LONDON, 23 May 2004 — I received some horrific photographs by e-mail Friday. Purporting to be from Iraq, they depicted the sexual abuse of women by US servicemen.
On some, chadors were hitched up over the women’s heads. On others, the women were naked while they were raped by groups of men. It is impossible to tell whether the photographs are real — those images we know have been seen by American senators — or faked. They make you sick to your stomach.
If the photographs are genuine, they are the visual evidence of the sexual abuse of Iraqi women — abuse, which we already know, is common, with or without these grotesque images. We know that such images exist, because a US government report confirmed it. And we know that Iraqi women are being raped throughout the country, because both Amal Kadham Swadi, the Iraqi lawyer, and the US’ own internal inquiry say that abuse is systemic and widespread. We also know this because all wars feature the abuse of women as a byproduct, or as a weapon.
The ancient Greeks considered rape socially acceptable; the Crusaders raped their way to Constantinople; the English invaders raped Scottish women on Culloden Moor. The World War I, the World War II, Bosnia, Bangladesh, Vietnam — where the gang rape and murder of a peasant woman by US soldiers was photographed in stages by one if its participants.
But even if the pictures are mocked up, it makes you wonder where the images came from. Some woman, somewhere, had to be raped, or make it look like she was being raped. The poses, the large numbers of men to one woman, the violence — they have all the hallmarks of contemporary porn.
Nevertheless, right now the American porn industry is in shock. The military has stolen its thunder.
It is hard not to see links between the culturally unacceptable behavior of the soldiers in Abu Ghraib and the culturally accepted actions of what happens in porn. 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 brutalized in terrifying conditions. And yet, the images in both are the same. The porn culture has clearly influenced the soldiers; at the very least, in their exhibitionism, their enthusiasm to photograph their handiwork. And the victims in both don’t have feelings: To the abusers, they didn’t in Abu Ghraib; to the punter they don’t in pornography. Both point to just how degraded sex has become in Western culture. The Abu Ghraib torturers are merely acting out their culture: The sexual humiliation of the weak.
So Charles Graner and his colleagues can humiliate Iraqi prisoners because the prisoners are dirt; they can humiliate women, forcing them to bare their bodies and raping them, because that way they can show their power.
The annihilation of Lynndie England, while her superior Graner, clearly in control and already with a history of violence against women, was left alone, fits this story too. They are both repulsive, torturers; but she has been vilified for her involvement, while his is passed off with a shrug. Some women in the military — if they are not themselves being raped by male soldiers (in February, US soldiers were accused of raping more than 112 colleagues in Iraq and Afghanistan) — seem to have to prove that they are one of the guys by sexually humiliating the only people less important than they are: Iraqi prisoners, of whatever sex.
It’s a chilling lesson, that women can be sexual sadists just as well as men. Just give them the right conditions — and someone weaker to kick. It’s proof that sexual aggression is not really about sex or gender, but about power: The powerful humiliating the powerless.
The real images of sexual abuse of Iraqi women, if they are ever released, will at once appear on websites. They will be used for sexual gratification. People are already joking that England (though not Graner) can have a nice little future career for herself in porn. Of course we are horrified by these images. But we should be horrified too by their familiarity, and how much they tell us about our own societies.
