13 January, 2012 | Leave a Comment
Dead Taliban soldiers being pissed on = war crime
Live women in porn being pissed on = sexually arousing
[Of course, the difference is that the women in porn "choose" this and they "enjoy" it. For men, even dead ones, this is humiliating.]
The news that U.S. Marines in Afghanistan pissed on dead Taliban soldiers is drawing comparisons to the torture at Abu Ghraib. In both cases, the soldiers filmed/photographed themselves degrading the prisoners/corpses. This is significant. The term “war porn” was often used to describe what happened at Abu Ghraib, but only in that sloppy way the word “porn” is often used to describe various things (i.e. “food porn”), which is completely detached from all critical analysis and context. Only a few brave writers (mostly feminists) drew comparisons between what happened to the prisoners at Abu Ghraib and to what actually happens to women in pornography every day. [Most commentators on the left-wing remained silent about this aspect, not surprisingly.]
D.A. Clarke’s essay “Prostitution for Everyone: Feminism, Globalisation and the “Sex Industry” [PDF], which I first read in this book, includes an addendum about Abu Ghraib. I thought of this essay today when I read the news about the pissing Marines. I’ve included a few quotes from the essay below, but the whole thing is worth reading:
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.
[...]
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.
[...]
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.
Anglofille said @ 12:41 am | Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Anglofille,
I don’t see the contradiction – some people see humiliating others as sexually arousing because it gives them a power rush. That the actress acts like she is enjoying it gives the power rush without the guilt. If the victim deserves it or secretly enjoys it or wanted it, then there is no guilt. But if there is enough hate, then there is also no guilt. And there are also those incapable of guilt.
Condoning the rape of men actually encourages the rape of women because those men who rape are seen as more masculine than those men who are raped. When rapist=masculinity, then men are actually encouraged to become rapists to prove that they are men. Condoning the prostitute-madonna dichotomy also encourages rape because there are the “good girls” who presumably don’t get raped and the “bad girls” who deserve it. Note that one can be as pure as the freshly fallen snow and one would still be seen to be as dirty as coal afterwards.
We live in a world where it is the victim of rape, male or female, who is judged harshly – who is made to feel ashamed or not as good as everybody else. It is not the victim who should be judged harshly.
The Rape of Men (not for the light hearted)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/jul/17/the-rape-of-men
Stephen Lewis talking about the exact same thing happening to women:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyrEBvioeZw