Saturday, October 08, 2005

War-Porn



The website that has been exchanging porn for pictures of dead Iraqis is in trouble, or at least the man who runs it is in trouble:

Polk County officials arrested a Lakeland man on obscenity charges Friday after investigating his graphic Web site, which has gained international attention for allowing U.S. soldiers to post pictures of war dead on the Internet.

The charges against Christopher Michael Wilson, a former police officer, are likely to reignite the debate about obscene material in the Internet age. It also raises questions about whether the federal government played a part in motivating the prosecution.

Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said late Friday that the 300 obscenity-related charges against Wilson all involve sexual content on his Web site -- and not graphic war-scene images posted by soldiers.

"It is the most horrific, vile, perverted sexual conduct," Judd said. "It is as vile, as perverted, as non-normal sexual conduct, which rises to the level of obscenity, as we've ever investigated."

Late last week, U.S. Army officials said they could not confirm whether photographs on Wilson's Web site, presumably showing Iraqi and Afghan war dead, were actually posted by U.S. soldiers.

An Islamic civil-rights group was disappointed that the Army did not pursue criminal charges. Last week, Ibrahim Hooper, a Council on American-Islamic Relations spokesman, said: "For this to be treated in a manner that suggests the Army does not take this seriously is only going to further harm our nation's image and interests around the world, particularly in the Muslim world."

Wilson, 27, was letting soldiers access normally paid portions of his site in exchange for graphic war-scene shots or proof that they were fighting in the Middle East, for instance. Late Friday, Wilson's site, which the Orlando Sentinel will not name, still had grisly images of war dead.

Judd said none of the 20 films and 80 photos that brought about the charges involves pictures of war dead. But Judd confirmed that his detectives did speak with officials with the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division before arresting Wilson on Friday.

Disgusting stuff. The reactions (in the comments sections) to these news both on Americablog and on Eschaton are worth reading. The consensus appears to be that the display of dead Iraqis is horrible and that for Wilson to be arrested on obscenity charges for the ordinary porn part of the site is hypocritical. Also, many point out that porn is legal and all over the internet, that the authorities in this case seem to be arguing that sex is dirty and showing dead corpses is not. I can see the truth in these arguments.

It certainly is hypocritical to behave as if dead corpses are somehow ok to view and porn is not. But it might be enlightening to ask why a website trades in both kinds of pictures. What is it that the two might share, at least in the case of some types of "ordinary" depictions of porn? Could it be the pleasure of observing how violence works? The pleasure of humiliation, of making a person into a thing? The pleasure of the ultimate power of unmaking a human being?

Not all porn is like this, of course, and not even the majority of porn, but there is a narrow edge to pornography which definitely serves the same kinds of instinct as come into play with those who enjoy watching torture, for example. I have not visited the war-porn website, so I don't know if any of my guesses are correct. But the feelings of disgust and fear I have experienced from seeing violent pornography are not really any different from those I experience when I come across a really horrible picture of a war victim, except that I try to persuade myself in the former case of it all being play-acting.

The point I am making in this piece is not the central one that the war-porn website elicits, and I don't pretend that it is. But it's a point worth making, I think.
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Added on Sunday, thanks to mark from ireland in the comments, who pointed me to some blogs who have worked on this topic for a long time and who do talk about the central point in this sordid story: Go to Nur Al-Cubicle and Just World News to find out how this story is unfolding both in foreign media and possibly even in our own so-called liberal media. And to find out how horrible it all is.