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Rape and war have much in common. Both involve the fight for
domination - in rape of a woman, and in war of an 'enemy'. If successful
both involve the humiliation of the object of 'conquest'. The military
boast about such conquests as adolescent boys boast about how many girls
they have 'laid'. Boys 'mouth' or make up stories of sexual conquests,
they boast about their prowess, their bravery: (Lees 1993) Boys with
their toys, toys that can be lethal. A young unemployed British teenager
on his way to become a mercenary in the war in Serbia, for pittance pay,
when interviewed on TV said he wanted to find out what it was like to
kill as many people as the Yorkshire Ripper, only legitimately. Films
and videos encourage this macho form of masculinity. The language of sex
reflects the language of war. We draw analogies between the conquering
of land and of women, of the rape of women and of the countryside.
War is an important mechanism for enhancing masculinity. Miriam
Miedzian (1992) in her recent book draws out the links between
patriotism, manhood and war and argues that it is the tough masculine
mystique, which represents the real threat to national security rather
than the tendency to 'wimpishness' or weakness. She outlines how men who
resisted the Vietnam war were ridiculed and likened to women in such
terms as 'hell, he has to squat to piss'. The terms in which the
American decision to go to war with Iraq were, she argues, blatantly
sexual. The press discussed President Bush's need to prove his manhood
in going to war with Iraq where according to a Washington correspondent
for Newsweek, Bush's tough talk about Saddam Hussein was referred to as
getting 'his ass kicked'. It was reported that ' some pundits have
wondered if the President is still fighting the wimp factor'. The
culture of violence influences national security decisions and makes the
public accept war and conditions men to sacrifice themselves
'heroically' and unnecessarily.
In extolling masculinity, femininity and women need to be suppressed.
Women's 'softness' and empathy was unsuited to the 'toughness' required
for combat. The Nazi party passed a resolution in 1921 to refuse women
any leadership positions to the party and governing committee. Only men
possessed the required 'strength of hardness' . Concern with morality or
human life was considered to be 'soft'.
Rape in war occurs most frequently when victorious armies march
through conquered territories. It is one of the 'spoils' of war. Women
who are raped also have their reputations 'spoiled'. Men who had raped
and killed women in the Vietnam war were called 'double veterans' .
Soldiers abused women's bodies as a way of humiliating the enemy and
dealing with their own frustrations.
Underlying the Contagious Diseases Acts was belief that women must
serve men and male institutions not just by providing cheap or unpaid
labour but by providing 'clean sex'. Only if women were sexually healthy
could men's presumably uncontrollable sexual drives be allowed full rein
without society's male institutions being jeopardised.
Cythia Enloe outlines the horror of rape atrocities, where young
pubescent girls were ruthlessly gang raped at gunpoint and considers why
this is so common in war. She attributes it to the exclusiveness of all
male communities where men are expected to conform to standards of male
behaviour twenty four hours a day, where the world outside is viewed as
chaotic and in need of control . (Enloe: 1988:35) The idea of the
military family encourages men to see the rest of world as chaotic,
fearsome and needing to be controlled or conquered.
More recently reports of forcible impregnation of thousands of women,
mostly Muslims by Serbian soldiers as a form of ethnic cleansing aroused
outrage in the West . A European Commission report estimated that 20,000
women had been victims of 'organised rape' in Bosnia while Muslim and
Croat sources claim the incidence is far higher. The only way to
understand the mass scale of such atrocities is as a reflection of
sexual inequality and misogyny. Men have licence to rape when they have
the licence to kill. Angela Davis described how gang rape was a weapon
of the Klu Klux Klan after the American civil war. (Davis 176)
Cynthia Enloe (1988) has traced links between militarism, sexuality
and military policy. She concluded that although military officials deny
that an official policy in regard to prostitution exists, this is simply
not true. She argues that each time the military establishment reasserts
its 'masculine' identity, it does so by insinuating that women are
essentially whores. Prostitute becomes the paradigm for the marginalised
yet militarised woman, the camp follower. Military attitudes are fraught
with contradictions. The idea that men's sexual appetites must be given
an outlet for them to be real men. conflicts with the fear that sexual
relationships could lead to a dilution of men's loyalty to the military
and that their vigour might be drained. Most armies built on patriarchal
bonding between men as men. The link between gang rape, prostitution and
war is only beginning to be understood. The Japanese military government
in the 1930's and 1940's used prostitution of Korean women as an
integral tool of military expansionism. Tens of thousands of women were
forced to work in a vast network of government run brothels to provide
sex for the Japanese soldiers. ( See Vickers 1993, Enloe 1988)
In every area Japanese conquered during World War 11 prostitution was
restored. In fact in 1941, the Japanese authorities actually conscripted
Korean women into a corps of 'entertainers' to 'comfort' the Japanese
troops in Manchuria. With the beginning of the Pacific War, form 50,000
to 70,000 Korean girls and women were drafted and sent to the front to
'entertain' the Japanese troops.
