Mark Richards wrote:
I am baffled as to why a clitoris would be considered comparable in any way to torture. I guess I am baffled as to why 'sex and violence' so frequently appear in the same sentence.
To paraphrase that great American philosopher, George Carlin, "It's OK to fuck your enemy; just don't fuck your lover." It's a question of morality. On American TV they may be showing the torture pictures from the Sadaamite jail, but any suggestion on these pictures that the prisoners might have genitals needs to be blurred to avoid offending the morals of decent religious folks. The administration strongly objected to pictures of returning dead American soldiers. These weren't pictures of mutilated bodies - just rows of flag-draped coffins. For many, the video game world has to be real; without that some would be left with the unpatriotic illusion that when you pull on the trigger real people are being killed.
Perhaps the painted nails on the fingers that spread the labia to show the clitoris were a detraction from the purpose of that article, but so too would be an excess of pictures to illustrate the tortures at Abu Ghraib, as was the excess of pictures about Rachel Corrie. But we can't ignore any of these images altogether.
Ec