‘Freedom’ to Rape Prostitutes in Iraq: Fun and Porn for the Boys
Suki Falconberg Ph.D.
January 09, 2007
My fury is high, and I am seeing red, and I don’t quite know quite where to start in response to one of Newsweek’s usual pieces: a sexist, patriarchal, overweeningly male, massively chauvinistic (that useful word bequeathed to us by the feminists of the 60’s), on-the-surface story about how booze and drugs and whores are rampant in Iraq due to the American presence. Now young Iraqi men can easily have access to bodies. The author of this particular piece, called “Iraqi Vice” (Dec. 22), is Christian Caryl, and he tells of a typical journey from a village to Baghdad by a young male named Ali who, as soon as he gets off the bus, heads to a well-known alley where he plunks down $1.50 to buy 15 minutes with a woman. (Woman? What are the ages of the ‘women’ held here? Are they girls? Caryl does not bother to ask or to find out. ) “The room is a cell with only a curtain for a door, and Ali complains that Abu Abdullah’s women should bathe more often,” writes Caryl.
Is Abu Abdullah the pimp, the ‘owner’ of the girls? Why didn’t Caryl interview him to see where he bought the girls from?
Why didn’t Caryl ask why the girls were dirty? There is a reason prostitutes don’t bathe more often. The kind of filth they need to wash away is not amenable to soap and water. The filth that men like Ali deposit inside is so indelible and deep, that even scrubbing the vagina away, until it is raw and dead, will not take away the true dirt. The filth of being raped all day, for $1.50 a shot, can’t ever be washed away.
Caryl’s second enlightening comment on prostitutes in this piece is that the girls now have ‘nothing to fear’ since American MP’s make the cops in this district release the prostitutes if they are arrested. Back to the pimps? That’s not much of a release. And as for them having ‘nothing to fear,’ the prostitution-rape these girls undergo everyday is greatly to be feared. As is the everpresent possibility of physical violence. As is the psychological misery and destruction and pain that accompanies the violation of their bodies.
Why didn’t Caryl go behind the curtain and interview the girl? Why was she so unimportaint that he didn’t even give her a voice? Is she just an unwashed body, an unbathed whore, with no humanity or identity? I would ask this journalist: Is she just a hole that men stick it in for fifteen minutes at $1.50 a shot?
There is no female perspective in this article. But then there is no female perspective in the media. Every day journalists all over the world crank out articles just like this one—exclusively from the merciless, male point-of-view: without pity or empathy for the raped.
Ali is quoted as saying that the availability of these whores, unwashed as they are, is “a big improvement from Saddam Hussein’s day. Back then, he says, the only establishment for a poor boy like himself was a Gypsy settlement on the capital’s western outskirts. ‘But now there are plenty of places,’ he grins. ‘Now we have freedom.’”
Okay, I guess this is a male version of ‘freedom’—to be able to ram a hole for 15 minutes for $1.50. But does the girl he is ramming consider this ‘freedom’? Why didn’t Caryl ask her? (I’d also like to know what happened to those poor Gypsy girls.)
I would like Caryl to ask her other questions. Is she being rammed all day? Does she ever get to rest? What kind of physical and emotional shape is she in? How did she get here, in this brothel bed, behind a curtain? Is she hurting from the constant use by strangers? Does she have venereal diseases? Is she receiving any medical care? Does she have children? Does she get to keep any of the money or is she just a revolving sex-door for the men? Does she want to be here?
What woman or girl would invite this treatment, I wonder? Sexless, ‘loveless sex,’ sex without tenderness or caring, sex done anonymously, 15 minutes of being rammed by someone she doesn’t know, and then the next man gets on. Why is this woman’s point-of-view so negligible that this journalist did not go behind the curtain, to speak to her?
Is there never a journalist, anywhere, male or female, who asks these questions and writes about the world from the rape-battered woman’s point of view? Why do we never hear the words of the millions upon millions of women and girls and children being sold every day for a dollar or two (or even less) a rape? I don’t care which publication I go to—Newsweek, Time, US News & World Report, all the major papers—they only see the world from Ali’s point of view. His ‘grin’ as he talks about raping a whore body is apparently a far more salient journalistic detail than is the pain of that raped body. Why this should be so is great mystery to me.
