"Crunch Time for Crush Freaks: New Laws Seek to Stamp Out Stomp Flicks"
by Dan Kapelovitz
What do mice, lizards, frogs, snails, crickets, worms and guinea pigs have in common? As unsexy as these creatures may be, they are among the favorite fixations of a subculture of masturbators commonly known as "crush freaks." Creepy-crawlies are essential to a good time for the members of this twisted branch of the pervert family tree, but merely tuning in to the Discover Channel's Animal Planet is not likely to bring satisfaction to a crush freak. A wasp or a lobster will not titillate a devotee of this bizarre paraphilia unless the beast is being squooshed to death beneath a female foot.
"The fetish is very old, and it starts in childhood, when the child observes an adult, usually a woman, stepping on an insect," explains Jeff Vilencia, publisher of The American Journal of Crush Freaks and the producer of more than 50 crush videos, including Smush, a worm-mashing flick. "He becomes sexually aroused, sort of by happenstance, and as he becomes an adolescent, he eroticizes his behavior in his sexuality and it becomes a part of his love map."
Often thought to be a subcategory of the much more common foot fetish, the crush fixation also incorporates aspects of giantessophilism (the love of gigantic women), sadomasochism and trampling.
Because it is not the everyday XXX consumer who sprouts a trouser tent when watching small things die slow, painful deaths, most of the crush videos that have been produced are tailor-made, allowing customers to specify what type of creature the woman in the film will crush, and with what footwear. Some men want to see stiletto heels, other perverts prefer pumps. Barefoot flattening flicks are a subcategory of the genre.
The American Journal of Crush Freaks, with about 500 subscribers, along with Squish! and In Step, fetish magazines, cater to men who beat off to the misfortunes that befall the small, but the Internet is the primary supplier of stomp-related stroke materials. Some 2,000 video titles are thought to exist that cater specifically to mash men, almost exclusively online. The Web also allows stomp enthusiasts to communicate with others who share their passion on chat rooms. The Official Crush Message Board is an electronic forum where smoosh fans from all over the world offer tips on where to download crush pics; one page calls attention to an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that features series star Sarah Michelle Gellar stepping on a six-inch-tall demon.
"The most extreme thing I ever heard of was this guy in Utah somewhere," recalls publisher Jeff Vilencia. "He made a Plexiglass platform, and he would lie under it, and the prostitute or whatever would crush things for him. One thing he liked was to take a lizard and glue it down to the glass. Then he put the lizard's arms in the Christ position, and he would have her step on it while he masturbated under this glass platform."
"I don't remember when exactly I first developed this fetish, " says a middle-aged squash enthusiast who goes by the nickname Wormee. "At some point, whenever I saw a woman step on a bug or a cigarette, it would spark the giantess fantasies: What if it were me instead of that cigarette being ground beneath her sole? When you see her step on a bug, you get to live your fantasy out through it, imagining you are the bug getting stepped on, helpless and overpowered by this woman.
"To me, it's all part of femme-dom S&M," adds Wormee. "You admire the woman's power, her ability to dominate or take control. If she's 1,000 times bigger than you, there's nothing you can do--she steps on you, and crushes you out of existence like a bug, on a whim. She's significant--you're not."
"Sometimes I'm a giantess's playtoy," says fellow crush afficionado FlatNme. "They will find me, trap me under their leather boot soles and crush me flat. And I will die well--with a smile." Asked where he draws the line on crushing, FlatNme replies, "Animals larger than mice...or bigger than the shoe itself. No cats or grown chickens or any sick shit like that."
Crush freaks are undoubtedly a strange bunch--so strange that they have found themselves under an suffocating degree of scrutiny lately. FlatNme and Wormee insist on being identified by their Internet screen names, not as an extension of their kink, but out of the fear that they will be prosecuted as criminals for their preferred means of getting their freak on.
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Frog Stomp is a 90-minute video that features "Crush Goddess" Vanessa trampling hundreds of tree frogs beneath her high-heel sandals; in Buttcrush Ballet Shoe Barefoot Crush, Sherry flattens mice under her beautifully shaped glutes. In Tit Crush, Vanessa reappears to smother pinkies (crush-speak for baby mice) between her 38-DDD hooters. All three squash flicks were either produced or distributed by Getsmart, a California-based company owned by a mild-mannered man named Gary Thomason. On June 18, 1999, Thomason was placed under arrest by the Ventura County, California Sheriff's office.
Ironically, it was not one of Thomason's own videos that led to his legal troubles. Thomason's path to criminal prosecution began in May 1998, when the United States Humane Society purchased a crush video produced by Steponit, a Burbank, California, company, and forwarded the tape to Tom Connors, a deputy district attorney from Ventura County, California. Connors screened the tape and was appalled.
"You can kill animals all day long," says Connors. "They do it in slaughterhouses. What matters is how you kill it." Torture, according to Connors, occurs when "you stretch [the animal] out and tie it down on the ground and slowly kill it by stepping on it and squashing it and breaking its bones." Connors recalls one crush video in which "it took four minutes to kill this little guinea pig."
