Abu Ghraib ---Why are young Americans so hung up on sex ?

All the humiliating and disgusting photos have one underlying theme. Each one is sexual in nature. Why? They seem to get their jollies from hooking up wires to genitals. They seem to be obsessed with deviant sexual acts. Why? They want to see naked males humiliated - in sexual poses of the same sex. Why?

In my opinion, it is part of our society here in America. Our entire nation is hung up on sex. All we want to talk about is Janet Jackson exposing a breast or Britney Spears gyrating her luscious hips on her TV special or queer eyes for the straight guys. They are so fucking confused about their sexuality.

Then when they are put in a situation as the one in Abu Ghraib, their obsession becomes reality. They laugh about what confuses them the most. They want to see dicks and balls stacked in a pyramid. Ooo-ooo! That is so exciting! Give me a fucking break!

Breaking that taboo gives a thrill.

Here, the Surveillance Camera Players explains it all:

Wilhelm Reich's The Mass Psychology of Fascism
as scripted by the Surveillance Camera Players
http://www.notbored.org/reich.html

It was about humiliation. It was an attempt to make a human being into something else -- an object of ridicule and contempt.

While the tactics used there may reveal something puerile about American attitudes toward sex, they mostly show an understanding that the cultural taboos for those prisoners are even stricter and more repellent than they would be here.

This was an attempt at psychological torture. The shame and humiliation that our personnel knowingly inflicted were perpetrated with full understanding not of American cultural values, but of the cultural values of those prisoners.

I don't know that I buy the argument that the troops knew nothing or had read nothing about the Geneva Convention but were fully understanding of the complex cultural values of the country they were occupying...

in the cultural part from ones who did know, see Seymour Hersh's article on a earlier thread.

That's why I am so incensed...I'm sure that the Arab hangups about sex could be explained by making them stack up in a naked pyramid. That came from sick American minds.

However . . .

Even if we were a fully sexually healthy culture with completely open attitudes about sex, there's a high probability that people wanting to torture and humiliate their prisoners would have chosen the exact same way to do it -- because THEIR culture has as many, if not more, sexual taboos than we do.

I can't humiliate someone on the basis of MY cultural hangups and taboos. I can only humiliate him/her only if what I make him/her do holds a strong taboo in HIS/HER culture.

Do I condone any kind of humiliation or torture of another person? Of course not.

It was an attempt to make a human being into something else -- an object of ridicule and contempt.

Is this a Freudian slip?

As a culture, Americans are deluged in a sea of sexually suggestive advertising. There's a reason all that money is spent.

It's about the objectification of a human being.

That's what humiliation tries to do -- make a human being understand that he or she is something that is less than human.

many NG seem to be in '40s and even 50's.

what is the average age in the NG?

because he is so paranoid about the naked female form!
:crazy:

:mad:

You know how the troops have been taught to idolize him.

be it political, etc.

It's the favorite right wing tactic to attack liberals with.

Two words: Bill Clinton.

They couldn't get him any other way. They had to use the sex card.

Of a very serious mental disease...

I'm sorry but Americans do not have a monopoly on sexual misconduct. Look what is going on in Sudan, Sierra Leone, Iraq, etc.

Saddam and his sons have rape rooms.

In other countries they are dragging women out of their homes and making them sex slaves.

They are raping women with machine guns.

This is nothing new in the world and there is no country that isn't consumed with sex or sexual deviancy.

And , at least, our poor people have more to eat than poor people in ohter countries. It cannot be explained away in such simple terms.

you are a bit confused. Americans may not hold a monopoly on sexual misconduct, but we have a sex/nakedness hang-up that is pretty extreme.
In most of Europe nudity is not considered a big deal. In France one sees topless women on the beach as a standard. Nursing a baby in public is not looked upon with distain. The rates of sexual crimes are much lower.
Americans put naked bodies only in magazines, videos, or seedy bars - they are 'shameful'.
The more sexually repressed a society is, the more likely there will be sexual violence.

It`s all about power and control.

Sure.

Like rape, especially violent rape and in a military setting, has little to do with sex; but a lot to do about domination and humiliation.

pnorman

to a lot of women, it's important to make a big distinction between the motives behind consensual sex between adults and the motives behind forced or coerced sex.

To add a little more: it really bugs me when the media calls something like the priest/abuse story a "sex scandal" when it is so different from something like Bill Bennet getting his hiney spanked by a dominatrix. One is Bill paying for a service he enjoys and the other is a child being abused and suffering years of psychological torment. Yet the just randomly characterize these things under "sex scandal."

;-)

It is also obssessively present in our language and that is nowhere, on any talk forum, except perhaps Yahoo, more obvious than on DU

:)

Americans have such an uhealthy view on sex. It starts with the horrible messages we give our children and then it just goes downhill from there.

The childish response towards a man's penis in those horrible Iraqi prisoner photos are definately a display of our stunted emotional growth when it comes to sex and the human body. A grown woman pointing and laughing and taking photos of a penis. A penis. WTF?

unique to the U.S. or its soldiers. Though I think our country is more screwed up than most in terms of our attitudes towards this. Americans enjoy their porn and Howard Stern etc., but then like to go on righteous jags and go nuts about some gal's nipple on TV. Screwed up legacy of Puritanism we haven't shaken off in a few hundred years.

going into this country to do this torture to get information. i think they took a page out of saddams book, was done by him "them" we need to do to get info

just another piece of the universal truth, walk with lack of integrity it feeds all the way thru

Think this is just the most vile way to humiliate a person. Just as Rape is a violation of females from earliest times, the mutilation of genitals and exposure of a person in their nakedness is the utiltimate in dominance.

It's gone on forever, Ketuck. This is nothing new. Although I agree with your view that sexual identity is messed up in our culture now, I don't equate this with what goes on in all wars.

That's why we shouldn't go to war if we can possible avoid it. Especially wars of "Humiliation and Subjugation" which I think Iraq was all about. It's Bush/Cheney's inferiority that's responsible for his humiliation. There's a sickness in them and their Neo-Con handlers that we need to be worried about more than Britany or Janet. :-(