The sexual sadism of our culture, in peace and in war

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

and bound to get worse with the internet and all.

A spring edition of MS. magazine had an article about violent porn by Robert Jensen, "A Cruel Edge".

I think the growing acceptance of violent and/or humiliating porn will have ill effects on women & children (and everybody) in society.

It is the only way to get young people so sexually jaded that they'll have to buy Viagra and Levitra the rest of their lives.

...now we're just negotiating which levels of degradation of women you're willing to advocate.

("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.)

When will people wake up and stop abusing one another?
How in the hell can peaceful,people with love left inside ever hope to re-sensitize all the traumatized brutes in this culture to save life itself?.How can we get these sociopaths to feel another's pain when they rape and take and hurt them? Can we teach the numb to feel pain of another,without raping,taking from them or hurting them?? To tghe bully vunerabiulity is to be exploited,so they must believe and pretend they cannot feel,and will never become vunerable,so they will not care about anything but getting power and what they want!
So cruel,they have lost thier humanity,inwant of power,as thier twisting emotions make them become monsters and thier abuse of people makes more people become like them to avoid being hurt by them..
How do we stop the bullies from abusing without becoming just like them?

the failure to find WMDs in Iraq finally ended when America's quasi-religious crusade against evildoers with rape rooms itself turned into a digital snuff film. It says so much.