A monograph on the exciting new directions to be taken by prodding boners in the new American century.

It has been observed often and consistently that the formation of fetishes is at least strongly related to phobia and trauma, and the suggestion has an explanatory heft one finds wanting in any other theory of fetish formation. The ritual sexualization of fear and shame are a force stronger than most conscious commitments, and indeed various fetishes - especially those specifically tied to race or gender relations - precede self-identification in politics. Our sex lives are intimately coupled to our persons, and like those persons lack loyalty to ostensibly ‘deeper’ loyalties - to family, country, tribe, religion, or ideology. And to the extent Freud got anything right at all, it is this - that fear plays a profound role in even ‘normal’ sexuality, and the fetishistic behavior we regard as extreme and separate from our daily experiences is as normal and natural as ‘regular’ sex. (And, for that matter, ‘regular’ sex is as ritualized and fear-influenced as non-vanilla sex.)

I would like to present this as a given for the sake of simplicity. (I cannot find a good source to make the point clearly for me; I leave this as an exercise to any skeptical reader and am open to the possibility it is incorrect.) There are a few good examples of what for want of a better phrase I will call mass kinks, a generational shift in sexual desire based on canonical trauma. While the kinks themselves are subtly different - just like every person’s experience of the social canon - they revolve around similar themes.

The two World Wars are pretty self-evident in the set of traumas they offered; it’s difficult to trace a precedent to the erotic energy of fascism with anything like the clarity with which its political antecedents can be drawn - in fact, a number of the psychosexual elements of the interbellum and the second war were the only factors whose trajectory emerged full-formed ex nihilo in the late teens. There are books to be written about the sudden explosion of cross-dressing as a comic device in postwar Britain and France (and, to a lesser degree, the other belligerents), and the booming if well-suppressed popularity of BDSM in the wake of an all-annihilating war in which no rule but subordination to authority could be said to exist with any consistency. More important to us for this brief excursion, however, are the Jews.

Nazi pornography, along with most things having to do with the Nazis, are understandably frowned upon by the authorities of Israel. In spite of this, and in spite of the youngest generation to survive the Shoah entering old age, there remains a bustling black market in Israel of holocaust porn, with each year growing broader and more stereotyped in its relationship to the camps. A generation without the personal experience of the Holocaust still exhibiting a sexualized terror of it makes plain the abstract nature of mass kink - its relationship with trauma is indifferent to its proximity. I cannot say for certain how important the personal distance from trauma is to its incorporation within the self, but it’s pretty clear - considering how easy it was for the Republicans and other people whose primary interest with New York was keeping a stern eye out for its hated Jew to mourn bitterly and angrily the World Trade Center - that if first- and second-hand trauma are not interchangeable they are closer to it than not.

The current generation of Muslims, especially Arabs (and backwater or conservative groups whose primary window to the world is religious rather than tribal), have in the past decade been inundated with a particularly surreal and violent series of images; where the colonial interference of one set of imperial and local exploiters after another formed a stable, reliable part of the world for generations - centuries - before 9/11. This is even true of the relationship between the Muslim community and Israel; where before it was primarily an extension of the inhuman behavior of the colonialists, now the Zionist project is presented as an extension of the train of abuses which America has inflicted on the ummah by individual, group, and community. The complaint of the Palestinians has taken second fiddle to the general terror of Asia Minor, the unconditional belligerence of America, Israel, and the UK, and so on. Israel itself has adopted this shift wholesale - invasive settlers, once accepted universally as a useful tool for keeping the revolting wogs at arm’s length, became a white elephant when the mud people - rather than junior partners in an unbreakable contract - became indolent barbarians intent on destroying a permanently besieged civilization. Israel’s involvement with Lebanon in the 80s near-completely mirrors its involvement with Lebanon in 2006 - and yet the modern war is treated as a failure not for its inability to manipulate Lebanese politics (Israel’s ability to do so was never accepted as plausible the second time around), but its vulnerability to the second Lebanese resistance’s equally primitive, unequal methods of infiltration and destruction of Israeli civilians.

