Something touchy about me. If I'm watching a tv show or movie and a rape scene starts, I freak out. If I'm prepared, it's a little better but if it just jumps out at me with no preparation for it, I get incredibly upset. Same for certain types of violence.

I mean, I change the channel until it's over. Sometimes I can't even finish watching the show.

Am I the only one like that?

-- Anonymous, January 21, 2000

Answers

I'm pretty much the same way, although I'm not as bad as I used to be. I mean, I sat through Fight Club, although there were a lot of parts I couldn't watch. Then again, there were some parts of American Pie (which I saw last night) that I couldn't watch, either, so it may be more a matter of being grossed out than disturbed.

I used to freak, though. Anything involving stabbing or cutting -- if I watch it, I will have nightmares. It doesn't have to be explicit; the shower scene in Psycho will do it, too.

But I loved Scream and tolerated the sequel and fully intend to see Scream III. Go figure.

-- Anonymous, January 22, 2000

Violence makes me squirmy and often grosses me out completely. Some things I can't watch at all, like people injecting needles. That's an old old phobia of mine and it makes my skin crawl.

I went to see "Girl, Interrupted" today and there were a couple of needley scenes and it made my stomach all flip-floppy.

On cop shows, I don't mind when they're running around with guns, for example, because carrying a weapon is a part of a cop's job.

And "clean shooting" in movies, doesn't get to me much, I'm too inured to it from years of seeing it on TV.

But scenes where they show the blood, the guts, the expressions on people's faces, make me feel ill and skeevey.

And I think that that is natural. If someone didn't feel evena vauge sense of discomfort at seeing human suffering then I'd worry a little bit about their mental state.

It's just too easy for me to put myself in the victim's shoes ... I empathize and hence for me that's the source of the unease, discomfort and revulsion.

-- Anonymous, January 23, 2000

Scenes with knives and stabbing bother me, especially if the knife is being waved around, held to someone's throat, etc. If someone is suddenly stabbed, it doesn't bother me very much.

Fighting and guns don't bother me at all. It rarely seems real to me - I start noticing how the fight was choreographed, and get into the spirit of it. We watched "Never Say Never Again" on Saturday night and we were totally analysing the fights, comparing them to similar scenes in other Bond movies.

-- Anonymous, January 24, 2000

I'm with Lizzie and Beth K. -- duelling cowboy violence doesn't bother me at all. I can watch all of the gun battles between good and evil that Hollywood dishes out. Torture of innocent victims can give me bad dreams for weeks. Even little things like when kidnappers give their victim a sedative needle (shiver). I don't watch much TV anymore.

-- Anonymous, January 24, 2000

Few acts of violence in the media get to me, but the ones that do I don't forget. The two that pop readily to mind are the slaughtered cow in Apocalypse Now and the gunplay sex scene in The Man Who Fell to Earth. The former was hard to watch because they actually killed the damn cow. The latter was just about the creepiest thing ever put on film.

-- Anonymous, January 25, 2000