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electriclandPlenty to catch up on, but for now I will just say that this column by Margaret Wente pissed me off more than a little.
Women at war: should we think again?
By MARGARET WENTE
Saturday, March 29, 2003 - Page A21
They are giggly, apple-cheeked girls from small-town America. Their names are Lyndi, Heather, Jessica, Waynetta. They still look like high-school cheerleaders.
Some sleep with stuffed animals they brought from home.
Some are single mothers.
Now some are casualties of war -- captured, missing, maybe dead.
In just one week, one woman has been captured and two others are missing in action. All belonged to the 507th Maintenance Company. One was a supply clerk and one was a cook. But they wound up on the frontlines just the same.
Giving women equal opportunity in the military seems like a fine idea to most of us. But this kind of equality may not quite be what we had in mind.
Airman Laura Sargent watched the TV pictures of Shoshana Johnson, the African-American PoW from Texas, with horrified fascination. "It bothered me a lot worse than if it would have been a man," she confessed to a New York Times reporter. Airman Sargent is being shipped out to the war next week. Now she realizes that could be her.
When the relatives of male soldiers talk about their loved ones, they usually say things like "He wanted to be a soldier since he was two." The relatives of females never say that. Private Jessica Lynch, who hails from Palestine, West Virginia, just wanted to see the world. "Just since this year, 2003, I've been to Mexico, Germany and now Kuwait," she wrote her former kindergarten teacher. Her biggest trip before she joined the army was to Charleston.
Does this make you a bit squeamish? Get used to it. After the last war in the Persian Gulf, the United States ended most of the restrictions on women in military roles. Today they're flying F-18s and Black Hawks, launching Tomahawk missiles, and working as combat engineers.
There are more than 200,000 women in the U.S. military now. They now make up 15 per cent of the armed forces and 25 per cent of the reserves -- by far the biggest percentage of any army in the world. The only jobs from which they're barred are frontline combat roles.
But where's the frontline? In modern warfare, with its long-range weaponry, the frontline can be anywhere. This has been one of the chief arguments for letting women take on a wider range of jobs. You can't insulate them from danger, the reasoning goes, so why bother trying? Even people working back in the supply lines can be killed by Scuds. The other argument for recruiting women is the transformation of the military into a high-tech fighting force, where brains count for more than muscle mass.
Today, women's ability to perform as well as men is practically a dead issue. You can't find an active military man (at least for attribution) who isn't full of praise for their grit, drive, smarts, courage, etc. "I see a soldier, not a woman," they all say. In the field, the women are treated the same as men, which in Iraq means they share sleeping quarters, dirty work, sand and latrines.
All this fills me with pride. Until a girl like Jessica goes missing.
This war is shaping up to be much different from the last one. It may be dirtier and longer, with higher casualties and more close combat. These girls are in for a rougher time than they imagined.
Call me sexist. But I confess I'm troubled by the thought of girls like Jessica and single mothers like Shoshana being rounded up at gunpoint by fedayeen and other men who've never heard of the Geneva Conventions.
"We need to have an honest discussion about this," says Lory Manning, a retired navy captain who runs the Women in the Military project in Washington. For years, she has fought to open up the military to women. She tells me that military women have always died in combat, and that male PoWs are scared and vulnerable, too. Men just show it less, she says.
She reminds me that 200 U.S. military nurses were killed in combat during the Second World War. There were nurses on the Bataan death march, and nurses who died on the beach at Anzio. We just didn't see pictures of them. The powerful images of captives beamed instantly into our living rooms give their plight an emotional impact we've never felt before. "This isn't new," she says. "What's new is the pictures." As for the delicate issue of the sexual abuse of female prisoners, we're reminded that men can be sexually abused, too.
Capt. Manning is the voice of the military majority these days. Only two groups disagree with her -- the conservatives and the feminists. Most feminists are hopelessly conflicted about women and war. They've complained for years about sexism in the army and pushed for women's equal treatment. But they're invariably against combat. In other words, the armed forces should be open to women, but nobody should ever actually fight.
The conservatives aren't all grumpy old army men. They include Kate O'Beirne, editor of the National Review. "I do not believe American men in the military are capable of pretending that a young woman in their company is exactly the same as a young 18-year-old man," she told The New York Times. "I think we can expect he will act differently in the interest of trying to protect that young woman. I'm fairly certain she wouldn't mind."
In an argumentative new book called Men, Women, and War, military historian Martin Van Creveld argues that women's progress in the military is directly related not to feminism but to the absence of war. No developed country has had to fight a war that threatens its existence for a generation or more. During this prolonged peace, he contends, we have turned our national forces from fighting machines into "social-research laboratories for some feminist brave new world." He believes the influx of women into the armed forces has contributed significantly to their overall decline.