The grand and disorienting shift in the imperial narrative, one in which the abusers’ primary concern is a mixture of grand project and nihilist revenge rather than the simpler, less loathsome motive of profit, has been accompanied by the first stumbling steps in the development of American dominance. Long story short: the globalists, lacking the finesse and experience of the exploiters of days past, have made obvious their methods for producing a dull, unbreakable terror in the subject populace. They’re crude and violent, but each leak richochets and spreads so heavily that no one can escape its long, clawing reach; even the sadistic hell-raising of a half-wit cod-Rambo can produce anger to match that at state policy, and when the government itself is behind it the usual result is all the worse.

In short, the incoming generation of Arabophones, linked closer than ever by an increasingly decentralized system of Internet access and SMS communication, are entering our world without the power to change it, and the world looks even more miserable from that end than from ours. They are the subjects and victims of the American bullies, and the canonical representatives of the West are tough-talking, professionally incurious cretins like Bush, Merkel, and Sarkozy; even the members of the northern elite outside of their immediate oppressors are mean-spirited house-proud doctrinaires who resent them personally for no clear reason. But more than the simple world of politics, the more private world of sexual shame holds a veritable minefield for the teenagers of the Third World - for they can’t even count on dealing with Bush.

Indeed, it takes a spirited denial the likes of which this world hasn’t seen since the fall of Imperial Japan to refuse to accept that the American regime of rapture, imprisonment, torture, and implied destruction completely lacks any systematic protection from error. Largely escaping the servile American media is the unnervingly long list of men abducted from their lives for having a name close to one surrendered in earlier interrogations - abducted from their homes on suspicions ultimately founded by personal rivals and inexperienced clods - and treated as if their guilt had been acclaimed down from On High. There is a danger to anyone that the Americans, a malevolent and inscrutable force, will sweep them from their home or job and throw them into a legal black hole, a pit of torture and recrimination in which the only ears to hear are deaf to pleas of mercy. It does not matter what kind of life they’ve lived; they’re automatically suspect.

Then comes the torture, a process repeatedly illustrated with self-authenticating media. Reports from observers and the imprisoned attest in one voice that the victims of these raptures are then thrown into a dank, featureless cell, drugged, beaten, physically and mentally tortured, and lead into a surreal world in which they are guilty of any crime their accuser feels them capable of. This particular part of the mass trauma is what informs what I predict out of rendition pornography - that is, its universality. Like the imprisoned in POW or death-camp pornography, the renditioned have done nothing to deserve it; the more obvious examples would include liberals, Americophiles, and the smug little wheels in the war engine - an element designed to both please the reactionary and resistance fetishists and appeal sexually to the fetishists among the ranks of those very groups - nothing, in fact, could be more terrifying than falling into the abusive grasp of someone you would otherwise admire.

The particulars of the torture are likely to be at least partially derivative of prior BDSM, but there is one interesting and unique kink: the fem-dom. While female domination creeps without warrant into Nazi fetishism, in this case the fear of fem-dom is deeply warranted: the mass images of American torture have the degraded victims lead around on leashes and stacked into pyramids by butch, shapeless, but self-evidently female Americans - the canonical example being England. Even beyond this, there’s a strong element of feminization to the whole affair - not only is there the identified trend in orientalism to identify the Arabs as passive and effeminate, but there’s the much simpler and more direct matter of torturees’ garb.

The rendition prisoners wear flowing, constraining robes, and when they are shuttled in open air they are given head-covering wraps. Several of the more shameful images from Abu Ghraib involved men, in the course of evidently random and pointless torture, being electroded in ragged mockeries of the chador.

Add this to the generally gynaeophobic and homosocial social urges present in much of the Muslim world, and we find a truly ugly picture facing men and women alike coming of age there. And when this endless struggle turns against us - which it ineluctably will - God knows how terrible will be the revenge.