During the Gulf war, prostitutes were transported to the desert to
service the troops where they queued up in line. If such practices are
institutionalised, where women are treated as commodities for the
servicing of male sexual needs, it is hardly surprising that gang rape
occurs. Prostitutes are supposed to enhance soldiers morale by
fulfilling their presumed sexual needs. Aids is changing the militarised
policies of bases. Analogies between the Contagious Diseases Acts of the
late nineteenth century designed to protect the military from syphilis
and other forms of VD.
The language of war is laced with sexual imagery. Carol Cohn (1987)
described how when working for the American nuclear establishment, she
became aware that the scientists talked in a technical language which
was loaded with sexist meaning. It was impossible, she writes, not to
notice the ubiquitous use weight of gender, both in social relations and
in the language of war and militarism, which reflects and shapes the
nature of American nuclear strategic projects. By the elaborate use of
abstraction and euphemism, the appalling reality of war is forgotten.
The talk is of 'clean bombs' and 'clean language', countervailing
attacks rather than incinerating cities, collateral damage rather than
human death. The air force does not target people, it targets factories
and missile bases. American military dependence was explained as
'irresistible because you get more bang for your buck'. One lecturer
solemnly announced that to disarm was to 'get rid of all your stuff'.
Talk is about erector launches, soft lay downs deep penetration and
'releasing 70-80% of our mega-tonnage in one orgasmic whump' (according
to a military adviser to the National Security Council). One professor
spoke of India's explosion of the nuclear bomb as 'losing her
virginity'. Initiation into the nuclear world involved being
'deflowered', losing one's innocence, knowing sin, all wrapped into one.
New Zealand's refusal to allow nuclear-armed or nuclear-powered warships
into its ports prompted similar reflections on virginity.
Joan Smith, in her analysis of the songs pilots of an American Air
Force base for nuclear fighter bombers at an air base in Upper Heywood,
found they reflected the links between their two main concerns, in sex
and war. She suggested their magazine's advertisements for new weapons
rivalled Playboy as a catalogue of men's sexual anxieties and fantasies.
The Russians were referred to as 'those fuckers' who would be 'assholed'
, male rape being the final humiliation. Two verses of one of the songs
are particularly relevant
Nearing the target, our nerves they are STEADY
Switches are thrown and we got us a READY
Bay doors are open, the jobs(sic) almost done
Killing those Commies, we're having some fun.
When the shit fills up your flight suit and you're feeling had,
just simply remember that big mushroom cloud, and then you won't
feel SO BAD,
As Joan Smith points out, being 'ready' can, of course, equally apply
to preparedness for war and for sex and the 'big mushroom cloud' for the
after effects of detonation or as a metaphor for orgasm. Woman's bodies
are described in terms of overwhelming contempt and disgust, where the
real enemy appears to be women, or 'not real' men. If warfare is an
extreme means of gaining and enhancing masculinity, then everything
associated with femininity is to be denigrated. Disgust with the female
body is a way of distancing oneself from femininity, and repressing
one's desires.
To return to the explanation of gang rape, it does appear that it is
a normal inevitable part of warfare rather than a rare pathological
event. A Vietnam veteran in 1971 told a conference on war crimes how he
saw seven friends from his company all 'basically nice people' rape a
young Vietnamese girl. 'I just couldn't figure out what was going on to
make people like this do it. It was just part of the everyday routine'.