In spite of the gruesome footage in his possession, Connors was unable to bring cruelty to animals charges against Steponit because the three-year statute of limitations had expired from the film's production date. Furthermore, Steponit's owner had shut down the company's P.O. Box and pulled its advertising off the Internet.
Law-enforcement officials have consistently been foiled in their attempts to enforce animal-cruelty laws against crush filmmakers because the actual perpetrators of the cruelty are typically shown from the knees down, making identification difficult, if not impossible. Thwarted in his attempt to bust Steponit, Deputy District Attorney Connors decided that the only way to prosecute crush-video manufacturers was to penetrate the animal cruelty subculture and catch someone in the act.
In June of 1998, Susan Creede, an investigator for the Ventura County D.A.'s office, assumed the screen name "Minnie" and logged onto crush freak chat rooms. Minnie claimed to have been involved in the production of several crush videos with her boyfriend. She was greeted by a veritable avalanche of responses from around the world. One man requested a custom movie showing a dog being crushed to death.
Getsmart's Gary Thomason was the unlucky dupe who became ensnared in Creede's trap, allegedly initiating contact with the agent and sending her a video of a woman crushing a rat. A criminal complaint against Thomason further alleges that he invited the undercover officer to star in a custom rodent-stamping video.
In the complaint, Creed says she watched Thomason tape a rat to a glass table in his apartment. Instead of crushing the rat to death, however, Creede pronounced a prearranged code word, cueing to police to storm in and arrest Thomason. Subsequently, Diane Chaffin, the star of the video Thomason had sent to Creede, was arrested as well. Bail was set at $30,000 for Thomason and $45,000 for Chaffin.
Chaffin crushed 12 rodents (two rats, four mice, and six baby mice) to death in the Getsmart video she appeared in, but she was prosecuted for only three of the deaths (the other nine animals died too quickly for authorities to prove that they had been tortured).
In one scene, Chaffin picks up a baby mouse and says, "Hey, pinkie, I'm gonna teach you a lesson. I'm gonna teach you to love my heel." The animal is then forced to "love" Chaffin's heel until death quickly does them part. Another mouse has his tail tied to the ground; Chaffin teases the ill-fated creature, letting it escape briefly before flattening it to a pulp. Chaffin holds her bloody soles up to the camera, displaying the guts of the pulverized rodents.
On November 5, 1999, Chaffin pleaded no contest to one count of cruelty to animals. She was sentenced to three years probation and 365 days in jail (the maximum penalty is four-and-a-half years in prison). With credit for 132 days of time served, Chaffin will be free in about seven months.
"She is a victim of Gary Thomason," says Antonio Bestard, Chaffin's lawyer. "She used very poor judgment."
For his part, Gary Thomason has vowed to fight his arrest. The filmmaker expects his case to be thrown out of court on the grounds that rodents are not protected by cruelty-to-animals laws. Furthermore, Thomason improbably insists that mice-flattening videos "sicken" him; he also alleges that agent Creede wanted very badly to star in a rat-crushing video. (Creede's superior has forbidden her to discuss the case.)
"The California Superior Court is willing to strip Gary [Thomason] of his Constitutional rights and grant those rights to mice," says "Sparky," a crush enthusiast who prefers to keep his real name secret. "We are moving toward a totalitarian society, and the people are letting it happen. The animal rights movement seeks not the humane treatment of animals--they seek the animalistic treatment of humans."
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"What do Ted Bundy and Ted Kaczynski have in common?" asks Elton Gallegly, a Republican member of Congress representing Simi Valley, California. "They tortured or killed animals before killing people."
Gallegly, the sponsor of anti-crush bill H.R. 1877 claims that crush videos sell for as much as $300 apiece, providing incentive for more people to join the crush-video industry, which translates into a greater number of animals tortured to death for the sake of stroke material.
"The bigger the animal, seems to be what justifies the bigger price," says Gallegly. "We have testimony in our committee where there were even monkeys that were trampled or killed, and it's not just killing them--it's torturing them. That's apparently what excites some people. Far be it from me to pass judgment on what excites people, but the fact remains [that] if it is an agonizing death to an innocent animal, that is not acceptable to me. I would think there would be other ways for folks to get the satisfaction without killing or maiming an innocent animal."
During debates on the House floor, lawmakers championing the anti-crush bill stressed that a connection exists between animal cruelty and crimes against human beings. A 1985 study of prison inmates that found that 25 percent of aggressive criminals had abused animals in childhood, as opposed to zero percent in a group of noncriminals, was often cited. Testimony from the FBI also suggested a correlation between torturing animals and violence toward human beings.
"Some of society's most brutal killers began their violent ways by killing and maiming small animals," says Congressman Lamar Smith, a Republican from Texas. "By putting an end to these disgusting and cruel videos, we could discourage the behavior of these individuals before it escalates to more serious crimes directed not toward animals, but toward people."
Crush enthusiasts deny that their fetish leads to increasingly violent urges.
