Humiliation of Iraqi prisoners of war

Excerpts from the article: The Gendered Method of Iraqi Prisoner Abuse, 

by Paul G. Buchanan

To force such type of Arab men to strip naked, then pose in passive-receptive/submissive sexual poses and force them to engage in homoerotic weirdness under the laughing gaze of female soldiers is the ultimate form of degradation. As one ex-prisoner is quotedby CBS as saying, “physical torture is just a blow and we can resist, but to take away our manhood and treat us like women--that is the worst insult.”

Prevented from engaging in physical cruelty (for which the prisoners were better prepared), the interrogators decided to use the vulnerability provided by Arab male sexual psychology. The prisoners would have preferred to have suffered like men, with their pants on, but instead were made to feel powerless, penetrable (and there are now disputed claims that some of them were) and utterly vulnerable to the sadistic depredations of what surely must have been a sight from hell: female soldiers ridiculing their genitalia and forcing them to commit “female” sexual acts. In such a context perhaps it is true that rape is worse for men than it is for women, because in this case the prisoners felt particularly (and culturally) powerless and vulnerable--perhaps like thewomen in their lives.