Vengeance Porn: How America Became Addicted to Righteous Harm
Cops, To Catch a Predator, Crime Junkie, oh my!
In a culture saturated with punishment narratives, a term like vengeance porn is perhaps provocative, though apt in describing our relationship with violence. Vengeance porn describes a deeply embedded American cultural pattern: Our collective obsession with watching perceived wrongdoers get what they deserve. Whether it's in the courtroom, in true crime podcasts, or in academy award-winning films, we are fed a steady diet of narratives where justice is served through harsh consequences, public humiliation, and violent retribution. These narratives are crafted not only to inform, but to gratify a deep psychological craving humans have.
What Is Vengeance Porn?
Vengeance porn is the glorification and emotional consumption of punitive outcomes. It's not just about crime and punishment; it's about feeling good when someone suffers for violating a social norm or moral code. The German word for this is schadenfreude. The Dutch word is leedvermaak. The Russian word is злорадство (zloradstvo). The ancient Greek word ἐπιχαιρεκακία (Epikhairekakia) also captures this same sentiment. Humans across the world, in vastly different ages and cultures, recognize this part of the human psyche. Violence porn offers us emotional closure, a dopamine hit of righteousness. And when this becomes habitual, it becomes addictive.
In media, it's the courtroom drama, obsessed over on YouTube tea channels, TikTok gossip, and news bites that end with a 20-to-life, no chance at parole, conviction. In politics, it's the campaign promise to "crack down on crime" and "lock them up." In casual conversation, it's the schadenfreude we feel when someone we dislike gets cancelled, caught, fired, or hurt. In all these instances, the emotional reward is the same: Satisfaction from someone else's suffering, so long as we've deemed it morally justified.
Why Are We So Drawn to It?
Because vengeance is emotionally easier than accountability.
Vengeance bypasses the discomfort of self-examination. It diverts our attention from the shame we may feel for our own roles in systemic or personal harm. It allows us to point outward instead of inward. If we can focus on their wrongness, we don’t have to face our own. If, for example, external moral attitudes and punishments are reflected back at me when I look in the mirror, it's easier to think, feel, and believe that I am a good person. (External social ideals matching your internal version of self, psychologists call this congruence.) This desire for a matching external and internal justice system, can be born out of being harmed yourself, and be warped into the perhaps overused, though true, phrase: Hurt people, hurt people.
America, in particular, has cultivated a national psyche that is allergic to shame but addicted to moral clarity. This country was built on unresolved harm: Murdered North American ancestors, enslavement, violent acculturation practices, religious discrimination and hatred, exclusion, and exploitation. To reckon with that history is destabilizing. To atone is exhausting. But to punish someone else? That feels good.
This emotional sleight-of-hand helps explain why we're so often more comfortable with criminalizing poverty than alleviating it, more invested in prison expansions than restorative justice, more compelled by police procedurals than trauma recovery. Our cultural narratives don't just entertain; they train us to associate justice with pain. We even feel this in our bodies viscerally and chronically.
Who Becomes the Target?
To maintain this emotional ecosystem, we need a steady stream of DC and Marvel comic-style bad guys.
Criminals. Immigrants. Substance users. Protestors. The unhoused. The mentally ill. The disabled. Trans people. These are the figures we are told threaten our order and safety and therefore, must be punished, publically. Often stripped of context and humanity, these scapegoats are presented as problems to be solved, not people to be understood, not your very neighbors or family members to be loved and protected.
In these narratives, the more dehumanized the target, the more justified the vengeance. We don’t just want to correct the behavior; We want to see the person suffer. This is how vengeance porn functions, it offers the illusion of justice without the burden of nuance. It offers psychological distance and personal reconciliation as we stand, looking through a one-way social media mirror, with the privilege of judge, jury, and executioner, without fear that the mirror will reflect any of our own responsibilities, failures, traumas, or moral discomfort back at us.
The Psychological Trade-Off
There’s a cost to this addiction.
It erodes our ability to hold complexity. It inhibits empathy. It normalizes cruelty as a means to an end. And it keeps us locked in an emotional loop where our own traumas, pain, and suffering are never actually resolved, only displaced.
Vengeance, after all, is not the same as healing.
When we rely on vengeance as our emotional regulation tool, we remain spiritually hungry. We mistake punishment for closure. We confuse dominance with safety. And we lose the opportunity for actual growth, both personally and societally.
What Might Accountability Look Like Instead?
Real justice requires something else entirely:
The courage to examine our own roles in harming others
The willingness to repair what is broken
The ability to see humanity in both the harmed and the harmer
Accountability is not as clean or satisfying as vengeance. It doesn’t offer the same fast-food, quick-fix, emotional release. But it does offer something deeper: Connection, integrity, and the possibility of societal change and development.
In a society saturated with vengeance porn, choosing accountability is radical. It’s not just a moral choice; it’s a refusal to let someone else's pain become your entertainment.
American Examples of Vengeance Porn in Action
Consider the "tough on crime" policies of the 1980s and 1990s, such as mandatory minimums, three-strikes laws, and the War on Drugs, which disproportionately targeted Black and brown communities. These were not policies rooted in evidence-based rehabilitation or public health; they were engineered to satisfy a cultural craving for punishment, bolstered by sensationalist media coverage that painted entire neighborhoods as crime-ridden war zones.
Reality television shows like COPS and To Catch a Predator elevated humiliation and arrest to national pastimes, turning systemic issues into consumable entertainment. Podcasts like Crime Junkie bring real people's stories of the worst days of their lives to your ears and invites you to participate in the hunt for wrong-doers. Convicted Felon Trump's political campaigns have used slogans like "lock her up" to rally support not around policy, but around collective vengeance against a vilified figure.
This trend has metastasized into full-blown political ideology in the form of the far-right MAGA movement. Framed around grievance, retribution, and a return to an idealized past, MAGA has weaponized vengeance porn into a governing principle. Its adherents are not just angry, they are addicted to the emotional payoff of by punishing those labeled as un-American and non-conforming, whether immigrants, educators, LGBTQ+ communities, autistic children, and dissenting voices.
This is the psychological cost of refusing to reconcile with shame. When we cannot tolerate the vulnerability of examining our own complicity, we outsource our pain into rage at perceived wrongdoers and social norm breakers. That rage gets politicized. That politicization becomes fascism.
The MAGA regime is not an anomaly, it is a culmination. A cultural result of decades of unresolved shame, glorified violence, and the seductive power of moral vengeance.
Change starts with you. "We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.” Mahatma Gandhi
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