Abu Ghraib and Pornography ...

by Cliopatria

For two feminist perspectives on the photographs from Abu Ghraib, see: Donna M. Hughes,"Not Unfamiliar," in National Review Online and Joanna Bourke,"Torture as Pornography," in The Guardian. Bourke is a military and gender historian at Birkbecke College in London and Hughes is the Carlson Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Rhode Island. The analogy to the American pornography industry may be strained, as Clayton Cramer and Eugene Volokh point out, because porn workers are paid to abase themselves and each other. In the United States, the straps and chains are cash. In the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer argues that, in some real sense, the great jihad is about sex and that the photographs from Abu Ghraib merely confirm many Islamists' belief that we in the west are sex-obsessed.

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Hugo Schwyzer - 5/10/2004

I'm with you, Jonathan, and will try and find time to blog on this -- thanks, gentlemen, for the links.

Jonathan Dresner - 5/7/2004

Cramer and Volokh are splitting hairs when they attack the pornography argument, because the bulk of Hughes' argument (which Cramer accepts) is about the connection between sexual humiliation and enslavement (sexual, political or otherwise), and the fact that there are "voluntary" (within the limits of social choice) subjects of pornography and "voluntary" prostitutes does not in any way rebut the existence of involuntary participants. Moreover, the inability (or unwillingness) of consumers to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary participants means that the sexual product/services marketplace is clearly tainted. The connection between political repression and sexual humiliation is even more powerful, and that's clearly a way in which we should be loudly and clearly distinguishing ourselves from Iran, etc., not making excuses for diving (not falling) to that level.