Mr. Van Creveld is right about one thing. This ambitious social experiment hasn't had a workout in the real world yet (including Israel, where women in national service aren't allowed near the frontlines).
Maybe I'm being too sentimental about girls in battle who paint their toenails red underneath their combat boots and still sleep with teddy bears. It's their choice, isn't it? My head says I should toughen up. My head says there's no difference between Private Jim, MIA, and Private Jessica, MIA.
It's only my heart and gut that say there is.
mwente@globeandmail.ca
I've been venting about this to Jen and Kath. The gist of my vent is this:
I especially liked the notion that "the conservatives and the feminists" are against putting women on the front lines. Which feminists would those be exactly? To take a random example, I'm a feminist, and I'm for it. Why? Because unless we're given the same opportunities as men -- including the right to die in the service of our country -- we will still be second-class citizens. That's what this is all about: women are supposedly too precious and fragile and sweet to face the same risks as men. This is condescending bullshit. In an ideal world, NOBODY should have to die or be maimed or taken prisoner in war. Not women, not men. But we don't live in an ideal world.
And to turn the argument around, does Ms. Wente mean to say that men who die in combat are mourned less? That the families of male POWs are less afraid for their safety? That men sign up for the army so they can get blown to bits in combat, but women just want to see the world? When the four Canadian soldiers were blown to bits by friendly fire in Afghanistan, I don't remember anyone saying "phew, at least they weren't women". We mourned their loss because they were young and brave and doing a job that a lot of people don't want to do. Several of them had young children. How is it so much more acceptable for men to get killed, other than tradition?
The reason women in national service in Israel aren't allowed near the front lines is that when they were, their male colleagues got all afraid for them. While I sympathize, this is their problem and their society's problem, not the women's problem.
And another thing... This war, like most of the wars of the 20th century and, I'm sure, most wars of the foreseeable future, has brought the front lines to plenty of civilian women and children who never asked for the honour. How is this more acceptable than putting women in an army? At least women in the army can shoot back when they're in danger.
Women at war: should we think again?
By MARGARET WENTE
Saturday, March 29, 2003 - Page A21
They are giggly, apple-cheeked girls from small-town America. Their names are Lyndi, Heather, Jessica, Waynetta. They still look like high-school cheerleaders.
Some sleep with stuffed animals they brought from home.
Some are single mothers.
Now some are casualties of war -- captured, missing, maybe dead.
In just one week, one woman has been captured and two others are missing in action. All belonged to the 507th Maintenance Company. One was a supply clerk and one was a cook. But they wound up on the frontlines just the same.
Giving women equal opportunity in the military seems like a fine idea to most of us. But this kind of equality may not quite be what we had in mind.
Airman Laura Sargent watched the TV pictures of Shoshana Johnson, the African-American PoW from Texas, with horrified fascination. "It bothered me a lot worse than if it would have been a man," she confessed to a New York Times reporter. Airman Sargent is being shipped out to the war next week. Now she realizes that could be her.
When the relatives of male soldiers talk about their loved ones, they usually say things like "He wanted to be a soldier since he was two." The relatives of females never say that. Private Jessica Lynch, who hails from Palestine, West Virginia, just wanted to see the world. "Just since this year, 2003, I've been to Mexico, Germany and now Kuwait," she wrote her former kindergarten teacher. Her biggest trip before she joined the army was to Charleston.
Does this make you a bit squeamish? Get used to it. After the last war in the Persian Gulf, the United States ended most of the restrictions on women in military roles. Today they're flying F-18s and Black Hawks, launching Tomahawk missiles, and working as combat engineers.
There are more than 200,000 women in the U.S. military now. They now make up 15 per cent of the armed forces and 25 per cent of the reserves -- by far the biggest percentage of any army in the world. The only jobs from which they're barred are frontline combat roles.
But where's the frontline? In modern warfare, with its long-range weaponry, the frontline can be anywhere. This has been one of the chief arguments for letting women take on a wider range of jobs. You can't insulate them from danger, the reasoning goes, so why bother trying? Even people working back in the supply lines can be killed by Scuds. The other argument for recruiting women is the transformation of the military into a high-tech fighting force, where brains count for more than muscle mass.
Today, women's ability to perform as well as men is practically a dead issue. You can't find an active military man (at least for attribution) who isn't full of praise for their grit, drive, smarts, courage, etc. "I see a soldier, not a woman," they all say. In the field, the women are treated the same as men, which in Iraq means they share sleeping quarters, dirty work, sand and latrines.
All this fills me with pride. Until a girl like Jessica goes missing.
This war is shaping up to be much different from the last one. It may be dirtier and longer, with higher casualties and more close combat. These girls are in for a rougher time than they imagined.
Call me sexist. But I confess I'm troubled by the thought of girls like Jessica and single mothers like Shoshana being rounded up at gunpoint by fedayeen and other men who've never heard of the Geneva Conventions.
