There is a connection between Fear Factor, an NBC television program, and the recent release of Abu Ghraib photos.
Fear Factor is a reality program in which individuals and teams of people compete in three segments to show how much fear they can endure. The first and third segment deal with falling from heights, risk of drowning, speed and combinations such as dropping from a helicopter into a cold 
ocean after walking a tight rope in mid air, sliding down the outside of 50 story slanted building and escaping from locked cages underwater. Some programs have had wild animals as the fear factor including vicious dogs and crocodiles. The middle segment deals with eating gross objects such as live scorpions, raw bull testicles or worms and being immersed in live animals including poison snakes, piranha fish and hornets.
The Abu Ghraib photos are now on line by the hundreds. I looked at all the photos on the Salon site, despite the hysterical and Loony-Left Salon warning that looking at the photos could damage my psyche.
Fear Factor and the photos are related.
Fear Factor and the photos are related. How can Americans love the TV
program (more than 100 episodes on a major network, so far, with more
beginning this Summer) with human terrors five, ten and fifteen times
as great as anything at Abu Ghraib?
Extracting information from detainees relies on evoking fear, when it
works. Cultures differ in their relation to fear. American culture is
directly based on fear. Americans respond to the kinds of fear shown
on Fear Factor. Other societies evoke fear with other approaches.
Japan is a family shame society so creating shame related to one’s
family is the greatest source of fear. Japanese traditionally have
evoked fear at amusement parks with natural disasters such as simulated
earthquakes and tsunamis. Natural disasters wipe out whole families.
Arabs are a shame culture based on tribal shame. Fear is created by
humiliation. When a member of the tribe violates morals they shame
their family, hence raped women are punished.
Abu Ghraib was about Americans inducing fear in Arabs by humiliation, not physical torture of the kind that Arabs in Iraq used to kill pacifist Tom Fox after two months or the kind John McCain endured for years in North Vietnam. The snarling dogs in the Abu Ghraib photos didn’t bite anyone, the electric wires weren’t connected to anything and the blood in some of the photos came from self-inflicted prisoner wounds (as the original notations indicate).
Any American who has experienced real torture would trade five years of
being naked and photographed with a woman’s undies on their head … for
one hour of the standard kind of physical torture that I was trained to
expect when I was in Army basic training. It is the kind John McCain
experienced in North Vietnam.
Fear Factor is loved because the participants are volunteer contestants, similar to race car drivers, but with almost no chance of being hurt. It is training to confront fear. The thrill is imagining oneself being brave and overcoming our kinds of fear. Being terrified is a positive experience for Americans … when it is over.
The scandal surrounding Abu Ghraib was precisely because Abu Ghraib was about humiliation not physical torture. Sexual humiliation, with naked men in public photographed…all critical elements. Without the photos and public nakedness there would have been no torture. The unique problem was that the photos got to America and created a scandal, expressed as Congressional outrage.
So why were photos of sexual humiliation of a kind that would hardly bother any individual American the source of such great scandal?
Americans are Puritans (so are Arabs),we are fanatic Puritans. There are several qualities of our Puritanism that need to be explicated.
First, an American Puritan is offended by the thought that anyone else
anywhere is having a good time. This is not hypothetical or anecdotal,
as you will see in a the next paragraph. It doesn’t relate to Abu
Ghraib.
In a sex research project at Stanford in the early 1970s the participants were divided into three groups. One group saw porn every Friday night for a month, one group watched travel films every Friday night in the same building and the third group (control group) just filled out the same questionnaires (as the other two groups) at the beginning and ending of the research project. The group that saw porn became much more liberal in their opinions about sexuality at the end of the month, the control group that saw nothing showed a modest increase in liberal opinions about sex (stimulated by the questionnaire), but the group that saw travel films became more anti-sex because they knew another group was seeing porn films. Pure test of Puritanism.
Secondly, Puritanism generates black and white perceptions of the world. People are able to have sexual affairs when married to someone else because, in the heat of passion, they never admit to themselves that there can be bad consequences of their behavior…often times terrible consequences. Once an American, in passion, has stepped outside the bounds of normal morality, having a sexual affair while married or with a married person, then they close their mind to the outlaw world they live in. Puritanism sees the black and white world, and in the black world there is no grey to consider moderation, negotiation, apology or compromise…much less consequences.
Thirdly, the Puritans who came to America were publicly austere in black clothes with uncurtained windows in their living rooms and moral police prowling the streets. As an acceptable outlet in Puritan America, the woman wore bright lascivious underwear and married couples were encouraged to enjoy wild sex.
Consequently and most importantly, this public private distinction relates to Abu Ghraib.
Public behavior is what is proscribed, private behavior is treated as separate and unregulated, as a person alone, as between married people (but not as it relates to small groups in a private home). Congresspeople would be reasonably comfortable in private being naked with panties and private photos, but publicly that is taboo. Outrage, as we saw.
The two military enlisted peons who were court martialed for Abu Ghraib were really tried for their stupidity in participating in the photographs and taking the photographs themselves. They embarrassed the Army when the photos got out. Without photos, there was no Abu Ghraib. A written description wouldn’t have attracted any attention except insults about the “prude” who wrote the story.
We have a good example of the truth of this public photo issue.
How many of my readers paid any attention to the much worse humiliation that was described at Guantanamo where a woman interrogator put a red marker on her inner thigh and during an interrogation put her finger under her skirt, in full view of the prisoner, then touched the red marker and put her red tipped finger on the forehead of the prisoner? Humiliating to a Muslim man. Accurately reported and not denied. No photo, no Congressional outrage.
Fear Factor, Abu Ghraib and Puritanism…a strange and incomparable mixture.