Pimps, the US Military, and Domestic Terrorism
Like pimps on the street and pimps in strip clubs, the US military is using psychological methods to harm, not heal. Many of the practices systematically used by pimps to control women in prostitution - sensory deprivation, dehumanization, threats to family, deliberately induced exhaustion - are the same as those used by military torturers. I've written briefly and plan to write more about these practices. See p 114 of this article click here Also see the kink.com torture pornography thread on this blog.
The US military has used psychologists to assist in the practice of torture, now it's funding psychological research on the use of mind control as a weapon of destruction. This is nothing new - similar research was conducted in the 1950s-1980s. The American Psychological Association has miserably failed to oppose these practices, while other groups such as Physicians for Human Rights and Psychologists for Social Responsibility have taken far more ethical stands against psychologists' participation in torture and mind control.
The National Science Foundation, through Project Minerva (they love being perverse. She's the goddess of wisdom) is offering $50 million to fund psychological counterinsurgency programs that further military goals of the United States. For a chilling analysis of this program, please read Tom Burghardt's Militarizing the Social Sciences click here For those of you who know the ways that pimps use mind control, this will be all-too familiar.
Melissa Farley
Comments
My acrobat isn't working so I wasn't yet able to read the first link.
But this goes to the heart of the argument of prostitution being about choice.
A liberal society doesn't mean anything goes, and let the dominators rule through fear and violence.
Freedom means everyone is able to become more human, not less. A free person will not choose to be dehumanized. When someone is "voluntarily" moving in the direction of giving up her humanity that's evidence she's not free, her chains are just not obvious.
Posted by: diana | August 9, 2008 08:27 PM
Dear Melissa:
Thank you for your bold and courageous statement about US military torture methods and their simialrity to the methdos used by pimps to gain mind control over women for prostitution. The parallels are certainly there. We need to stop seeing torture as something exotic and apart from teh daily violence and abuses that occur in our schools, colleges, homes, and work places. The principles and purposes are often the same -- control, dominance, brutality.
Posted by: Tony | August 10, 2008 08:41 AM
Many of the practices systematically used by pimps to control women in prostitution - sensory deprivation, dehumanization, threats to family, deliberately induced exhaustion - are the same as those used by military torturers.
Yeah, I'm not surprised at all. I already knew that.
Yet, what bothers me and saddens me the most is that most anti-torture activists (who campaign against military torture) cannot see the torture that is happening in prostitution and in pornography on a daily basis.
This is real sad, 'cause when it's women as a class who is the primarily victimized group and the torture is sexualized and/or made available for many men who believe that it is "their male right" to use, abuse and discard female bodies for their selfish pleasure, then nobody notices the torture. Not even most of the anti-torture activists. They suddenly lose their anti-torture politics. All they see is "sex", not torture. This is so heart-breaking...
Posted by: Maggie Hays | August 10, 2008 04:48 PM