May 5, 2004
Naked prisoners in Iraq
The hyberbolic criticism surrounding the photos of naked, hooded Iraqi prisoners really is a bit much, but at the same time, it speaks to the sexual politics of the Middle East, which comprise a chapter of my forthcoming book, Romance on the Road.
First, the hyperbole, as exemplified by this Washington Post op-ed piece, with the headline "Willing Torturers," and its inference that at some level, our culture is not immune to the sort of cruelty seen in Nazi Germany and the Cambodia and Rwanda genocides:
We've now seen the horrific evidence: American soldiers, brought up in an American culture, stripped and sexually humiliated Iraqi prisoners. They dressed them in black hoods and laughingly threatened them with electrocution.They also took photographs of themselves, grinning and pretending to shoot at the genitals of their captives, even though the prisoners came from a society that values physical modesty, even though some of the guards were women.
Oh no!
As Rush Limbaugh said on Monday, the photos, say of naked men stacked in pyramids, aren't that far afield from what you might observe in a Britney Spears or Madonna video. Being stripped of one's clothes and forced to lie on top of another man, icky though that may be, is short of real torture, as in the Hanoi Hilton greeted our own airmen, many of whom were brutally broken and never recovered enough to live normally. It also falls well short of the desecration of bodies in Somalia and Fallujah.
I hear that in at least one Baltimore office, water-cooler conversation centered on the fact that U.S. soldier women made goofy "I'm getting photographed" expressions as they paraded near the naked Iraqi men, who are apparently being forced to handle themselves. I have posted one sample photo, a frame grab from CBS's 60 Minutes, above.
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.
You could almost make a feminist argument that Muslim men are better off getting used to Western women being a part of all facets of our society, including the military and even including military staff who get off on prisoner humiliation that after all, leaves the prisoner flustered and disoriented yet without a mark on his bodies.
Yet the West reacts as if the soldiers were kicked in the ribs, hung like slabs of beef from hooks, starved, shocked and starved -- because again, they correctly perceive the degree of insult.
That brings us to the sexual politics of the Middle East. To quote from part of my Middle East chapter in Romance on the Road:
Way back in 1966, a sociologist in Israel observed the budding relationships between shy, lonely Arab youths and visiting Scandinavian women and later produced the first social science report ever published on Western female sex adventurers. Erik Cohen ("Arab Boys and Tourist Girls" 232) presciently noted that tourist girls provided the youths with an alternative to "extreme activism (found in nationalism) and extreme passivity (found in drugs)." Decades before Sept. 11, he identified the life of the unmarried young Arab as a tense, unhappy, "pitiful and eventless," such that just to obtain a blonde visitor's home address offered a shining ray of hope for a decent life overseas (226, 227).
There is a nexus between terrorism and an entire region's sexual frustration, unemployment and cultural envy. Female Western soldiers enact in concrete form the teasing superiority of Scandinavian tourists, Hollywood actresses and music video temptresses that madden Islamic men, with few prospects for women or jobs, from Morocco to Indonesia.
- posted by jbelliveau at 11:10 AM in Love, Sex, Romance and Travel
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