"It's just a sexual fantasy," says Wormee in defense of his favorite turn-on. "You fulfill it like any other kink--watching videos, pictures on the Internet, or just by seeing it in real life."
Jeff Vilencia believes that the argument being forwarded by lawmakers amounts to nothing more than an easy way to demonize eccentric sexual behavior.
"Let's face it--there's a small number of guys beating off to this, not even enough to worry about, let alone write a major piece of legislation," Vilencia says.
"They've got to throw in the baby thing," Vilencia adds. "They say, ‘Eventually, they're gonna want to murder a human baby.' "
According to Vilencia, the fetish idoesn't revolve around deriving a sadistic thrill from killing helpless animals; crush enthusiasts are masochists, not sadists.
Even so, animal-rights activists have been at the forefront of the battle against crush videos. Actress Loretta Swit, better known as "Hot Lips" Houlihan from the TV sitcom M.A.S.H., serves on the board of directors for Actors and Others for Animals, an animal-rights group that hopes to eliminate the profit motive behind flicks such as Rodents in Bondage.
"Only the most depraved minds can be getting off on this," Swit asserted in testimony given before Congress about crush videos. "There is nothing to learn except that it's okay to step on, torture, maim, mutilate and kill a living creature."
"What a cunt head," Vilencia says of Swit. "She called me an ‘insect murderer.' Hot Lips--another useless Hollywood personality who has nothing better to do with their time than to defend animals while they eat a big steak dinner somewhere afterward."
"This is sickening and despicable stuff that needs to end," says Mickey Rooney, presumably another "useless Hollywood personality" who publically opposes crush flicks. "Is this what we are going to leave our children? These videos--crush videos?"
Vilencia dismisses animal-rights activists, his primary adversaries, as hypocrites.
"The Humane Society--they're so humane, they want to cut the balls off of dogs and kitties," Vilencia contends, adding that people don't care if animals lives are snuffed out, "as long as it is not for sexual gratification. You can hunt them down, you can remove their sex organs, you can eat them, test them for fashion, test them for medicine--just don't be beating off to that shit."
***
Criminal-defense attorney Dan Barton, a partner with Nolan, Armstrong & Barton, LLP, in Palo Alto, California, characterizes Elton Gallegly's anti-crush bill as a classic example of overlegislation.
"Acts of animal abuse are already illegal. It's just a censorship law, designed to take the profit motive out of unpopular speech," Barton says of H.R. 1877. "This statute is so poorly written that it would prohibit distribution of a documentary on collecting butterflies. Does this require everyone who runs a newsstand to make sure that there are no pictures of cockfights or bullfights in their magazines? I think so."
In Barton's view, legislators like Gallegly know that H.R. 1887 is an unconstitutional restraint on speech, but an insincere effort to acquire political capital.
"It's just like the flag-burning law," Barton says. "Congress enacts the law knowing that it's unconstitutional, and knowing that it will get reversed by the courts. It's playing chicken with the courts, and it's playing chicken with the First Amendment."
"It is clear that we can constitutionally prohibit cruelty to animals," says Congressman Bobby Scott, a Democrat from Virginia who weighed in against crush movies during debates in the House of Representatives. "However, it is [also] clear that we cannot prohibit communications regarding such acts, including the film communications done for purely commercial gains." Scott compares crush videos to footage shown on television programs such as Cops, in which "human beings are intentionally killed or pistol whipped by criminals." The conduct may be illegal, but televising the conduct for profit is not.
FlatNme believes that people such as Congressman Gallegly have blown a harmless quirk entirely out of proportion.
"The animals and bugs crushed are the same ones used to feed pets--does it really matter which beast they feed?" FlatNme asks. "Whether it's for a pet to survive or to feed man's odd fetishes--they die all the same. And pet stores and bait shops profit from both sales all the same. Leave us alone. We're not out spreading AIDS or killing people. We are harmless to man and its society. Let us live our lives in the silence we enjoy and turn off the damn spotlight!"
In December 1999, President Clinton signed H.R. 1877 into law, establishing federal criminal penalties for the creation, sale or possession of "a depiction of cruelty to animals." In a concession to free- speech concerns, a clause was added late in the legislative process that makes exceptions for works of "serious" religious, political, artistic or educational merit.
Since Clinton signed Gallegly's bill into law, almost all of the dozens of crush-related Web sites that once existed on the Internet have disappeared. The Official Crush Message board has vanished. With a few exceptions, crush fetishists have gone underground.
"The people in the crush community are really nice people," says Sparky, who defiantly operates one of the few remaining crush-related Web sites, http://neuromancer.web1000.com , which features a time-lapse photo gallery of women pulverizing pasta and trampling crustaceans.
"How do you regulate or legislate a fetish?" Sparky asks. "It's like trying to blow out a flare. It's the potential of arrest, prosecution and punishment for communicating that tends to abberate [sic] the soul. That's where your antisocial behavior comes from. Leave us to mind our own business."
(This article first appeared in the May 2000 issue of Hustler Magazine.)
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