From Susan Sontag's excellent essay on Abu Ghraib:

It is surely revealing, as more Abu Ghraib photographs enter public view, that torture photographs are interleaved with pornographic images of American soldiers having sex with one another. In fact, most of the torture photographs have a sexual theme, as in those showing the coercing of prisoners to perform, or simulate, sexual acts among themselves.

As a country of Paris Hilton downloaders (don't lie -- you typed it into Kazaa), humiliation more often than not takes the form of sexual humiliation. Bill Clinton couldn't be undone with a murder rap or a bad real estate deal; he had to be sexually humiliated before the country took notice. The Catholic Church has inflicted a heaping Hell of a lot of horrible hate, but the shit doesn't hit the fan on a grand scale until pedophilia rises to the top of the scum.

So why?

The Puritanical argument for sexual taboo is too easy to make. Sex, no matter what, requires a circumvention of vanity and modesty, that it always encapsulates a certain degree of humiliation. Don't get me wrong -- sex is a lot of fun, whether it's a long-term relationship or a drunken hook-up. However, sex requires a display of weakness, of poetic nakedness. No wonder Fundamentalists of any sort consider it evil -- it's a power struggle between people, not a power struggle between good and evil, not a power struggle where your spiritual strength is the primary tool. Sex is violent. That Perry Farrell was on to something.

So what better way to torture someone than to put him or her into a sexual situation where they have no power, where the display of weakness cannot be overshadowed by love or joy? In the best sex, everyone wins. In the worst sex, someone loses.

And in Abu Ghraib, everyone loses.