May 7, 2004
Naked prisoners and sex ... you heard it here first
It's not often that we are ahead of renowned columnist Charles Krauthammer by 48 hours, but it has happened!
Two days ago, I wrote that the hooded prisoner treatment in Iraq:
... speaks to the sexual politics of the Middle East, which comprise a chapter of my forthcoming book, Romance on the Road.... What is the real problem here? The perception, a correct one, that female U.S. soldiers laughing at naked Muslim men is an especially humiliating insult -- to Muslim men. That having a woman be a soldier at all, yet alone a conqueror, and most of all a gloating conqueror -- making fun of a Muslim man's private anatomy -- is beyond the bearable for a Muslim. Women are demonstrably second class under sharia, Islamic law, and in the most traditional Islamic nations are barely allowed out in public, so we can readily imagine the extent to which a gloating female conqueror would be welcome in an Islamic society.
It almost makes one wonder if the U.S. command knew exactly what it was doing ... that they could break Iraqi prisoners without a single blow or harsh word. A few laughing soldier girls could do the trick.
Today, Krauthammer writes:
... the torture pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib prison could not have hit a more neuralgic point. We think of torture as the kind that Saddam practiced: pain, mutilation, maiming and ultimately death. We think of it as having a political purpose: intimidation, political control, confession and subjugation. What happened at Abu Ghraib was entirely different. It was gratuitous sexual abuse, perversion for its own sake.... What makes [jihadists] unique ... is their particular hatred of freedom for women. They prize their traditional prerogatives that allow them to keep their women barefoot in the kitchen as illiterate economic and sexual slaves. For the men, that is a pretty good deal -- one threatened by the West with its twin doctrines of equality and sexual liberation.
... Which is what made one aspect of the Abu Ghraib horrors even more incendiary -- the pictures of female U.S. soldiers mocking, humiliating and dominating naked and abused Arab men. One could not have designed a more symbolic representation of the Islamist warning about where Western freedom ultimately leads than yesterday's Washington Post photo of a uniformed American woman holding a naked Arab man on a leash.
I have posted a piece I wrote 17 days after Sept. 11. The nexus between terrorism and sexual frustration was immediately recognized by female travelers; now, nearly three years later, with the Abu Ghraib prison photographs, the big-name columnists are finally getting it.
- posted by jbelliveau at 2:32 PM in Love, Sex, Romance and Travel
