed to act according to their beliefs and desires except for when this has a negative effect on others, or that they achieve maximal utility, without detracting from other people’s utility? Tough question, but an important one.

Another point: so far the highest RPT we have officially given has been 6.5 out of 10, “Drug Baby”. We considered that “Horse Fucker” might be 7 out of 10, but this was never officially decided, as I recall it may have been because we became doubtful about the legitimacy of the claim that the recipient had died as a result of the injury. Also, I felt that the video was so brutally shocking that we may have been biased by it. We were both familiar with bestiality before, and I suspect that had we seen a written report of it, we would not have given it 7, even if we knew the man had died. The visual impact of the blow could well have shocked us into calling it a 7, whereas I felt quite unprovoked by “Drug Baby”, and felt that I judged it objectively, and 6.5 was fair.

The reason we have only gone as high as 6.5 for something that is extremely shocking, I think, is because we realize that there is a vast potential for higher RPTs beyond our own comprehension as yet. I have mentioned already how we encountered some things that are relatively low RPT that we admitted to not previously being able to conceive, so it would definitely be bad reasoning to declare “Drug Baby”, or anything else, as extreme as it gets. In fact, I would say that it is more likely that the highest possible RPT would be better expressed as 20, than that “Drug Baby” is the highest or close to it. At the moment we are only able to quantify over what we know is actual. There must surely be more perverse and disgusting things that have actually happened, things that are actual but unknown. Then consider logical space. I have already mentioned a few fictional examples of RPT, these are known possible RPTs. By far the highest number of RPTs, I think, are unknown possible RPTs. These are the actions that are simply humanly capable. I have become quite desensitized to these shocking stories, and now only occasionally feel even slightly nauseous at a story or video, but I suspect that there might be an event happening in some possible world (even close possible worlds) that would literally cause me to die through shock. This is speculation of course, but I find it more intuitively likely than not. Humans are capable of some very extreme actions. Fortunately this has an upside I believe. When there are people around who independently imagine the possibility of severing their penis through the urethra perpendicular to the spine, and then masturbating through “both of their penises”, and carrying out these actions, we can expect there to be people who independently imagine brilliant advances in human scientific and philosophical theory. For every horse-fucker there is a Wittgenstein. For every soldier who eats a live chicken there is a Lewis, and for every man who amputates his own penis and testicles there is a Godel. At least I hope there is only one maniac per genius…otherwise we are surely doomed…doomed in psychologically interesting and bizarre ways.

It enthralls me that many of the people featured in RPTs are probably well-functioning members of society. If we consider all of the actual RPTs that have happened amongst the currently living population on Earth, I wonder how many people, or what proportion have committed an RPT? I suspect quite a high amount. I’m tempted to ask people who I’ve only just met, “Have you ever shoved a long metal rod down your penis shaft?” or, “Have you ever tried to hang yourself to enhance an orgasm?” These are clearly not socially acceptable things to say, but there are so many of these people that by not saying these things I’m bound to miss out on asking somebody who does x whether they do x, and why they do it, since that is the fascinating part. These activities are so bizarre and unknown to the laypeople (who are the same people who partake in them), that to even ask people whether they engage in them is very mildly RPT. I’d be considered a weirdo by the very people who do these sorts of things. I don’t think I actually do anything, or have any desires to do anything, that is RPT, but might it be the case that if one desires to do an RPT, they don’t recognize it as an RPT? Possibly, although I suspect I’d be an objective enough judge to realize.