Why do we want our women raped and bloody?

I was flipping through the channels the other day and started watching the film The Watchmen.  After one woman was beaten and almost raped and another pregnant woman was shot to death, disgusted and repulsed I turned off the film.   What is it with the way we treat women on film?!  It seems that every TV show and so many movies are filled with images of beaten, raped, and mutilated women.......I remember watching the film "Breaking the Waves" a bunch of years ago and being so angry that I started yelling at the screen.  A few years after that, I barely made it through a screening of The Piano Teacher with the excellent Isabelle Huppert...what a vile film of a self mutilating, genital mutilating and self desecrating sex performed by Huppert's character...........I remember watching an episode of the highly praised "The Soprano's" where a young and vulnerable stripper is naked and being entered from behind by her abusive Mafia boyfriend while she is giving oral sex to someone else as she is being verbally abused....a few minutes later, her boyfriend drags her outside and beats her to death as he slams her head against a metal barrier.......that was the last time I watched that show........it is so disturbing to me that this is becoming so common in all our art, that it has ceased to become shocking and we just accept this deplorable treatment of women.........what does this say about us as men or as a society which so willingly accepts and supports these depictions......does art imitate life or does life imitate art, or does it become so entwined that we cease to see the distinction.........in addition to subjecting our children, our wives, girlfriends, mothers and sisters and daughters to these" artistic creations", we are subjecting our actresses to what I considered to be the equivalent of rape , abject disrespect. and sexual abuse. How can we as men and fathers hope to create a world in which our daughters are respected and valued if we continue to create and crave images in which women are nothing more than carnal objects created for the sole purpose of fulfilling our most base sexual desires and then being disposed of at the end of a fist o by the blade of a knife or tortured in the most horrific ways.  And we reward these stories with critical praise and awards, praising the way they push the envelope and always look for something that crosses boundaries just because they can...........lets start to explore stories which live up to our potential as men and women and begin showing us another way to relate to our female lovers, mothers and sisters. We have put so much energy into these truly disturbing portraits that I am concerned that it doesn't bring us all down that dark and soulless road and give our children such a bleak and heartless view of a man and woman's relationship that their only course of action is to live out these depraved versions of truth  as their only possible actions............let us realize how much power and influence we as artists have on each other and society in general and most important of all, our children, our future.....and let's not buy into that "it's just a movie or just a song"......no I do not believe in censorship, but I do believe we all need to begin to take responsibility for the power of what we say and what we create to influence others.......