Girls Gone Wild?

It is difficult to comment on the Abu Ghraib scandal--the photographs, the New Yorker reports by Seymour Hersch, etc., have, for the most part, rendered me speechless. But I was motivated to mouth off a bit yesterday at the lunch table when I read an article in the Chicago Tribune (from the New York Times News Service) that quoted Lynndie England's lead lawyer Richard Hernandez as saying, "[England is] as stressed as anyone would expect of a 21-year-old young lady who faces 30 years in prison for photographs you'd see at Mardi Gras or spring break…." Now I assume Hernandez is referring to the type of imagery I caught one insomniac evening on an informercial for Girls Gone Wild: Doggie Style that riled every cell in my feminist body. I do find those GGW-type images exploitative, but the analogy Henandez makes is absurd and offensive. Abu Ghraib is not a spring break vacation destination, and the prisoners were not complicit in their participation in the photographs--they were humiliated and terrified. They were prisoners in a war zone. Further trivializing the issue, Hernandez states, "Of course she regrets things. Every one of us regrets things in our teens and 20's." As if the episode could fall under the same rubric as a high school shoplifting escapade! These are certainly not the most vitriolic comments that have been aired on the topic, but I do find them especially tasteless coming from her attorney. While searching for the link to the New York Times article, I found another article from the Associated Press published today that reported of England: "A string of prosecution witnesses have described the 21-year-old reservist from Fort Ashby, W.Va., as undisciplined and promiscuous, part of the government's strategy of portraying her as one of a handful of rogue soldiers from her 372nd Military Police Company who took it upon themselves to abuse detainees." I kept returning to that line "undisciplined and promiscuous" and wondering if any of the men on trial for the Abu Ghraib scandal would have his sexual activity characterized on the record. Abu Ghraib (and the dialogue about it) raises many, many other questions for a feminist, not the least among them: "How could women participate in these atrocities?" I, and almost every woman I spoke with when the story broke, asked some form of this question. In These Times Contributing Editor Barbara Ehrenreich wrote an excellent Op-Ed for the LA Times on this topic that helps me to answer some of my questions about Abu Ghraib (and even some of my questions about Girls Gone Wild). She concludes it thus: "To cite an old, and far from naive, feminist saying: 'If you think equality is the goal, your standards are too low." It is not enough to be equal to men, when the men are acting like beasts. It is not enough to assimilate. We need to create a world worth assimilating into.'"