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A growing market for ‘war porn’
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“Soldiers have always collected trophies from the conflicts in which they are involved, but today they have the technology to turn such trophies into media events.”
“War porn”—videos viewed for entertainment that feature gruesome footage of dead American soldiers or the killing of soldiers and civilians in the Middle East wars—are growing in numbers online, in part because of the absence of a strong mainstream media presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to UB popular culture expert David Schmid.
“War photography and images can and do celebrate war, of course, but ‘war porn’ is born of a systematic dehumanization of the enemy ‘other,’ says Schmid a professor of English who teaches fiction and cultural studies, and is the author of highly regarded studies of American’s popular fascination with violent death.
“Soldiers have always collected trophies from the conflicts in which they are involved,” he says, “but today they have the technology to turn such trophies into media events. In one sense, then, it’s just the technology that has changed. The rest is continuous.”
Schmid notes that such images can provoke social protest, such as when television footage of dead and maimed soldiers and civilians helped stoke the public outcry against the Vietnam War, and ghastly photos of the Antietam battlefield sent shockwaves throughout the Civil War North.
“It is, in fact, the lack of a critical mainstream media presence in Iraq and Afghanistan that helps create and expand the market for war porn,” Schmid says. "In contrast to the Vietnam era, when war correspondents had much more mobility and independence inside war zones–and thus submitted some pretty horrifying footage of war that arguably hastened the war's end–ever since the first Gulf War, the American media has, by and large, been quiescent to the government’s desire to keep them away from the action by ‘embedding’ them with the troops,” he says. “War porn, in a bizarre way, is evidence of the failure of the strategy of embedding."
The consequences of public fascination with war porn are starting to become apparent, he noted.
"We’re only just beginning to see the damage inflicted on Americans (veterans and non-veterans) by 10 years of war," Schmid says, "and, whether we like it or not, we have to reckon with those consequences sooner or later. In this sense, war porn is just the very visible tip of a very large iceberg, just as the phenomenon of ‘murderabilia," which are collectibles related to murders, murderers or other violent crime, is the very visible tip of a similarly large and perhaps connected iceberg."
Schmid is the author of "Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture" and (in progress) "Murder Culture: Why Americans are Fascinated by Homicide.”
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