FRANK RICH writes in It Was the Porn That Made Them Do It that

Some of our self-appointed moral leaders want to...blame Janet Jackson for what's gone wrong in Iraq, or if not her, then Jenna Jameson...

If porn or MTV or Howard Stern can be said to have induced a "few bad apples" in one prison to misbehave, then everyone else in the chain of command, from the commander-in-chief down, is off the hook. If the culture war can be cross-wired with the actual war, then the buck will stop not at the Pentagon or the White House but at the Paris Hilton video, or "Mean Girls," or maybe "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy."

The hypocrisy of those pushing this line knows few bounds. They choose to ignore the reality that the most popular images of sadomasochism in American pop culture this year have been those in "The Passion of the Christ," an R-rated "religious" movie that many Americans took their children to see, at times with clerical blessings. Mel Gibson's relentlessly violent, distinctly American take on Jesus' martyrdom is a more exact fit for what's been acted out in Abu Ghraib than the flouncings of any cheesy porn-video dominatrix.

According to him, in essence, those who blame porn are trying to devolve the Bush administation of all responsibility.

Although Rich makes no reference to it, the editor has added a photo with the caption "A historical antecedent of the photos from Abu Ghraib: The 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Ind."

That's something taken up by Susan J. Brison in Torture, or 'Good Old American Pornography'? She writes,

...the similarities between American-style torture and hard-core porn are difficult not to notice and, given our tolerant, even self-congratulatory, attitude toward pornography, why should we be so shocked when torture takes this form?

...we -- and the rest of the world -- are also bothered by the fact that the U.S. soldiers in the pictures (and presumably those taking the pictures) clearly got a kick out of what they were doing. In this respect, these photos resemble the postcards circulating in the United States in the early 20th century showing white people smiling and cheering at the lynchings of black men (and sometimes women) -- the photos that showed us that racial animus can amount to a kind of giddy arousal. What revolts us now is not just that black men were lynched, not just that white spectators on the scene were smiling and laughing at the murders of their fellow human beings, but that the people sending the postcards could assume (and rightly so) that their recipients would also get a charge out of the images.

But we must not confuse reality with representation. Each of the black men depicted in the postcards was actually lynched -- and none of them consented to be. In contrast, the Asian women who posed naked, bound with heavy rope, and hung from trees for a 1984 Penthouse series of photos of eroticized torture presumably consented to (and were financially compensated for) their treatment and its photographic documentation. Besides, those photos, unlike the lynching postcards, were intended to give men sexual pleasure. And we all know, post-Freud, that people's imaginations are filled with all sorts of unfathomable erotic imagery and that we should be wary of suppressing the external representation of such fascinating and perplexing interior landscapes. But the lynchings of black men in the South also had a sexual component; not only did they often involve castration, but the kind of kick some white folks got out of the lynchings (and their depictions) strikes me as not all that different from a form of sexual arousal. I'm sure some white racists' fantastical interior landscapes still include trees with such strange fruit, but that would not be taken to provide sufficient reason for the rest of us to tolerate the widespread production and sale of such images.

...a disturbing amount of hard-core porn produced in the West is based on the view that violently degrading others is arousing, and we need to begin to question the assumption that whatever some people find arousing should be tolerated by the rest of us.

(emphasis mine) So whereas for Rich blaming porn is wrong, for Brison it's absolutely right. But to blame porn she not only has to drag in lynchings of blacks, omitting to explain that the soldiers in Iraq are in a quasi-combat situation; to compare them to blacks is to paint the soldiers as racist and to forget that their victims are the enemy. If we go along with her and say, yes, the soldiers are racist, and yes, the victims of their torture are all innocent, then we get to say that there is no such thing as an enemy in Iraq. She also has to find a sexual element in lynching. It makes you wonder if there is anything that's not sexualized for her. Finally, with the internet, how does this self-appointed moral leader propose to be intolerant about "the widespread production and sale of such images"?

Like this Nini 妮妮, who's got an adult site, and claims to be a student at Chinese Culture University 文化大學, so the authorities are concerned about the site being harmful to society's morals 妨害風化. How do they propose to shut it down?