I think my viewing of it leans more towards Sadism as I only watch the early shows where the Munters & divs get slung out crying.
This is one of my two big problems with X-Factor. To me, the early shows are like the television equivalent of our ancestors going to the asylum to laugh at the inmates - quite an apt description as it goes, as if you believe what you read, one contestant this year, having also entered two or three previous times, was found to have been diagnosed as mentally ill.
I would never willingly watch this parade of the gullible and deluded, but unfortunately the wife's sister is an XF addict and I've been forced to sit through it whenever we visit - it's just utterly toe-curling watching people publicly sacrifice their dignity in this way in front of a baying mob that masquerades as an audience.
My second problem is with Simon Cowell himself - there isn't a word in the English language to adequately sum up the degree of contempt I have for him and his continued rape of the music industry. The amount of audio excrement that this man pumps to modern teenagers is staggering.
Who has X-Factor ever produced with any staying power? Leona Lewis and Will Young have pretty much disappeared and JLS's shelf-life as the boy band du jour are surely numbered. None of these have any kind of 'X-Factor' as far as talent is concerned - they are just stereotypes that fill the next perceived gap in the market. Once that gap in the market is filled, and the cash cow well and truly milked, the acts find themselves as fodder for those tawdry 'celebrity' gossip mags or return to the obscurity whence they came.
But then each September, back comes Simon with another series and the whole cynical cycle repeats itself ...