Porn and Rockets

I have seen enough of the photos from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal to last a lifetime. While it is hardly equivalent to what Saddam and his thugs did, it's bad enough to merit all but the most draconian punishments.

A question struck me as I saw the poses struck by the prisoners. How much pornography did these prison guards consume? The reason I thought this is because the sexual exploitation acted out in pornography mirrored that on display with the mistreated prisoners.

To my shame, I am familiar enough with pornography. When I was a soldier stationed at Ft. Leonard Wood, the barracks common area had a TV. It was there mostly for the benefit for the Charge of Quarters (CQ), usually a Sergeant who spent the night making sure none of us knuckleheads wrecked the place or killed each other. It was very common, especially on weekends, to come into the CQ lounge to see porn movies played on a rented VCR, with plenty of guys in my unit watching, myself included.

I understand now that pornography is a particularly corrosive distortion of human sexuality. It would be very rare to find someone who, having lived a lifestyle like those depicted in even the mildest soft core, would be but a brittle husk of a human.

Frankly I think it would be very rare to find someone who habitually consumes pornography to be much more than an brittle husk of a human. The desensitizing aspects of pornography are well documented. How a man sees a woman is profoundly affected by pornography, and not in ways women would want.

Worse, pornography that is increasingly degrading has become increasingly popular since the years of my youth. Porn actors play the parts of victims and abuser, and their debasement is part of the appeal. I would not be surprised to learn that among those who are responsible for crimes against the Iraqi prisoners were fans of such debauched materials.

How you treat a human being over whom you have absolute power is fundamentally a moral question, and is dependent in part about how you see humans in you heart. These are not the actions of otherwise moral people who lost their way. A man who will not tolerate the defilement of human sexuality in his entertainment is logically less likely to tolerate it in reality. Conversely, someone whose fantasy life includes the sexual humiliation of another is ill-equipped to resist the urge when the opportunity is presented.

Some of what happened at Abu Ghraib, is hardly what I would call torture, but piling prisoners up in homo-erotic poses is barbaric. The script for this horrid play had it's genesis in the worst parts of our culture that dispense depraved sexuality. Individuals should be held to harsh account, but you can't ignore the fact that you don't get this sort of behavior out of a man who eschews pornography out of respect for human dignity.

Tim McNabb