Addendum/Postscript
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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"Documentary pornography" is a term I am using to try to distinguish, for my own clarity, pornography of the imagination (such as literature, paintings, animation) from pornography that is photographed or filmed, using real people -- real women, children, real male and female models. It is pornography that, while some elements may be "faked" or simulated, purports to be a document of actual events. The fact that it is photographic -- still, film or video -- lends it, even in these digital times, an aura of verisimilitude. The use of live models required by this genre makes it documentary in other senses, which I'll address in a moment.
Structural similarities between the documented humiliation of prisoners and the conventions of "normal" pornography are many and strikingly obvious. The prisoners were made to masturbate for the camera; images and footage of women masturbating are a stock theme in commercial porn. The prisoners were made to pose in tableaux suggestive of homosexual activity such as fellatio; a large and profitable subgenre of commercial porn is "girl/girl", in which (presumably heterosexual) models are posed in tableaux mimicking lesbian sex, or directed to engage in sexual behaviour with each other while the camera rolls. These models usually bear little resemblance to real-life lesbians, being selected (like most porn models) for their conformity to commercial and male-defined standards of heterosexual attractiveness.
In these forms of documentary porn there are surely two gratifications, one overt and one tacit. The overt gratification is the fantasy of violation of privacy, of spying on the intimate and private acts of another person. But the Abu Ghraib pictures should illuminate for us a further, tacit or covert gratification: the gratification of knowing or believing that the persons depicted were compelled or persuaded or paid to submit to a violation of privacy in reality , to strike poses and perform acts in reality which most people would not care to have seen or photographed by others. This is one sense in which this genre is genuinely documentary.
The "kick" of girl/girl porno lies partly in its catering to the fantasy of violating the privacy of lesbians, of making even sex between women -- something quite threatening to male sexual prerogative -- serve a male agenda; the other, tacit element is the kick of seeing "normal girls" made to emulate lesbian sexual activity. The assumption is that homosexual activity is repulsive, and that therefore the models are disgusted by it and endure it under some compulsion -- whether
the compulsion of money, force of personality, or physical threat. Pictures of real lesbians -- at Gay Pride rallies, for example -- kissing, necking, and flirting are often considered "disgusting" and "ugly" by the same men who enjoy "girl/girl fantasy" porn. Lesbians in the public world who kiss, hold hands, or otherwise behave like a sexually intimate couple (in a restaurant, in a park, at a movie) have often been subjected to abuse, threats, and violence from hetero men -- the same men who constitute the market for ever-popular girl/girl porno. What is disgusting in this case of real lesbians in the real world seems to be the women's autonomy; what is attractive in the case of commercialised, fictionalised documentary porn is the evidence of reduced autonomy, the dissonance between what the porn consumer assumes are the real wishes and feelings of the model, and the actions she is being bribed or forced to perform. If the model were a real lesbian she would experience violation and humiliation due to the invasion and exploitation of her sexual privacy by men; if the model is conventionally heterosexual then she is presumed to experience a degree of humiliation in being made to commit, or mime, homosexual acts.
Ironically (being otherwise deeply opposed in many ways) Arab men and Western lesbians both represent an Uppity Other, in their different ways claiming a private culture and personal pride, defiantly separate and distinct from white male Euroamerican power. It's not surprising that a parallel to girl/girl porn is found in the pictures from Abu Ghraib, in which Arab men were forced to pose in suggestively homosexual tableaux. The covert kick of documentary porno is that the viewer/purchaser believes it genuinely documents some violation of the will and autonomy of the subject. In the Abu Ghraib images this features has become overt.
Our reaction -- as a nation and a public -- to the use of Iraqi prisoners in amateur pornography shows that we believe this was a deeply humiliating experience for them. Our media have made much of the "special" characteristics of Arabs, to explain why this experience is so very humiliating for them in particular -- whereas it is of course perfectly harmless and good for the women and girls spread, splayed, stripped and mocked throughout our commercial advertising/porn media nexus. This neocolonial cultural essentialism deserves an entire essay or book unto itself, of course, starting with a no-holds-barred critique of The Arab Mind (appallingly enough, this racist classic appears to have been used as a serious planning document by the Bush regime). But our space here is limited and we cannot afford to digress.
