The sexual sadism of our culture, in peace and in war
The Abu Ghraib images have all the hallmarks of contemporary porn
Katharine Viner
Saturday May 22, 2004
The Guardian
I received some horrific photographs by email yesterday. Purporting to be from Iraq, they depicted the sexual abuse of women by US servicemen. On some, chadors were hitched up over the women's heads. On others, the women were naked while they were raped by groups of men. It is impossible to tell whether the photographs are real - those images we know have been seen by American senators - or faked. They make you sick to your stomach. And they look strangely familiar - like the XXX films in hotel rooms, like those "live rape!" emails sent to internet users, like porn.
If the photographs are genuine, they are the visual evidence of the sexual abuse of Iraqi women - abuse which we already know is common, with or without these grotesque images. We know that such images exist, because a US government report confirmed it. And we know that Iraqi women are being raped throughout the country, because both Amal Kadham Swadi, the Iraqi lawyer, and the US's own internal inquiry say that abuse is systemic and widespread. We also know this because all wars feature the abuse of women as a byproduct, or as a weapon. The ancient Greeks considered rape socially acceptable; the Crusaders raped their way to Constantinople; the English invaders raped Scottish women on Culloden Moor. The first world war, the second world war, Bosnia, Bangladesh, Vietnam - where the gangrape and murder of a peasant woman by US soldiers was photographed in stages by one if its participants.
But even if the pictures are mocked up, it makes you wonder where the images came from. Some woman, somewhere, had to be raped, or make it look like she was being raped. The poses, the large numbers of men to one woman, the violence - they have all the hallmarks of contemporary porn. Indeed, there is suspicion that the photos are part of a gruesome new trend - the manufacture of films showing the rape of women dressed as Iraqis by men dressed as US servicemen.
There's a difference, of course, between the making of pornography for money and the photographing of pornographic poses as war trophies: the consent of the woman involved. But to the consumer of these images, there's no way of knowing if there's been consent or not. They look the same.
Modern porn has become increasingly savage. "You're seeing more of these videos of women getting dragged on their faces, and spit on, and having their heads dunked in the toilet," says even pro-porn campaigner Nina Hartley. At the same time, the multibillion-dollar porn film industry, bigger than Hollywood, is widely seen as acceptable; just this week, EastEnders actor Nigel Harman told Heat magazine: "I have always wanted to make porn, I think the industry is very underrated." It is aggressively mainstream.
~snip~
more:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1222393,00.html