Combat footage from Iraq and Afghanistan has generated a new form of online porn, Newsweek reports, with tens of thousands of spliced-together clips—soundtracks added—drawing millions of views on YouTube, and enthusiasts creating sites with names like GotWarPorn.com. "Like sexual porn," writes Jessica Ramirez, "they come in degrees of violence, ranging from soft-core montages of rocket-propelled grenades blowing up buildings to snuff-film-like shots of an insurgent taking a bullet to the head."
It all started with Abu Ghraib, when images with obvious "pornographic sensibility" went viral on the web. Soldiers began swapping war footage for sexual porn, the founder of a user-generated porn site reports, with the content getting more and more extreme—filled with headless corpses and body parts. The Week rounds up opinion on whether public access to graphic footage serves a purpose—to make war more real—or inspires violence. One military blog notes that it works well as propaganda for our enemies.
(More combat video stories.)
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