An American soldier explained how in Vietnam 'Let's face it. Nature is
nature. There are women available. Those women are of another culture,
another colour, another society. You don't want a prostitute. You've got
an M-16. What do you need to pay for a lady for? You go down to the
village and you take what you want. I saw guys who I believe had never
had any kind of sex with a woman before in that kind of scene'. A
Croatian researcher Slavenka Drakulic interviewed a woman gang raped by
four men in Bosnia in 1993 and asked 'Were they drunk? Did they look
abnormal? How did they look'? She said 'No'. 'No' . They were perfectly
normal men if you were to meet them in the street you wouldn't say they
were rapists'.
A particularly distasteful development outlined by Enloe (1988) is
the use of rape as a tool in counter insurgency strategy used to protect
third world governments from poor and landless peasants. It is designed
to allow the local regime to carry out counter insurgency operations
without depending on foreign military. It relies on irregular
militarised vigilantes and according to third world feminists is not
merely one more offence in a litany of atrocities, but
Rape is being used as a tool of this kind of warfare. As part of
village 'sweeps' or as a systematic part of torture while under arrest,
rape may be integral to the very strategy of sustaining the existing
social order in the face of women's growing 'subverseness' . (Enloe.
1988: xxxiii)
This view suggests that a crucial and integral part of any military
strategy is gender. The Amnesty (1991) report on Rape and Sexual Abuse
not only documents the rape of dozens of women in the emergency zones in
Peru by members of the security forces, in India by the Border Security
Forces, in Indonesia by police officers, and in the Philippines, but
laments the failure of governments to recognise rape and sexual abuse by
government agents as serious human rights violations. Instead, when
governments use military force to suppress armed insurgency movements,
troops are often given extensive powers and not held accountable to
civilian legal authorities. Women who are political activists, community
organisers, or human rights workers have been particularly targeted. The
report states that soldiers and police use rape as a way of humiliating
such women and punishing them for their political and social
independence. Often sexual abuse, stripping women naked and physically
and verbally abusing them is used as a method of interrogation. Rose Ann
Maguire was arrested in July 1991 in Northern Ireland and held for five
days in Castlereagh interrogations centre. she was reportedly sexually
harassed, physically abused and threatened with death. She said that on
one occasion, a detective slapped her, pulled her by the hair, fondled
her breasts and put his hand between her legs. 'they were just trying to
degrade you all the time'. she said. she was released without charge. At
least three other women interrogated at Castlereagh in 1991 reported
incidents of sexual harassment.
The report concludes that governments fail to investigate or
prosecute such offences :
'bear full responsibility for the persistence of widespread rape
and sexual abuse in custody. .. Many governments clearly regard rape
and sexual assault as less serious offences than other human rights
violations. this is a particularly frightening prospect when the
perpetrators of these rapes are those same policeman and military
personnel charged with the protection of the public'
It is a mistake to assume that the link between the construction of
masculinity and militarism implies that women have not actively
supported militaristic values and have not taken a crucial role in
supporting and upholding imperialism or other systems of domination.
Such a view as bel hooks argues implies that men and women are
biologically different in some fixed and absolute way. Such views make
it appear that all women are against war, that men are the enemy. (hooks
1989: 94) Feminist need to emphasise that the power to choose to be for
or against militarism is crucial for men and women.
So why do men gang rape in war? One reason often put forward is that
their superiors force them to do so at gun point. Brownmiller in her
book 'Against Our Will' refutes this and argues 'My point has always
been that you don't need orchestration, or commands from on high when
you have a young soldier with a gun. You don't need any order to rape.
The penis can be used as a weapon, in Warfare it becomes another
weapon'. Rape both demoralises and humiliates the enemy, defiles his
property and deters him from propagating his own people through the
bodies of violated females and hence assists in crushing a
people.(Bennett 1993) In peacetime women are raped because they are
objectified, in wartime they are doubly objectified, as women and as the
enemy.
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