Feminism and Abu Ghraib

[jere7my]

supergee points me to this article, the premise of which seems to be, "Gee, maybe the atrocities at Abu Ghraib Prison have demonstrated that all us feminists were wrong—women aren't innately morally superior to men."

But it's not just the theory of this naive feminism that was wrong. So was its strategy and vision for change. That strategy and vision rested on the assumption, implicit or stated outright, that women were morally superior to men. We had a lot of debates over whether it was biology or conditioning that gave women the moral edge -- or simply the experience of being a woman in a sexist culture. But the assumption of superiority, or at least a lesser inclination toward cruelty and violence, was more or less beyond debate. After all, women do most of the caring work in our culture, and in polls are consistently less inclined toward war than men.

I'm not the only one wrestling with that assumption today. Mary Jo Melone, a columnist for the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, wrote on May 7: "I can't get that picture of England [pointing at a hooded Iraqi man's genitals] out of my head because this is not how women are expected to behave. Feminism taught me 30 years ago that not only had women gotten a raw deal from men, we were morally superior to them."

To which my response is: well, duh. It never crossed my mind that women were morally superior to men (despite being told as much, by people I love and respect, all my life), and I'm a little shocked that people were shocked by the gender of the perpetrators, which to me is less than irrelevant. Private England is human, ergo capable of brutality; where's the surprise? My brand of feminism has always rested on the idea that women and men are equal...with the necessary implication being that women with power would be just as likely to abuse it as men. I'm sorry to have been proven right, but, jeez, was there ever a question?

On a slight tangent: Kendra and I were watching a documentary on the end of WWII last night. Both of us, independently, were unable to avoid comparisons between the German reception of American troops and the modern Iraqi reception. What particularly struck me was the young soldier, now an old man, who said something like, "Word got out that Americans treat prisoners well. We all wanted to surrender." I can't imagine anyone in the Arab world saying that today. Lesson being, moral capital makes wars end faster, with less blood on the ground—and we done went and squandered ours, didn't we?

Comments

I agree, but...

[(Anonymous)]

I agree, but allow me also to point out that the pictures don't disprove the 'women superior to men' thing, either. I mean, the point of the generalization was never that any woman was bound to be morally superior to any man, just that on the whole, men tended to be violent, aggressive, dishonest meat-eating porn-watching rabbit-torturing alcoholic rapists, and that women on the whole tended to be nurturing, empathetic, peaceful, creative, high-minded green-thumbed anti-corporate tea-drinking collectivist saints. The odd Alan Alda or Jean Kirkpatrick didn't disprove the trend, particularly as we could describe Mr. Alda as 'feminized' and Ms. Kirkpatrick as 'masculinized'. I've seen several posts to various sites attributing the behaviour of Pfc. England to her subsuming herself in the masculinist culture, trying to be 'one of the boys', and generally un-womaning herself.

All of which--all of it--is crap, in my humble. But you knew that.

,
-Vardibidian (http://www.kith.org/vardibidian/journal/).

Re: I agree, but...

[supergee.livejournal.com]

That is the traditional means of dealing with the cognitive dissonance that comes from exceptions to one's beliefs about groups of people, and they may be right in this case. I, however, yearn for the day when "masculine" and "feminine" seem bizarre as behavioral descriptors as "Caucasian" and "Negroid" now do.

Re: Moral Capital

[god-of-belac.livejournal.com]

Good point on moral capital. I don't think the current administration, or the current average american, knows what any sort of capital besides the monetary kind means. The same logic goes toward not breaking treaties and not acting unilaterally. Ugh.

[arctangent.livejournal.com]

They don't actually understand capital in the econ sense either. Well, they may understand *financial* capital -- they understand the need to have big huge numbers in the stock market and in bank accounts in order to finance things they want to do. But they generate the illusion of financial capital by squandering economic capital (real capital); they pursue economic policies that overheat the economy into a frenzy by cutting taxes and spending wildly, discouraging people from actually spending or investing their money in any sensible way. (The cut on dividend tax may be an exception, but it's largely outweighed by their other actions.) The result will be an America that is dangerously short on capital (on savings and investment that go into building long-term infrastructure for the future economy) once the steam runs out of their policy.

[arctangent.livejournal.com]

I've never once bought the idea that women are somehow morally superior to men. That particular fiction is one that, ironically in many ways, was invoked to justify the constrained roles men and women were meant to play in the Victorian era -- saying that men were corrupted by being out in the world while women were kept cloistered to protect their purity. Bleah to that -- there's no single "real world" out there, and both women and men, however sheltered, have to deal with a lot of psychic stress and nastiness in their lives, and this causes many people, both women and men, to do morally bad things that harm others. Men get more opportunities to do it in bloody, violent and obvious ways, thanks to the social status accorded to them as the physically stronger side of the species, but that doesn't mean that a woman who feels unable to physically harm people is somehow better because she takes out her aggression through verbal and social channels.