Thought i'd dig this article up for you since it's on the same subject.
War porn
With their jazzy graphics, fact boxes and breathless statistics, the military pundits are everywhere. But aren't they enjoying themselves a little too much? And who wants to know all this stuff anyway? Could sex have something to do with it, wonders Emma Brockes
Emma Brockes
Wednesday March 26, 2003
The Guardian
Consider an exchange that took place last week on Sky News, between the studio anchor and defence expert of the hour, Colonel Mike Vickery. With the aid of the Skystrator, Sky's hi-tech version of the Etch a Sketch, footage of a tank trundling across the desert was freeze-framed and decorated with red arrows to highlight its selling points.
Vickery: Moving at 35mph, that is a hell of a pace for not just an armoured vehicle, but a whole bunch of armoured vehicles.
Anchor: Does that surprise you?
Vickery: It doesn't really surprise me, but it's very impressive.
Anchor: OK. What are we looking at now?
Vickery: Here you can see the tank in its UK guise and you can see they've got that 120mm gun on the front there, that's got a range of over two miles. On the top you can see a hunter-killer sight, that is to say that the commander can look at one target while the gunner is engaging another one. And then you've got, of course, the armour, if you can see that square chunky appearance on the sides and at the front of the vehicle.
Anchor: Have these tanks been adapted for the desert?
Vickery: Indeed yes. I hope we can see in the moment, a desertised Challenger 2.
The war has authored lots of odd media moments, none odder, perhaps, than that witnessed by anyone who crashed home at 3am on Sunday morning and turned on the telly to find Angela Rippon, live on the ITV News Channel, describing the skyline of Kuwait as "elegant". But one of the most consistently striking things about the coverage of the conflict - and every other conflict of the modern TV era - is the way it has been dominated by an endless flow of facts, stats and graphics about military hardware, from the sort of spoddy experts usually banished to minority satellite channels aimed at men you would rather not sit next to on the tube.
The press is just as bad. Before the war had started, newspapers were cranking out "Path to War" supplements, which, in their fiddly, fact-boxey layout looked like those special-interest magazines that come with a free ring binder.
While Vickery was on Sky, over on BBC News 24 defence analyst Paul Beaver was pouring over a slightly less jazzy version of the Skystrator and speculating, "If I was a military commander, I'd be putting B52s into this sort of area."
The rolling news channels consume such vast amounts of material that, for practical reasons, it makes sense for them to deploy every scrap of trainspottery detail in the fight against oblivion - that exquisite moment when the news anchor realises just how far from the shores of meaningful speech he's drifted and fear shines in his eyes. Still, the undisguised enthusiasm with which, for example, Sky's Francis Tusa describes a particular sort of jet as a "little beastie", is not, one suspects, about practicality. Even without the Sun's explicit conflation of war and sex images (see Kelly Brook in a camouflage bikini and a series of topless women behind barbed wire entitled "weapons of mass seduction"), the connection isn't hard to make. War porn is everywhere and lots of people, men and women both, have found themselves responding to it.
"As a scholar of porn, I look at this and say 'these are boys with phallic toys'," sighs Linda Williams, professor of film studies and rhetoric at UC Berkley. It's not a new observation, but what is new, is the extent to which it is amplified by technology. "CNN have this special thing they do whenever they introduce a new weapon. It reminds me of the way athletes are introduced in coverage of the Olympics: a little inset comes out with their bio and stats. This weapon they had just now was something called the AC130H-Spectre - some dreadful machine - it came flying out and turned this way and that so that you could see it from all angles." (A similar thing happens on ITN: "It's amazing to see the Abrams tank and we've put together a little fact file.") "This," says Williams, "is the kind of spectacular vision you get in porn - where the point is to see the sex act from every angle. It's narcissistic; boys getting together admiring their toys. It is about us proudly displaying our weapons and there is something sexual about that."
It is also about the thrill, for non-combatants, of affecting familiarity with militaria: slang such as "bite and hold" and "use them or lose them" delivers a visible jolt of pleasure to its users, but even without this, so much of the language of war is borrowed from sex, sport and entertainment that it constantly undermines attempts by those who use it, to seem serious. Ten minutes of channel hopping produced this sequence:
"Flank protection."
"The thrust is actually going on outside Basra."
"Tanks tanks..."
"The big push."
"Kick off outside the airfields..."
"Deadly game of cat and mouse."
"Pounding the earth."
"We were barrelling along the main road with these missiles flying overhead. It was an extraordinary show."
This showbiz element of war is, to a limited extent, encouraged by the military. Witness the rabble-rousing speeches given to troops by their US commanders: "it's hammer time" and "resistance is futile," which is what the Borg, a race of cybernetic beings, say before they assimilate you in Star Trek.
"War films, that whole boys-own approach and language, is what they call the John Wayne syndrome," says Professor Joanna Bourke, historian at Birkbeck University in London and author of An Intimate History of Killing. "It is men in combat getting over their fear state by using the language and mythology of Hollywood."
Soldiers might be encouraged to imagine that they are on the frontier, fulfilling a heroic duty, in the style of the old westerns. "We've heard that in this conflict, soldiers were shown Band of Brothers before going into battle, which is extraordinary." It is also, says Bourke, an attempt to overcome the fact that "one of the worst things about the modern battlefield is that it's the loneliest place on earth. The military puts enormous effort into trying to personalise the conflict and to use every scrap of adrenaline, even sexual adrenaline, to this end."
Inevitably, John Wayne syndrome rubs off on people outside of the military, particularly those covering it, and sharing some of its risk, in the media. Some of them says Bill Durodie, senior research fellow at the Centre for Defense Studies, go native. "They don't take a step back. The fact that they are wearing gas masks in some ways means they are participating in the propaganda that Saddam has chemical weapons. It's this obsession with feeling the feeling, this emotionology."
Strangely, however, the most porny of war porn behaviour - the barely suppressed subtext of "fwor, check out the grenades on that" - is non-partisan, since pure weapons enthusiasts don't care about the politics of conflict so much as the specifications of the gear they are using. OK, so it's a cliche, but, says Dr Krista Cowman, senior lecturer in history at Leeds Metropolitan University, "Boys are both innately and through programming turned into obsessive collecting from an early age. My son collects Digimon cards at the moment; my husband, though an early modernist, has an anal obsession over first-world-war aircraft. It's about categorising and sorting; it's about the way the sexes communicate. Girls talk about their hopes and dreams and fears; boys communicate through the swapping of lists and football cards."
Among the weapons geeks, there is also, possibly, the over-compensatory stance adopted by people deeply, psychologically involved in war, but physically removed from the action. "People with the highest level of psychological breakdown are often behind the front lines," says Joanna Bourke. "The medical and supply corps, who can see the horror, but can't fight back, who don't have the purpose of the frontline soldier. That's why people at home - women, often - can express more virulent hatred of the enemy than soldiers. Soldiers understand that, in reality, the enemy is just obeying orders."
For the most part, the representations of war don't put too much store in reality. "I've never had a great deal of sympathy for Baudrillard," says Linda Williams, "but there is something to be said for the hyper-reality of this situation: it is intensified reality, verging on the unreal."
All the lavishly reproduced fact files and whizzy graphics, the 3D cartoon missiles and gleaming formation of tanks, photographed from above, seem to be engaged in an enterprise as unreal as their equivalent in the sex industry - an attempt to pass something ugly off as something beautiful.
