Torture is a caricature of the everyday world. Everything in the world of torture gets inverted. A coerced confession of something you didn't do becomes truth. Guilt rather than innocence becomes the normative presumption. Torturers become heroes, because they do what they do to protect the rest of us. The tortured become villains, either because they're guilty (the normative presumption) or because, if "exonerated" and released, they are unwelcome reminders of something dark and dirty we don't want to think about. Their sheer presence haunts us.
One of the most troubling caricatures in the world of torture centers around intimacy. The language and act of physical love are twisted into the language of brutality and agonizing, humiliating physical treatment. Torture victims are inflicted with overt sexual abuse--cattle prods up the anus, gang-rape, sodomization--or more vaguely threatened with tough guy sexual metaphors--"we're going to fuck you up real good."
And the threats are, generally, good. Women and men--but especially women--are repeatedly raped and sodomized with both male penises and inanimate objects. Prisoners are bound in sexually humiliating positions. Algerian prisoners tortured in Paris in 1958, for example, were regularly "spitted": wrists bound to ankles, a metal bar behind knees, ass-up (and vulnerable), suspended in mid-air. "We're going to test your blood pressure before buggering you," one of them was told by a torturer.[1]
Torturers, like perverse lovers, pay special attention to the genitalia, especially when shocking their victims. Ostensibly, this is because the genitals are especially sensitive to pain. But there are other parts of the body just as easily hurt. Attention to the genitals is obsessional with torturers. It's fueled by a far deeper motive than maximizing pain.
Prisoners who escape physical rape are often psychically raped through sexual humiliation. The Abu Ghraib revelations of coerced simulations of coitus and sodomy among prisoners, panties draped over prisoners' heads, female guards mockingly grabbing prisoners' penises or baring their breasts: the foreplay, the cocktease, the 2nd base, of torture. Argentine torture survivor Jacobo Timerman recalls that prisoners were often forced to shout "I masturbate!" [2]Incredibly, favored prisoners are sometimes offered sex as rewards for their cooperation or as bizarre gestures of pity. Timerman remembers an occasion when he received such an invitation from a "benevolent" guard: "Everything about him transmits generosity...He tells me there are some female prisoners on the grounds, if I'd care to go to bed with one of them. I tell him no. This gets him angry because he wants to help me and, by not allowing him to, I upset his plan."[3] Another Argentine survivor, Mario Villani, tells a similar story. One of his guards thought he was sweet on a female prisoner--"Skinny, you like the blond, don't you?"--and arranged for the two to be together in the same cell for an entire night.[4]
How to understand this?
At one level, what comes into play is the raw energy that torture can stir up in the torturer. The torturer realizes that the person before him--a person who may be sexually desirable but totally beyond the torturer's range of partners in the normal world--is utterly powerless, utterly his to do with what he will. Juvenile sexual fantasties of fucking whoever one wants to fuck are suddenly thrust into the realm of live possibility. Faces and limbs contorted in agony resemble ones contorted in ecstacy. Radical vulnerability and imagined invitation: one needn't be a de Sade to find these potent motivators. Roberto, the torturer in Ariel Dorman's play Death and the Maiden, describes the fascination that eventually leads to his rape of torture victims:
How much can this woman take? More than the other one? How's her sex? Does her sex dry up when you put the current through her? Can she have an orgasm under those circumstances? She is entirely in your power, you can carry out all your fantasies, you can do what you want with her...Everything they have forbidden you since ever, whatever your mother ever urgently whispered you were never to do. You begin to dream with her, with all those women... [5]But of course a torturer never "makes love" with his victims. He always "fucks" them. The etymology of the word "fuck" is ambiguous, but two of its uses, current up through the 17th century, were "to strike" and "to penetrate." Fucking someone is assaulting them, invading their body, entering and conquering them. Bedroom talk between genuine intimates sometimes uses this assaultive language as harmless turn-ons: "Fuck me hard!" But in the lexicon of the torturer, the striking, penetrative function is taken with deadly seriousness.
This is because the torturer really is out to conquer the victim. Physical brutality is one of his tools. Psychical dismemberment and abject humiliation are two more. And sexual mastery is an especially effective way to accomplish all these goals. Kate Millet:
Torture is conquest through irresistible force. It is to destroy opposition through causing it to destroy itself: in despair, in self-hatred for its own vulnerability, impotence. It is to defile, degrade, overwhelm with shame, to ravage. In this it resembles rape. And the tortured come to experience not only the condition of the animal caged by man, but the predicament of woman before man as well. A thing male prisoners discover, a thing female prisoners rediscover. Torture is based upon traditional ideas of domination: patriarchal order and masculine rank. The sexual is invoked to emphasize the power of the tormentor, the vulnerability of the victim; sexuality itself is confined inside an ancient apprehension and repression: shame, sin, weakness. The victim tortured sexually is tortured twice as it were, first by being deliberately harmed, second by being harmed in a way regarded as the most humiliating of all humiliations. [6]From the torturer's perspective, perhaps the most ironic inversion of physical love is this: that the body which the genuine lover wishes only to please becomes one which the torturer-lover wishes only to fuck and thereby turn into yet another instrument with which to torture the victim.
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[1] The Gangrene, trans. Robert Silvers (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1960), p. 79.
[2] Jacobo Timerman, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, trans. Toby Talbot (New York: Alfred A. Knopt, 1981), p. 83.
[3] Ibid., p. 40.
[4] Marguerite Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 79.
[5] Ariel Dorman, Death and the Maiden (New York: Penguin, 1991), pp. 59, 60.
[6] Kate Millet, "The Politics of Cruelty," in William F. Schulz (ed), The Phenomenon of Torture: Readings and Commentary (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1007), p. 165.
torture, human rights, terrorism
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