The parallel with pornography is so obvious that even the MSM can't quite ignore it... but oh, the contortions they have to go through to demonstrate to their own satisfaction that the two phenomena are completely different, even while they use "war porn" as a handy catch phrase to describe, er, war porn. Metaphorically, of course!
[...] the [...][US] army took the unusual step of demanding that its soldiers stop posting video clips on the web. And with good reason - last year, a minor scandal broke when it emerged that GIs were sending pictures of dead Iraqis to a website called Nowthatsfuckedup.com in exchange for naked pictures of other people's girlfriends. [...] Fifteen years ago, the French social theorist Jean Baudrillard argued - with his tongue partly in his cheek - that the first Gulf war did not really exist but was a mirage conjured up by the broadcast media. More recently, in his 2004 essay War Porn, Baudrillard drew attention to the way in which the garishly explicit images of barbarity arriving from Iraq borrowed from the aesthetics and production values of modern porn. The posing of Iraqi inmates for those famous pictures in Abu Ghraib prison, he pointed out, shot on digital camera and originally intended only for private distribution, smacked of a kind of specialist, niche pornography. The photos, he argued, constituted "the degradation, atrocious but banal, not only of the victims, but of the amateur scriptwriters of this parody of violence". [...] War porn is designed not to titillate, but to humiliate its victims and horrify its audience [...]Harkin in The Guardian Somehow despite recurring scandals about rape within the US military, the rapes committed against Iraqi women by occupying troops including the spectacularly wicked and brutal rape/murder of a teenager called Abir... the everpresent connection between military domination and sexual domination, military vindictiveness and sexual vindictiveness, militarised racism and militarised misogyny... the Librul Media just never manage to put 2 and 2 together. Trophy Videos from the theatre of operations are for them only metaphorically pornographic. The reality that much/most of contemporary commercial and amateur pornography is designedto humiliate its victims and to express themes of domination, ownership, vindictiveness, collective punishment, etc. perpetually escapes them. They use the word "titillate" without examinating what feelings or impulses are being tickled by this titillation.
The Spinifex Press anthology Not For Sale (Shameless Plug) was released in 2005. I contributed a lengthy essay on globalisation, capitalism, and pornography/prostitution which was written mostly in 2001-2002. The Abu Ghraib scandal broke while the book was in press, and I managed to wheedle the publisher into allowing me a few extra pages for an Addendum to my essay covering the issue of "trophy pictures," specifically analysing pornography as a kind of trophy picture. Even the addendum is fairly lengthy, so I'll offer the first few para here and then a link to the rest.
This essay was begun before 9/11, and was in near-final draft before the American invasion of Iraq. The original end notes indicate that hints of the sexualised abuse of prisoners were emerging in late 2002 or early 2003. By May 2004 the Abu Ghraib scandal had been officially broken by veteran US journalist Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, and as of final copy-editing the scandal continues to spread upwards into the Bush administration. Two things happened which compelled me to expand the terse comment which appears in the end notes.
When the first photographs were made available by the Washington Post and other media outlets, some images alleged to be of Iraqi prisoner abuse were found to be, instead, commercial "war porn" -- pornography specialising in military imagery. Specifically, they were of the gang rape of women dressed in flowing black robes and veils, apparently in a barren desert environment, by a group of men dressed in US-style military fatigues. In a discussion group online I read the comments of one angry American, shocked by the Abu Ghraib revelations, who said s/he was "relieved" to find that at least some of the pictures were "just ordinary commercial porno." Apparently it was possible for this person to disconnect -- utterly -- the existence of a thriving subgenre of porn devoted to racist depictions of the gang rape of "Arab" women by US soldiery, from the fact of actual US soldiery abusing and raping actual Arabs. This honest and naive expression of relief haunted me for weeks.
Then, in correspondence with a feminist colleague, the inevitable question was raised about the US troops at Abu Ghraib and the many digital pictures they took of prisoner abuse -- pictures that were traded, collected, shared via email, stored on personal and work-related computers, and finally "leaked" to the American public after months of ongoing torture and sexual abuse had been documented. Why, asked my colleague, why on earth, did they take pictures? "I mean, they're doing this stuff and it's horrible enough as it is," she wrote, "but by taking pictures they are just leaving evidence. Why do it, except that it adds to the sexualized thrill to be making porno?"
This is a good question, deeply thought-provoking, deeply connected to the first troubling incident. This question applies across the board. Why did the Nazis take pictures and meticulously document the atrocities committed in the camps? Why did a generation of White Hunters take pictures of themselves standing on wild animals they had shot? Why do hunters hang trophy heads on their walls? Why did White people take pictures of lynchings and make them into postcards that were then collected, traded, etc.? Why did GIs in Viet Nam collect ears (and other more private body parts) from their victims? Why did "Indian fighters" and bounty hunters in the old West collect body parts from dead Indians? And -- lastly -- why do men make documentary pornography? Reverting to our first question again: why is one kind of documentary pornography reassuring and normal, whereas another (like the Abu Ghraib pictures) is deeply shocking and horrible?
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