To recap: no matter what degree of fakery may be involved in some documentary pornography, it is still presented and consumed as a document of humiliation; even if the actresses or models are inured to their trade, take it casually or even take pride in it, the consumer is still buying the idea or concept of a document of humiliation. This explains the enduring market -- despite an astounding glut of every variety of "normal" pornography available in many media – for "real" porno, as in the "real incest, real rape" porn sites and videos which claim to document real abuse. The primary fantasy is the purported story of voyeurism, homosexual humilation or rape. When this fantasy is no longer sustained by a willing suspension of disbelief, the secondary fantasy provides the thrill. The secondary fantasy involves the humilation or constraint of the people used to create the primary fantasy. When this secondary fantasy is weakened by a conventional belief that porno is a Good Thing and the actresses/models in it are all well-paid and happy, then "really real" pornography fills the gap by purporting to be a genuine document of abuse -- we mean it this time, really . Unfortunately we know from survivor testimony and police records that at least some substantial chunk of it is all too genuine.
The Abu Ghraib pictures fall squarely into this last, "outlaw" category of documentary porn. But they are not distinct or separate from the rest of the industry. The taste for porn pretending to be a documentary of rape or torture, combined with the underlying taste for an inferred real humiliation or pain involved in acting out the pretended rape, humiliation or torture, lead logically to a taste for documentation of unambiguously real rape, humiliation or torture. Or, alternatively, it is the same taste being indulged with varying degrees of impunity . The Abu Ghraib pictures are pornography as it is made in a culture of total impunity.
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Let us now return to the second vexing question: why? What is this compulsion of men to purchase or share documents of other men's sexual exploits; to be -- or to court -- the peeping-tom, in what is conventionally described as a most private and secretive activity; or to consume the documentary evidence of other men's acts of violence or domination? Why do they take pictures? Why do they like to look at these pictures? Why do they document their own crimes?
I'll put forward a theory. Suppose (for argument’s sake) that there is a durable, venerable form of male (primate?) sexuality that is wholly male-oriented; suppose that the structural, social, functional and emotional point of this sexuality is men engaging with, showing off for, gratifying, other men. Call it the sexuality of gang rape -- in which a woman is the prop or target for a ritual among men, possibly a hazing or manhood-testing ritual, possibly a primate resource-sharing ritual not unlike passing food around. This aggressive, vicarious homoeroticism might be dignified and ritualised -- as in the ancient Viking funerary rite in which the dead man's friends gathered, drank to his memory, and "shared" (i.e. raped) one of his servant girls, who was then killed and burned along with the body of her "lord and master" (the Viking equivalent of sati). Or it might be impromptu: a gang of youths getting drunk and raping any passing girl; frat boys [FOOTNOTE For non-US readers: "frat" is short for "fraternity," a name for all-male social clubs formed in high schools and colleges. "Frat houses" are apartment or boarding houses exclusively occupied by members of one fraternity. Fraternities vary in tone and purpose from casual social or sports clubs, to charitable organisations, to more sophisticated and elitist clubs which serve (like the British "old school tie") to connect and cement complex Old Boys' networks later in life. Some require would-be members to undergo a ritual ordeal before acceptance. These ordeals, known as "hazing", vary from juvenile foolery to genuinely dangerous stunts and physical torture.] (or football players) "getting out of control" at a party. My point is that the men, acting together , overpower (with muscle or money), rape, humiliate, and perhaps kill a victim; they do so primarily not because of anything about the victim, but to enact a social and emotional ritual amongst themselves.
The act of violence, however, is not the end of the ritual. Part of the ritual is that they brag about it afterwards. I'm thinking now of locker-room jocks, boasting about their (sometimes imaginary) sexual conquests; of the endless barracks anecdotes about what the guys did on their liberty nights; of sailors' stories about shore leave; of "dirty joke" contests and boys sniggering together over centerfolds. Men, among other men, traditionally practise a kind of oral pornography that consists essentially of bragging about their masculinity and dominance: their genital size, how they "put women in their place," what "base" they got to, what they talked (or forced) a girlfriend or prostitute into doing or permitting. Trophy display and bragging, as a ritual of male bonding, are a cultural tradition crossing boundaries from hunting to tourism, name-dropping to warfare to sex.