"We need to have an honest discussion about this," says Lory Manning, a retired navy captain who runs the Women in the Military project in Washington. For years, she has fought to open up the military to women. She tells me that military women have always died in combat, and that male PoWs are scared and vulnerable, too. Men just show it less, she says.
She reminds me that 200 U.S. military nurses were killed in combat during the Second World War. There were nurses on the Bataan death march, and nurses who died on the beach at Anzio. We just didn't see pictures of them. The powerful images of captives beamed instantly into our living rooms give their plight an emotional impact we've never felt before. "This isn't new," she says. "What's new is the pictures." As for the delicate issue of the sexual abuse of female prisoners, we're reminded that men can be sexually abused, too.
Capt. Manning is the voice of the military majority these days. Only two groups disagree with her -- the conservatives and the feminists. Most feminists are hopelessly conflicted about women and war. They've complained for years about sexism in the army and pushed for women's equal treatment. But they're invariably against combat. In other words, the armed forces should be open to women, but nobody should ever actually fight.
The conservatives aren't all grumpy old army men. They include Kate O'Beirne, editor of the National Review. "I do not believe American men in the military are capable of pretending that a young woman in their company is exactly the same as a young 18-year-old man," she told The New York Times. "I think we can expect he will act differently in the interest of trying to protect that young woman. I'm fairly certain she wouldn't mind."
In an argumentative new book called Men, Women, and War, military historian Martin Van Creveld argues that women's progress in the military is directly related not to feminism but to the absence of war. No developed country has had to fight a war that threatens its existence for a generation or more. During this prolonged peace, he contends, we have turned our national forces from fighting machines into "social-research laboratories for some feminist brave new world." He believes the influx of women into the armed forces has contributed significantly to their overall decline.
Mr. Van Creveld is right about one thing. This ambitious social experiment hasn't had a workout in the real world yet (including Israel, where women in national service aren't allowed near the frontlines).
Maybe I'm being too sentimental about girls in battle who paint their toenails red underneath their combat boots and still sleep with teddy bears. It's their choice, isn't it? My head says I should toughen up. My head says there's no difference between Private Jim, MIA, and Private Jessica, MIA.
It's only my heart and gut that say there is.
mwente@globeandmail.ca
I've been venting about this to Jen and Kath. The gist of my vent is this:
I especially liked the notion that "the conservatives and the feminists" are against putting women on the front lines. Which feminists would those be exactly? To take a random example, I'm a feminist, and I'm for it. Why? Because unless we're given the same opportunities as men -- including the right to die in the service of our country -- we will still be second-class citizens. That's what this is all about: women are supposedly too precious and fragile and sweet to face the same risks as men. This is condescending bullshit. In an ideal world, NOBODY should have to die or be maimed or taken prisoner in war. Not women, not men. But we don't live in an ideal world.
And to turn the argument around, does Ms. Wente mean to say that men who die in combat are mourned less? That the families of male POWs are less afraid for their safety? That men sign up for the army so they can get blown to bits in combat, but women just want to see the world? When the four Canadian soldiers were blown to bits by friendly fire in Afghanistan, I don't remember anyone saying "phew, at least they weren't women". We mourned their loss because they were young and brave and doing a job that a lot of people don't want to do. Several of them had young children. How is it so much more acceptable for men to get killed, other than tradition?
The reason women in national service in Israel aren't allowed near the front lines is that when they were, their male colleagues got all afraid for them. While I sympathize, this is their problem and their society's problem, not the women's problem.
And another thing... This war, like most of the wars of the 20th century and, I'm sure, most wars of the foreseeable future, has brought the front lines to plenty of civilian women and children who never asked for the honour. How is this more acceptable than putting women in an army? At least women in the army can shoot back when they're in danger.
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no subject
Date: 2003-04-02 02:53 pm (UTC)For written down rules, I suggest you start with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/charter/)... or the Constitution (http://www.archives.gov/exhibit_hall/charters_of_freedom/constitution/constitution.html) if you're in the US of course. :P
no subject
Date: 2003-04-02 03:56 pm (UTC)P.
no subject
Date: 2003-04-02 11:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-04-03 02:24 pm (UTC)P.
I've argued with many a femminist :P
Date: 2003-04-02 06:49 pm (UTC)I honestly don't understand some of the points that femmists argue at times and other times I intentionally misinterpret them so that I can make broad sweeping statements like, All women are evil :)
(Side note: I firmly believe that women are superior in many ways to men... and men are slightly less inferrior when compared to women in some other ways)
Sorry about the rules thing... reading it now I have no idea what the hell I was talking about.
Re: I've argued with many a femminist :P
Date: 2003-04-02 11:28 pm (UTC)Yay for broad sweeping statements!