The feminist cultural assumption justifying women in combat is
that violence against women in war and violence done by women
during warfare are costs society must accept in order for
“equality” to advance. Conservatives were shouted down when they
warned that placing women in combat would not only expose them to
abuse but could turn them into abusers.
The same champions of feminism who dismissed these arguments out
of hand now profess great shock at the images of women roughing up
male prisoners at Abu Ghraib. “The behavior depicted in the photos
— which, among other things, show naked prisoners being subjected
to sexual humiliation by American women — defies basic standards
of human decency and the accepted conventions of war,”
editorialized a stunned New York Times.
The image of that female guard, smoking away as she joins
gleefully in the disgraceful melee like one of the guys, is a
cultural outgrowth of a feminist culture which encourages female
barbarians. GI Janes are kicking around patriarchal Muslims in
Iraq? This is Eleanor Smeal’s vision come to life. Had Thelma and
Louise gone off to Iraq — and sexually humiliated some of Saddam
Hussein’s soldiers as payback for abuse to Jessica Lynch a few
cities back — the radical feminists could make a sequel.
Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness predicted
that women in combat would lead to their “coarsening.” Speaking to
TAS, she asked a question no mainstream newspaper will
bother to ask: “Why were women assigned to watch the male
prisoners?” The answer lies in the “interchangeability idea” the
Clinton military hammered home, she says. The idea was “sexuality
doesn’t matter,” she says. “Men and women are interchangeable.”
Whatever male warriors do, so should women. If they rough up
captives, why shouldn’t women too?
Feminists are good at creating a culture that produces
“equal-opportunity abusers,” Donnelly says. What happened at Abu
Ghraib is also happening in feminist America, she adds, pointing to
an Associated Press article from last month on a “disturbing trend
around the country. Girls are turning to violence more often and
with terrifying intensity.”
AP reported that girls, bereft of maternal role models and
soaking up pop culture images that lionize female warriors, are
catching up to teenage boys in arrests for violence (the boy-girl
ratio of arrests for violence was 10-1 a generation ago, now it is
down to 4-1. School expulsions bear this out as well.) AP gives
such examples as girls pummeling each other at a birthday party,
sending twelve-year-old Nicole Towes into a coma, and last May’s
videotaped hazing session among girls at Glenbrook High School in
suburban Chicago.
Perhaps in the eyes of feminists this isn’t a crisis but a
potential social program and these girls deserve ROTC credits.
Perhaps we’re not sufficiently conditioned to see that girls will
be girls, and that for the sake of a GI-Jane military in years to
come we must tolerate a few birthday-party pummelings. Just a few
broken test tubes in the glorious experiment feminism has planned
for us.
But what about that Clinton-era talking point that women in
combat would make the military more “sensitive”? Apart from its
ludicrous suggestion that sensitivity was an overarching military
objective, the claim was absurd on its own terms, since the whole
premise of women in combat is that men shouldn’t be sensitive about
the exposure of women to the violence of war, either as its victims
or its perpetrators.
When Elaine Donnelly explained to the feminists that women in
combat would mean the exposure of women to rape and torture in
captivity, their response was to say that America could get used to
violence against women, and that men could be conditioned out of
their chauvinism. And that’s what the feminized military endeavored
to do, setting up programs to teach male soldiers how to handle
being in captivity with brutalized women.
Trainers at the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape
training center at Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, Washington,
acknowledged to Donnelly and others that women in combat would
require a conditioning program for average Americans: “If a policy
change is made and women are allowed into combat positions, there
must be a concerted effort to educate the American public on the
increased likelihood that women will be raped, will come home in
bodybags, and will be exploited. The consequences of not
undertaking such a program would be a large scale disillusionment
with the military should the United States get in a protracted
military engagement.”
Now America needs a conditioning course not on the abuse of
American women taken in defeat, but abuse by American female
soldiers in victory. The feminists call this progress.