A more benign form of this competitive sexual talk might be a man's jovial boasting about what a great lover he is, how "the ladies" love him, how happy he can make a woman, how married women can't resist him, etc. But there's a more dismal, savage side that comes down to – basically -- bragging about rape. One point of this bragging may be that it clearly defines the braggart himself as an aggressor and not a victim (lest his fellows get any wrong ideas). At the same time the braggart offers, for the collective consumption of the peer group, his own pornographic narrative -- shared as one might share food or drink, in a ritual of social bonding and fellowship. (The British comedy team French and Saunders have produced a painfully percipient series of skits which illustrate this dynamic in an archetypically pathetic form: the transparently imaginary misogynist boastings and fantasies of a couple of sad old men.)
It seems obvious that a substantial subset of men [FOOTNOTE Let us ignore women for the moment: though there may be a female "girlfriend gossip" version of trophy bragging, it seldom involves violence] get off on listening to this kind of bragging, on hearing or watching male dominance exercised. (It's hard to determine whether a majority of men actively enjoy "locker room talk," and how many endure it or participate only for fear of losing status.) It seems to me a kind of male/male sexual encounter: some men listen while another man brags, or a group of men relive their "adventure" as a gang by telling the story over again. Male peers in our version of patriarchy cannot have sex with each other: that would require someone to lose his "manly status" by taking on the passive or victim role. But they can create intimacy and shared sexual thrills by sharing their sexual dominance over someone else. Prison rape survivor (and researcher) Stephen Donaldson has written about being raped by two men at once (orally and anally) while incarcerated; his perception at the time was that the two men were having sex with each other far more than with him -- he was just the "medium of exchange" (to take a note from Levi-Strauss). His notes on male definitions and perceptions of heterosexuality are also worth mulling over: in prison culture, a man who rapes other men is "straight." Only a man who is raped, or who consents to being penetrated, is "gay." There is little distinction between consent and force; "gayness" -- functional gender -- is an attribute of the receptive role, regardless of volition or physical gender.
The idea of "sharing a woman" has a mythic quality in patriarchal male thinking -- the woman (or in Donaldson’s case the victimised male) being the connection that permits sexual intimacy, while avoiding "forbidden acts" which would necessarily demote one man to "woman status". If we are willing to posit the existence of a male/male sexual dynamic based on this "sharing", then we would expect the acquisition of "sex partners" to be motivated not solely by their own value or pleasure but just as importantly by their value as "offerings" to a male peer group (whether anecdotally or literally, physically). Now the obsession with documentation starts to make sense. In this model, men would make documentary porn as a valued commodity to be shared, bartered, offered to other men in social bonding.
This deepens our understanding (above) of the dual nature of the attraction of documentary porn. In light of the "sharing" dynamic, we might view it as material produced literally in this spirit of "sharing the rape," i.e. produced as a form of trophy or bragging: look what we did to her! we can show you! We might see it as a commercialised, ersatz, sanitised substitute for the showing/sharing of trophies from a rape. Or it might be both at the same time: deniable/acceptable/sanitised because it is "pretend," yet satisfying because it is still consumed and appreciated as a document of (perceived) humiliation.
The come-ons for online porn rely heavily on the braggart style: "You Won't Believe What These Girls Can Handle" [read what we did to these girls ], etc. The tone is (to my ear) not strongly differentiated from the sniggering of high school jocks over what they got some girl drunk enough to endure at last night's party: the social/ritual continuity between violation and bragging is consistent.
