Woman as war weapon

I get a quarterly feminist Philosophy journal titled "Hypatia" Some of it I occasionally need a dictionary to read, because I have no philosophy background-- I just like and enjoy it. The lastest "special issue" has a number of topics on the concept of just war, very good, very rich writing (and I don't need a dictionary!!)

Anyway, the first essay is titled Women: The Secret Weapon of Modern Warfare?, by Kelly Oliver. I thought I'd share an paragraph or three;

"The figures and faces from wars in the Middle East that continue to haunt us at the beginning of the twenty-first century, are those of women: think of Palestinian women suicide bombers, starting with Wafa Idris in January 2002, or the capture and resucue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch early in the U.S. invasion of Iraq just over a year later, or the shocking images of Pfc. Lynndie England and Army Spc. Sabrina Harman at the Abu Ghraib prison in the spring of 2003. These images and stories horrify yet fascinate us because they are of young women killing and torturing. As they have circulated though the U.S. media, their stories share a sense of shock and confusion evidenced by various conflicting accounts of what it means for women to wage war. They have both galvanized and confounded debates over feminism and women's equality. And, as I will argue, their stories share, perhaps more subliminally the problematic notion of women as both offensive and defensive weapons. of war a notion that is symptomatic of age-old fears of the "mysterious" powers of women, maternity and female sexuality"
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"Writers on both sides of the feminist divide implicate feminism in women's criminal behavior at Abu Ghraid. For example, on the antifeminist side, MensNewsDaily.com suggests that women's sadism is not only responsible for Abu Ghraib, but also the norm; "all of the females implicated at Abu Ghraid will have little trouble finding jobs in the multibillion-dollar VAWA(Violence Against Women ACT) domestic violence industry, just as soon as `American, gender feminist justice` rationalizes away all their misbehavior" And a columnist for the American Spectator argues that the abuse at Abu Ghraib "is a cultural outgrowth of a feminist culture which encourages female barbarians"
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"While conservatives blame feminism for the brutality at Abu Ghraib, even feminists associate advances made by the women's movement with the abuse. For example, columnist Joanne Black concludes, "Throughout history when they have had the chance, women have shown themselves as capable as men of misusing power and inflicting brutality. They have, till now, merely lacked the opportunity. Feminism has remedied that. Sadly for those of us tho thought we were better, women have proved themselves men's equal."

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"Much of the conservative commentary surrounding the Abu Ghraib torture had explicitly or implicitly associated women and sex; we see explicit comments on women triggering men's sexual urges and the presence of women leading to "whorehouse behavior" But, as Susan Sontag points out, these images of women smiling while engaging in sexual abuse and sadistic torture that captivate public imagination are subliminally familiar to us from the S&M porn industry, which is booming on the internet and popular with soldiers and which traditionally puts women in the dominatrix role. Feminists have argued for decades that the prevalence of pornography promotes violent images of sex and desensitizes us to sexual violence. Perhaps desensitization to sexual violence is part of the why human-rights groups at first were unsure how to categorize the abuse."
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"In conclusion, women have been a central element in discursive constellations revolving around recent military action in the Middle East, whether as individuals supposedly representing all American women, or all Muslim women, as heroines or as scapegoats, as victims or torturers, as oppressed or as feminist avengers. In all of the cases that I have touched on, women have figure as either offensive or defensive weapons of war--and not just as weapons of war, but as the most dangerous and threatening weapons. Within this rhetoric, a women can break even the most devout with just the threat of her sex; her ponytail and pretty smile become deadly weapons; and with the charms of her vulnerability and sweet face, she can subdue even the most blood thirsty and win over the hearts of friend and enemy alike"



I skipped a bunch of stuff, comments on female suicide bombers, using menstrual blood to intimidate and humiliate prisoners, US military women used for "sex to get detainees to talk" "women using lechery as an interrogation tactic" "sexually loaded torment by female interrogators", the way Jessica Lynch's story was exaggerated and blown out of proportion, while the story of "Shoshana Johnson, an African American woman captured in the same skirmish and held for twenty-one days in various prisons and the victim of abuse, remains in the shadows" It's a fascinating essay, and I think correct in it's premise. It also lends support to my personal view that war is the ultimate in pornography.

For example, columnist Joanne Black concludes, "Throughout history when they have had the chance, women have shown themselves as capable as men of misusing power and inflicting brutality. They have, till now, merely lacked the opportunity. Feminism has remedied that. Sadly for those of us tho thought we were better, women have proved themselves men's equal."

What's this "women"? I haven't proved myself anything like that, despite the fact that I have had all sorts of opportunities that no generation of women before me had. I didn't enter the legal profession and immediately become the most lethal tool in the corporate box, evicting families and raiding widows' pension funds. I also didn't follow some nurturing model of womanhood and bury myself in trying to mediate people's matrimonial woes to win-win, for example. I became a rather formidable warrior fighting for justice for victims of injustice. Estrogen didn't make me a milksop, and feminism didn't turn me into a psychopath.

Did it you? Didn't think so!

A rerun of one of the Law&Order series last night said the same sort of thing: along the lines of when women engage in sexual assault, they do with with more ferocity and brutality than men. And the data to back that up are ...? Anecdotal, maybe?

Karla Homolka (the Canadian woman who participated in the sexual torture/murder of her sister and two other women, with her husband Paul Bernardo) was a very unpleasant person. You can find 100 men worse than her in a year for every equivalent woman you'll find in a decade. But the talk about her all focuses on her sex -- not as her being an outlier, but as her actions being somehow indicative of something about women.

A former friend of mine who worked for some time with badly abused children in the Netherlands back in the 70s used to say the same thing: that women abusers (mainly physical, in those cases) were more horrific in their abuse than men. Well, I wouldn't be surprised to learn there are *more* women child abusers than men -- simply because of the hugely greater contact between women and children than between men and children, and the enormously greater pressures on many of those women, and obviously the great range in the characteristics of the women who rear children, far more often not by choice than is the case for men. Do anecdotes from a sample in which children reared by women will pretty obviously greatly outnumber children reared by men mean much?

In all of the cases that I have touched on, women have figure as either offensive or defensive weapons of war--and not just as weapons of war, but as the most dangerous and threatening weapons.

An exact parallel to how discourse about Karla Homolka goes. It's kind of the flip side of the Ginger Rogers / Charlotte Whitten model:

Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did,
only backwards and in high heels.

Whatever women do they must do twice as well
as men to be thought half as good.
Luckily, this is not difficult.
(Charlotte Whitten was the mayor of Ottawa,
the capital of Canada, in the 1960s.)

Women as sexual abusers / weapons of war do everything men do only backwards in high heels, and twice as well.

It's stereotyping, i.e. based on outlier cases and not true reality, and it's still practised for the purpose of portraying *all* women negatively, and thus limiting all women's lives.

Putting women in some sort of "special" category, when regarding criminal behavior ie; if women commit violent crime, by the fact of their gender alone, it's MORE violent, MORE heinous.

I had the same reaction when I read that, a what the fuck moment. The author used it as an example of the reaction even among feminists to female violence.