Women and the military

The topic for today’s tutorial is based on one of the essay topics: Are fem­in­ist cri­tiques of mil­it­ar­ism essentialist?

Many of you who know me will know this is a pet topic. And one I get quite stuck on. My argu­ments are based on social con­struc­tion of gender, but given that I see that social con­struc­tion as so per­vas­ive as to be indis­tin­guish­able from bio­logy, I think my argu­ments fre­quently come across as essentialist.

Coin­cid­ent­ally, I got into a heated dis­cus­sion of an adja­cent topic only yes­ter­day: that most of the world’s viol­ent dic­tat­ors, mass mur­der­ers and archi­tects of crimes against human­ity are or have been male. Don’t get me wrong, though: this is where I would vehe­mently deny I am essen­tial­ist. I do not accept Mary Woll­stone­craft’s por­trayal, in Vin­dic­a­tion of Women, of the ‘fairer sex’ as bio­lo­gic­ally peace­ful, inher­ently gentle or any other mis­in­formed concept that denies the real­it­ies of Mar­garet Thatcher, Boad­icea, Eliza­beth I or any other woman you wish to use as an example.

I have argued many times that I believe most of the char­ac­ter­ist­ics we (West­ern soci­ety at the least and most pat­ri­archal soci­et­ies, I think) train into boys are designed to make them better sol­diers. We teach boys not to cry at pain; we teach them to be unafraid racing towards the other team, know­ing they will clash; we teach them to bury their emo­tions; we teach them to follow orders. War movies and war games are glor­i­fied; toys for boys are weapons and tanks; most com­puter games expli­citly aimed at boys are about combat.

I argued in my Year 12 HSC essay on Oth­ello that Iago’s “I loved not wisely but too well” was a self-decep­tion and that the actual prob­lem was that of a mil­it­ary com­mander apply­ing mil­it­ary logic to a domestic situ­ation he was not trained for. Is it any wonder that viol­ence against women occurs with the fre­quency it does? We have trained an entire gender for a battle we rarely send them to any longer [1]. I am grate­ful for that at least – but now it is time to undo the train­ing, to relearn a way of being that does not involve sup­pres­sion of nur­tur­ing instincts and a per­ver­sion of love of family into “pro­tec­tion”.

aethyrflux , some­where in the middle of the Burn­ing Man Center Camp, once told me about a tribal cul­ture – I can’t remem­ber where; when he gets back from this year’s Burn per­haps he can enlighten us – in which all the chil­dren’s games were based on avoid­ance of con­flict. The idea was to swing towards but aim to miss. As a result, the soci­ety was col­lab­or­at­ive, loving, peaceful.

I think essen­tial­ism is a trap that fem­in­ist cri­tiques of mil­it­ar­ism must struggle to avoid. I think it’s all too easy to train women to be equally devoid of human sense, equally stripped of kind­ness. I think boot camp is designed to do just that; it just has an easier time of it with most men, because this soci­ety does half the work before the poor child is even five.

[1] Although in some ways, our entire soci­ety is now more mil­it­ar­ised, depend­ent as it is on vast mil­it­ary con­tracts for wars that are ‘just around the corner’ or for mil­it­ary might that is needed as a ‘deterrent’.