The fact, then, that the tortures and humiliations committed by the US troops at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere were documented, and were evidently committed in a "party hearty" atmosphere with clowning around, big stupid grins, etc, shouldn't surprise us. It's the logical extension of the
frat-house or barracks male bonding experience, the use of the body and person of some third party as the medium for expressing an intimate sexual and social connection among men. When Rush Limbaugh commented that the upset over the Abu Ghraib photos was excessive, that these were just a bunch of guys "blowing off steam" and no worse than a frat hazing, the Left
responded with (appropriate) outrage. But after all, what Rush said about Abu Ghraib is what conventional men have been saying about the rape of women by frat boys ever since there have been frat boys: namely, that it’s no big deal.
Real rapes—sometimes gang rapes—do happen at frat parties. Hazings occasionally result in real deaths or permanent scars. The overexcited, giddy atmosphere of the frat party "out of control" is notable in first-hand accounts of lynch mobs, who tellingly referred to their social bonding events as "necktie parties " [emphasis mine]. Violence and the party atmosphere are by no means incompatible. The irony is painful: the US Left leaps to vilify Rush for daring to trivialise the Abu Ghraib abuses by comparing them to something unimportant or benign -- like rape and abuse at frat parties. Some commentators did make the connection with "lynching postcards," photographs of lynchings made into postcards and traded/sold/collected in the US. These photos have sometimes been referred to metaphorically as "lynch mob porn", but this is merely another metawhore -- the essential connection with commercial porn and its various structural purposes is obfuscated, not illuminated.
--------- [ I’ll tell Kerry (or you can) that we want some kind of indication of new-section-ness here, and also where the ------- are before . . . ]
The participation of women always shocks the general public – whether in lynch mobs, management positions in the prostitution industry, or the Abu Ghraib pictures. Their presence and participation suggest several possibilities to me (perhaps a complex blend of them all): 1)
the women were grateful to have their male cohorts' sadistic/aggressive gang-bang impulses safely diverted to some other target; 2) the women were trying very hard to be "one of the boys," as the support/approval of the unit/tribe is very important to surviving military service in a hostile environment -- and as we know, a woman has to try twice as hard to succeed in "a man's job"; 3) the women were already strongly racist, and were bonding racially with their troopmates in a mode parallel to male bonding, through pack violence; 4) the women had themselves been victimised or intimidated (rape is quite common within the US armed forces) and were themselves being used as porn models, told where and how to stand, when to smile, etc. Some of the Abu Ghraib pictures (which the public has not yet seen) are said to show "group sex" among soldiers, not involving prisoners. One Congressman commented that the sex in these pictures seemed to be "consensual" -- but this is what men traditionally say about sex, absent overwhelming forensic evidence of force. Whether female troops participated willingly in consensual orgiastic group sex (perhaps with the aid of recreational drugs), or whether these other pictures are yet more trophy porn documenting gang rape, we may never know.
I don't rush to claim victim status for the female troops. Female Nazis existed, and demonstrated ideological enthusiasm in excess of what mere survival would require. White women were prominent in the crowd at many lynchings, laughing and cheering the men on. While their mere presence in the crowd could be compelled by domineering husbands or fathers, raucous enthusiasm is harder to explain. The female troops at Abu Ghraib may have been fully complicit in the abuses, as they appear to be from the photographic record. I preserve a reasonable sliver of doubt because we know that the millions of women apparently smiling, laughing, and enjoying themselves in documentary porn from around the world, are often smiling and laughing on command. To what extent female troops may have "gone along" as weaker men sometimes have -- cooperating in a gang rape even though stomach and conscience rebel, lest they themselves become the target of the gang-rape party mood -- and to what extent they actively enjoyed humiliating and hurting helpless prisoners, is known only to them. They have to live with their complicity, as do we with ours.
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There was a howling silence at the heart of US liberal discourse on "the Abu Ghraib thing." That silence was the protective shell built around our multi-billion-dollar porn industry and the ideology of neoliberal capitalism that enables it.
Throughout all media discussion of the torture pics and revelations, the doublethink caused by the mainstreaming of porno made itself painfully obvious. Pundit after pundit referred to the Abu Ghraib pictures with evocative phrases: "like a bad porno flick," "the S&M war," "dirty pictures from Iraq," etc. Predictably, the conflicting necessities of responding to the Abu Ghraib documents with appropriate revulsion and outrage, yet continuing to maintain the received definition of pornography as a Good Thing, tied left/liberal commentators in knots. [See [URL ] for some typical samples of left/liberal commentary on the Abu Ghraib scandal.]