Caryl also reports massive attendance at porn films in Baghdad, now everywhere since the American presence took hold.
Girls have gone missing in Iraq? Have they been trafficked and put in brothels, for Ali’s use? And, of course, my big question, are the American and British soldiers also taking advantage of these vulnerable, helpless girls? I don’t have contact with military men anymore, but I would like to talk to those American MP’s who make sure the prostitutes are released. I would like to ask them, and other soldiers who have been in Iraq, if they are buying bodies. (Is this the reason the MP’s make sure the girls are let go—so they will also be available for our men?) If American men are buying bodies over there, then they’re not really promoting ‘freedom.’ As I have written elsewhere, freedom does not exist for raped bodies.
I can’t do much about the behavior of rapists like Ali, but I can definitely raise my voice in protest when I see my men exploiting girls—anywhere in the world. These American men belong to me, in a sense. They are my model of freedom and goodness, and they are my protectors from oppression. I want other men to emulate my men. It hurts me if my men are hurting girls in Iraq, or anywhere around the world.
Caryl’s end note is quite puzzling. He quotes an Iraqi leader, Fuad al Rawi, as saying, “We can’t forbid freedom.” Then Caryl says, “Still, some people are always ready to try. That’s how people like Saddam came to power.” What kind of ‘freedom’ are these men (Caryl and Fuad al Rawi) talking about? The freedom of other men to traffic girls and make big profits off of them? The freedom of men to buy and rape girls for fun and sexual release? The freedom of men to sit and hoot at this spectacle we call hard-core porn, an industry that relies on Viagra-soaked men giving endless anal poundings to stiff, reluctant bodies (where is the foreplay, or anything like human interaction in all this male-designed porn?—but that is a subject for a whole other article).
A last question: Where is the voice of ordinary Iraqi women in all this? If we have liberated all these Iraqi women, and given them American-style ‘freedom,’ why are they not protesting the rape of their sisters?
Caryl’s male window on the world is depressing and dark beyond belief. There is no hope for the women of the world as long as journalists record ‘reality’ in such a narrow, sad way—only from the point of view of the rapist, not of the raped.
Afternote: I assume from the name, Christian, that Caryl is a male. If I have the gender wrong, it doesn’t much matter since all women journalists also record the world from the male point-of-view: they can’t help it—it is how they have been taught. I recorded the world from the male point-of-view until I was raped and decided that there must be a better way of looking at reality.
Is Abu Abdullah the pimp, the ‘owner’ of the girls? Why didn’t Caryl interview him to see where he bought the girls from?
Why didn’t Caryl ask why the girls were dirty? There is a reason prostitutes don’t bathe more often. The kind of filth they need to wash away is not amenable to soap and water. The filth that men like Ali deposit inside is so indelible and deep, that even scrubbing the vagina away, until it is raw and dead, will not take away the true dirt. The filth of being raped all day, for $1.50 a shot, can’t ever be washed away.
Caryl’s second enlightening comment on prostitutes in this piece is that the girls now have ‘nothing to fear’ since American MP’s make the cops in this district release the prostitutes if they are arrested. Back to the pimps? That’s not much of a release. And as for them having ‘nothing to fear,’ the prostitution-rape these girls undergo everyday is greatly to be feared. As is the everpresent possibility of physical violence. As is the psychological misery and destruction and pain that accompanies the violation of their bodies.
Why didn’t Caryl go behind the curtain and interview the girl? Why was she so unimportaint that he didn’t even give her a voice? Is she just an unwashed body, an unbathed whore, with no humanity or identity? I would ask this journalist: Is she just a hole that men stick it in for fifteen minutes at $1.50 a shot?
There is no female perspective in this article. But then there is no female perspective in the media. Every day journalists all over the world crank out articles just like this one—exclusively from the merciless, male point-of-view: without pity or empathy for the raped.
