Pornography Of Pain
By Joanna Bourke
09 May, 2004
A woman ties a noose around a naked man's
neck and forces him to crawl across the floor. Uniformed people strip
a group of hooded men, then laboriously assemble them into a pyramid.
Men are forced to masturbate and simulate fellatio. In the past few
days, we have all participated in the pornographic gaze. The sight of
wide-eyed, grinning young men and women posing in front of their stripped
and degraded captives has proved profoundly shocking. These snapshots
tell us more than we may perhaps want to know about our society's heart
This festival of violence is highly pornographic. The victims have been
reduced to exhibitionist objects or anonymous "meat". They
either wear hoods, or are beheaded by the camera. The people taking
the photographs exult in the genitals of their victims. There is no
moral confusion here: the photographers don't even seem aware that they
are recording a war crime. There is no suggestion that they are documenting
anything particularly morally skewed. For the person behind the camera,
the aesthetic of pornography protects them from blame.
Indeed, there is
a carnivalesque atmosphere to the photographs. The perpetrators of this
sexual violence are clearly enjoying themselves. The cliche "war
is hell" takes on a chilling new vigour in these images. After
all, these photographs are not "about" the horrors of war.
Many, if not most, are part of a glorification of violence. There is
no question that many of these snapshots were taken by people who were
pleased by what they were seeing. Or what they had done. They are trophies,
memorialising agreeable actions.
It is hard to avoid
the conclusion that, for some of these Americans, creating a spectacle
of suffering was part of a bonding ritual. Group identity as victors
in an increasingly brutalised Iraq is being cemented: this is an enactment
of comradeship between men and women who are set apart from civilian
society back home by acts of violence. Their cruel, often carnivalesque
rites constituted what Mikhail Bakhtin called "authorised transgression".
After all, there is some evidence to suggest that more senior military
personnel were aware of what was happening in the prison but turned
a blind eye to it, accepting abuse as necessary either in intelligence-gathering
or in providing a safety valve for panicky individuals living in a country
that was turning increasingly hostile.
pornography of pain as shown in these images is fundamentally voyeuristic
in nature. The abuse is performed for the camera. It is public, theatrical,
and elaborately staged. These obscene images have a counterpart in the
worst, non-consensual sadomasochistic pornography. The infliction of
pain is eroticised.
It is important,
however, not to see these sadistic images as unique. After all, torture
and sexual violence are endemic in wartime. In the past, as now, military
personnel tend to simply accept that atrocities, including sexual ones,
will take place. As one British colonel admitted during the first world
war: "I've seen my own men commit atrocities, and should expect
to see it again. You can't stimulate and let loose the animal in man
and then expect to be able to cage it up again at a moment's notice."
Viewed as the inevitable
result of men's sexual urges (the "animal in man"), sexual
humiliation and the violation of prisoners of war was viewed as a military
problem only when it directly threatened the conduct of war or the reputation
of an imposing power. As General Patton predicted during the second
world war, "There would unquestionably be some raping." It
was "a little R&R" for the personnel. Factors facilitating
other forms of atrocity facilitated rape. Uniforms provided anonymity.
Potential victims were dehumanised; perpetrators deindividualised. In
military conflicts, the penis was explicitly coded as a weapon.
What is particularly
interesting in these photographs of abuse coming out of Iraq is the
prominent role played by Lynndie England. A particular strand of feminist
theory - popularised by Sheila Brownmiller and Andrea Dworkin - attempts
to argue that the male body is inherently primed to rape. Their claim
that only men are rapists, rape fantasists or beneficiaries of the rape
culture cannot be sustained in the face of blatant examples of female
perpetrators of sexual violence. In these photographs the penis itself
becomes a trophy. Women can also use sex as power, to humiliate and
However much the
American secretary for state may wish to discourage the use of the word
"torture", there is no other word that can describe these
acts. In torture and other extreme forms of abuse, the infliction of
pain and shame does not necessarily aim at extracting information. Beatings,
humiliating rites and verbal insults are often used to make prisoners
describe acts or reveal names already known to the police or military.
Often, the questions are of little practical value to the torturers
and the regime. The redundant interrogations are frequently accompanied
by the demand that prisoners sign a document, declaring that they have
seen the errors of their ways. The apparent futility of these demands
indicates the nature of the torturers' enterprise. They want to destroy
the victim's sense of identity.
The evil of torture
is not restricted to wanton violence inflicted on the body. Many types
of extreme pain and physical suffering, whether in war, during acts
of religious martyrdom, or simply as a result of poor health, are endured
with dignity and patience. The evil of torture lies elsewhere: it denies
its victim the minimum recognition offered by society and law and, in
doing so, it destroys the respect people routinely expect from others.
More importantly, torture aims to undermine the way the victim relates
to his or her own self, and thus threatens to dissolve the mainsprings
of an individual's personality. Torture is an embodied violation of
another individual. The sexual nature of these acts shows that the torturers
realise the centrality of sexuality for their victims' identity. The
perpetrators in these photographs aim to destroy their victim's sense
of self by inflicting and recording extreme sexual humiliation. As in
Jean Améry's description of being tortured by the Nazis, sexual
violation is so devastating not because of the physical agony suffered
so much as by the realisation that the other people present are impervious
to the victim. Torture destroys "trust in the world . . . Whoever
has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world."
The display of cruel
pleasure taken in punishing Iraqi prisoners has reverberated throughout
the world, confirming in many countries the negative stereotype of westerners
as decadent and sexually obsessed. Many people have questioned the motives
and conduct of the war in Iraq, but these pornographic images have stripped
bare what little force remained in the humanitarian rhetoric concerning
the war. In the Arab world, the damage has been done, and is irrevocable.
Bourke is professor of history at Birkbeck College London and author
of An Intimate History of Killing (Granta). She is currently working
on a book about rapists in the 19th and 20th century.
Newspapers Limited 2004