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Public Issues Beneath the Headlines | Sisyphus Express: In Depth
Sisyphus Express

🚘 In This Episode

Note: This episode was first published on July 31, 2025.
Also: if children are nearby or you are somewhere unsuitable for this episode, please use headphones or listen at another time.
Welcome to Sisyphus Highway: In Depth.
When sex enters the news, it immediately attracts attention, prurient curiosity, shame, and moral judgment. Yet amid the torrent of discussion, actual perpetrators often lose their names and faces, while victims’ identities, bodies, photographs, and details of their victimization circulate endlessly.
Why are cases often named for victims rather than perpetrators? When voyeuristic or intimate images leak, why does the public first scrutinize the person depicted? When the camera turns from women toward men, sexual minorities, or even animals, how do objectification, entertainment, and violence appear?
Beginning with real news stories, we discuss how sex becomes a media resource and how language, images, and power determine who may look, who is forcibly exposed, and who is permitted to retain a whole personhood and dignity.
 

📍 Roadside Guide

- From the Cho Doo-soon case, also known as the Hope case, to the Epstein case and his island: why do victims always become the focus of circulation?
- Bringing actual evil to center stage: why perpetrators’ names, images, and responsibility matter
- From profanity to subtitle translation: why do women always become sexual objects in language?
- Sensationalism, titillation, and privacy leaks: is the news reporting an event or consuming its victim?
- From the Justin Lee case to the Zou Zhenhao case: how do images of sexual assault become tools for documentation, boasting, and continued humiliation?
- MaskPark, “China’s Nth Room”: when voyeurism becomes an industry chain built on group collaboration
- The Jiao case in Nanjing: when a man becomes the object of the gaze, why does the news turn to entertainment?
- The assault in Zhengzhou People’s Park: how does humiliation of sexual minorities become discipline within groups of men?
- Denmark’s animal-sex industry: when the object cannot refuse, who draws the boundary of desire?
 

⛽️ Refueling Station

- Tupao Monster Subtitling Group
- Angels Wear White (2017) (film)
- YOLO (2024) (film)
Episode editor: 粒子
2026.08.20
Audio in Chinese

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