Ali is quoted as saying that the availability of these whores, unwashed as they are, is “a big improvement from Saddam Hussein’s day. Back then, he says, the only establishment for a poor boy like himself was a Gypsy settlement on the capital’s western outskirts. ‘But now there are plenty of places,’ he grins. ‘Now we have freedom.’”
Okay, I guess this is a male version of ‘freedom’—to be able to ram a hole for 15 minutes for $1.50. But does the girl he is ramming consider this ‘freedom’? Why didn’t Caryl ask her? (I’d also like to know what happened to those poor Gypsy girls.)
I would like Caryl to ask her other questions. Is she being rammed all day? Does she ever get to rest? What kind of physical and emotional shape is she in? How did she get here, in this brothel bed, behind a curtain? Is she hurting from the constant use by strangers? Does she have venereal diseases? Is she receiving any medical care? Does she have children? Does she get to keep any of the money or is she just a revolving sex-door for the men? Does she want to be here?
What woman or girl would invite this treatment, I wonder? Sexless, ‘loveless sex,’ sex without tenderness or caring, sex done anonymously, 15 minutes of being rammed by someone she doesn’t know, and then the next man gets on. Why is this woman’s point-of-view so negligible that this journalist did not go behind the curtain, to speak to her?
Is there never a journalist, anywhere, male or female, who asks these questions and writes about the world from the rape-battered woman’s point of view? Why do we never hear the words of the millions upon millions of women and girls and children being sold every day for a dollar or two (or even less) a rape? I don’t care which publication I go to—Newsweek, Time, US News & World Report, all the major papers—they only see the world from Ali’s point of view. His ‘grin’ as he talks about raping a whore body is apparently a far more salient journalistic detail than is the pain of that raped body. Why this should be so is great mystery to me.
Caryl also reports massive attendance at porn films in Baghdad, now everywhere since the American presence took hold.
Girls have gone missing in Iraq? Have they been trafficked and put in brothels, for Ali’s use? And, of course, my big question, are the American and British soldiers also taking advantage of these vulnerable, helpless girls? I don’t have contact with military men anymore, but I would like to talk to those American MP’s who make sure the prostitutes are released. I would like to ask them, and other soldiers who have been in Iraq, if they are buying bodies. (Is this the reason the MP’s make sure the girls are let go—so they will also be available for our men?) If American men are buying bodies over there, then they’re not really promoting ‘freedom.’ As I have written elsewhere, freedom does not exist for raped bodies.
I can’t do much about the behavior of rapists like Ali, but I can definitely raise my voice in protest when I see my men exploiting girls—anywhere in the world. These American men belong to me, in a sense. They are my model of freedom and goodness, and they are my protectors from oppression. I want other men to emulate my men. It hurts me if my men are hurting girls in Iraq, or anywhere around the world.
Caryl’s end note is quite puzzling. He quotes an Iraqi leader, Fuad al Rawi, as saying, “We can’t forbid freedom.” Then Caryl says, “Still, some people are always ready to try. That’s how people like Saddam came to power.” What kind of ‘freedom’ are these men (Caryl and Fuad al Rawi) talking about? The freedom of other men to traffic girls and make big profits off of them? The freedom of men to buy and rape girls for fun and sexual release? The freedom of men to sit and hoot at this spectacle we call hard-core porn, an industry that relies on Viagra-soaked men giving endless anal poundings to stiff, reluctant bodies (where is the foreplay, or anything like human interaction in all this male-designed porn?—but that is a subject for a whole other article).
A last question: Where is the voice of ordinary Iraqi women in all this? If we have liberated all these Iraqi women, and given them American-style ‘freedom,’ why are they not protesting the rape of their sisters?
Caryl’s male window on the world is depressing and dark beyond belief. There is no hope for the women of the world as long as journalists record ‘reality’ in such a narrow, sad way—only from the point of view of the rapist, not of the raped.
Afternote: I assume from the name, Christian, that Caryl is a male. If I have the gender wrong, it doesn’t much matter since all women journalists also record the world from the male point-of-view: they can’t help it—it is how they have been taught. I recorded the world from the male point-of-view until I was raped and decided that there must be a better way of looking at reality.
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