Good article in the Chronicle of Higher Education comparing pornography and the Abu Ghraib photos.
Of course, sexual expression can be a wonderful, life-affirming thing, and certainly not all that is currently labeled “pornography” is “sadistic, cruel, and inhuman.” Surely one advantage of our culture over that promoted by Islamic fundamentalism is that women, as well as men, are able to celebrate their sexuality. But a disturbing amount of hard-core porn produced in the West is based on the view that violently degrading others is arousing, and we need to begin to question the assumption that whatever some people find arousing should be tolerated by the rest of us.
Nonetheless, I find the comparison more than a little stretched, and perhaps even distastefully opportunistic; the Abu Ghraib tragedy shouldn’t be understood primarily as a chance to bring the porn industries abuses to light.
Subtler, and more interesting to me, is the comparison of Abu Ghraib photos and historic photos of lynchings.
In spite of Secretary Rumsfeld’s pronouncement en route to Iraq this month that “the real problem is not the photographs — the real problems are the actions taken to harm the detainees,” we — and the rest of the world — are also bothered by the fact that the U.S. soldiers in the pictures (and presumably those taking the pictures) clearly got a kick out of what they were doing. In this respect, these photos resemble the postcards circulating in the United States in the early 20th century showing white people smiling and cheering at the lynchings of black men (and sometimes women) — the photos that showed us that racial animus can amount to a kind of giddy arousal. What revolts us now is not just that black men were lynched, not just that white spectators on the scene were smiling and laughing at the murders of their fellow human beings, but that the people sending the postcards could assume (and rightly so) that their recipients would also get a charge out of the images.
To be fair, Rumsfeld’s statement can be read as saying, “the problem is the abuse, not just the fact that the abuse was made public,” which is proper, I think.
Lynching photos? No, they look more like the Mapplethorpe photographs (if I recall correctly).
I have to say that I like your argument on what they photos look like. I found it interesting as well as informal to my argumentative essay paper on Abu Ghraib.
“the Abu Ghraib tragedy shouldn’t be understood primarily as a chance to bring the porn industries abuses to light.”
I understand you see it that way, but what about trying to understand the Abu Ghraib tragedy from the point of view of why not just torture but specifically ‘sexual’ torture and the photographing of it? I think that’s worth noting and worth further investigation. The porn industry is a good example to bring in because it is an extremely well documented, widely viewed account of sexual torture, but it by no means the be-all end-all of sexual torture (as the article points out with regards to castrating black men).
I’ve not seen in the 4-5 articles linking porn to Abu Ghraib I’ve read where an author states the incident should be seen “primarily” in relation to porn, just that the similarities should be considered more thoughtfully. From one of my favs, Katherine Viner http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1222354,00.html
“Of course there is a gulf between them, and it is insulting to suggest that all porn actors are in the same situation as Iraqis, confined and brutalised in terrifying conditions. And yet, the images in both are the same.”
It doesn’t surpise me that so many women immediately thought of pornography when the story broke instead of considering the long military history of torture and sexual abuse during wartime. Perhaps if we had the visual records of black lynchings shoved in our faces with the dailiness pornography is shoved in our faces our thoughts would have gone there first.
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