To take just one example, one leftist pundit’s Abu-Ghraib-inspired discussion of the American “culture of suffering” includes a wholly unselfconscious reference to pornography:
"America's Funniest Home Videos" -- the once-backchannel program where we became comfortable in snickering at people's pain like a kid thumbing through porno locked in the bathroom -- has now come out of the closet and moved into the mainstream.
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18659
The kid thumbing through porno in the bathroom is snickering at people's pain; how much porno can we dig up that is not somehow predicated on women's (or kids') pain -- or if not outright pain then at least shame and embarrassment, -- or if not shame then at least poverty and harshly limited opportunities? The viewer/purchaser knows that s/he would not like to strip naked and pose in front of cameras, to be displayed to thousands of strangers – and that some extraordinary inducement must be offered to convince anyone to consent to such vulnerability and exposure. The more humiliating or offensive the poses and props, the more obviously uncomfortable or painful the activities photographed, the more dubious the probability of genuine consent -- the stronger becomes the voyeuristic thrill of watching the documentary evidence of abuse.
I have come slowly to believe that documentary pornography of the most prevalent kind, -- i.e. highly misogynist, often racist, definitely cruel and demeaning, hateful of the human body and particularly of female bodies, the kind of pornography promoted by spam mailers every day in emailboxes all over the world -- is part and parcel of the social dynamics of gang rape. It's all about "taking pictures of what we did to her," even if "what we did to her" is as structural and generic as the reduced economic opportunities available to women, the impact of poverty on women, etc.
Feminists have documented several ways in which men use pornography on/against women in their lives. Documentary pornography may be socially functional not only in male bonding, but also as a social tool for emphasising and enforcing women's lower social status. It might serve as an impossible standard of sexiness and beauty that no living woman can measure up to, as a message of intimidation and hostility to female employees trying to enter traditionally male workplaces, as a "how to" manual which men coerce or wheedle their lovers/wives into imitating for them -- or (and I suspect this is a more important function than we realise) it may be a veiled threat: this is what can happen to women without money, without the protection of a man. Certainly this parallels the use of State-sanctioned torture; one need not torture very many individuals to send a cautionary message to the general population: this is what can happen to you .
Misogyny drips from all accounts of Abu Ghraib, and from all attempts to analyze it. The outrage of Arab men that the Americans "treated our brothers like women." The idea that making men wear "women's undies" is a form of torture. The overarching, stunning hypocrisy of the world's largest pornography-exporting nation acting so dreadfully shocked when its line troops treat POWs in the same ways that its prison guards and stronger inmates treat weaker men, and that its pornography and prostitution industry treats women, every single day.
For this radical feminist the Abu Ghraib pictures merely elucidate what porn is really about. The essence is not obfuscated for once, because the victims are men, and literally prisoners behind bars and facing guns (instead of behind economic bars, facing hunger/homelessness). Therefore we can suddenly perceive that they are victims, that they have personal pride and dignity which have been assaulted, that they have rights which have been violated. The nameless, traceless women posing for websites like "See Asian Sluts Get What They Deserve" or "Farm Girls And Their Pets" -- whether guns are pointed at them in the course of their work or not -- arouse no such outrage or compassion. Even with such a searing illustration and example before us, the connection was made only by one or two marginalised feminist voices: Linda Burnham and Susan Brison for example, whose essays at least started to address the connection between "Bush porn", Abu Ghraib, male supremacy and US imperial supremacy.
Nor does anyone [except me?] seem to wonder why we would expect any other behaviour from the troops of a nation so completely addicted to pornographic imagery, or indeed from any group of men forced into close bonding by immediate physical danger, indoctrinated with race hatred, trained in brutality and violence, and isolated in a culture of impunity.
What no one wants to face -- in America, anyway -- is that these pictures are not just like pornography. They are pornography, the raw essence of pornography: taking trophy pictures of people being stripped, sexually humiliated, raped -- so that you can brag about it afterwards.