The torturers of Abu Ghraib had both a reason and a political sanction to do what they did. Yet the nature of the tortures and their recording suggests a casual licentiousness, the arbitrary indulgence of mean appetites. The two aspects -- rational justification and gratuitous sadism -- are superficially at odds but deeply inextricable from one another. I must inflict pain on you because you and your associates are terrorists, evildoers to be stopped for the greater good of mankind. But because you are an evildoer, enemy of mankind, I can also abandon myself to the pornographic voluptuousness of total control. In fact, not only can I, I must. In order to torture you, it is important that I see you as less than human, and so I will use torture to reinforce that image.

When power is exercised in such an extreme, absolute form as torture, it literally dehumanizes those it's exercised upon. And they know it. Stripped of rights, of the ability to trust a fellow human being, and most importantly, of self-respect, they lose the very sense of who they are. The identity of the torture victim can never be the same again. That's why sexual torture is central to the experience. The emasculation of men, the degradation of women, turns them into something they no longer recognize as themselves. Torture is largely the business of creating shame, indelible memories of one's own impotence which serve as warnings to a whole society. An instinctive understanding of this task can be evinced by the acts of the American torturers. They were aiming to hurt the Arab man where it counts the most -- in his masculine pride. There was hardly a more explicit way to do it than to strip him naked and capture him in effigy as the perverse negation of his own self -- as a pathetic loser, writhing on the floor or engaging in simulated sexual acts on command, while American men and women pose next to him with a grin and a thumbs-up. This instinctive understanding was further refined by the superior education in pornography that is typical of the contemporary American man (and to some lesser extent, woman.)

Pornography shares with torture an inherent ability to dehumanize. It reduces the individual to a sexual function, flattens identity to a physical act performed for somebody else's ultimate pleasure. As a performer of pornography, you relinquish your dignity going in. You adopt a vulgar, ludicrous stage name and sell yourself by the pound -- or more to the point, by the orifice. Pornography records acts of degradation to be perused, collected, lusted over by anonymous customers. A pornographic image is a trophy: the record of somebody's submission to the base needs of a customer, exercised as "power" through the laws of the market.

It is noteworthy, of course, that at least three of the alleged torturers are women. This inspires two opposite conclusions: One, that extreme situations such as war produce aberrant behavior, and a woman may occasionally go against her feminine nature and behave like the worst of men (still, that being the exception that proves the rule). Two, the participation of several women in the tortures is consistent with larger social trends, and therefore it belies the idea that pornography, rape and sexually predatory behavior are the exclusive domain of men. If we follow this hypothesis, we may conclude that porn has so deeply corrupted the female psyche that women have become willing to endorse an enterprise that is largely directed at their own degradation.

There is ample evidence in our culture to corroborate this second scenario. Women have been co-opted into watching porn, shopping at the Hustler store, patronizing strip bars. "Porn star" is a label of cool. It's routine to see actresses and singers showing every allowed inch of skin (and "suggesting" the rest) on the cover of mainstream magazines. Fashion dictates that thongs must peek out of low-rider jeans. Pamela Anderson and Paris Hilton illustrate the willingness of a generation of women to ply themselves into camera-friendly sex objects. Much too much scandal was made out of the Janet Jackson Super Bowl exploit, but few people seemed to object to its most insidious aspect -- not the baring of a nipple, but the pantomime of sexual aggression without reprisal: a man rips off a woman's clothes, she pulls a funny face and keeps on singing. And as far as violence goes, it's interesting that women are now victimized not only by men but, with statistically increased frequency, by other women. The Glenbrook North High School hazing incident, featuring junior-class girls forced to sit while drunken senior girls doused them in feces, urine, paint, animal guts and blood, followed by punching and kicking -- much of which captured in yet another infamous video -- was a chilling example of this trend.

This is the sad state of affairs that is, to the Islamic mind, the dark side of our much-touted freedom. And it is exactly this dark side that we are rubbing their nose in. The torture at Abu Ghraib says: Our pornography will conquer you.

In contrast, Islamic terrorists divulged the recording of a bloody execution. The victim, an American civilian: a sacrificial lamb whose blood was spilled with the declared intention to restore Arab pride. This is, as much as ever, a war of symbols, and the symbol of Arab emasculation couldn't but inspire somebody to create a symbol of absolute and terrifying Arab supremacy over a Western man. The American government reacted with proclamations of horror for such barbarity. But such barbarity is a direct reflection of our own dehumanizing ways. A beheading (a 40-second beheading with a knife) undoubtedly represents a more extreme form of cruelty than to strip somebody naked, beat him, sexually humiliate him and put him on a leash. Yet one has to wonder how much further the American soldiers would have gone if not for fear of disciplinary consequences -- something the terrorists don't have to worry about. If you ever saw "Salo," Pasolini's allegory about the last days of fascism in Italy, you know his thesis that separating the exercise of power from the fear of consequences -- whether because of granted impunity, or because of already certain doom -- is the true test of one's nature. The power of an individual over another will naturally tend to speak the language of sexual sadism, a language that articulates and celebrates it. Sadism will be implicit in every situation of captivity. It will be explicit in situations where the fear of consequences is reduced. It may become extreme where such fear is removed altogether.

Recent Stories