How we talk about women in combat

Posted on April 4, 2003 by Ampersand

J. at Silver Rights (aka Mac Diva – how does she manage to write so much?) has a must-read post about race, sex, and Pfc. Jessica Lynch. (If the permalink is bloggered, look for the entry on April 3 2003 entitled “Good for Pfc. Lynch, but…”).

I can’t find a quote that works well out-of-context, and I don’t really have anything to add to what J. says, so just go and read the post, kay?

Somewhat related to J.’s point is this New York Times article – which is very typical in how it approaches coverage of female deaths. Here’s the first two sentences of the article:

Women and children were among 14 people killed six days ago when American fighter aircraft attacked a vehicle traveling from a suspected Qaeda sanctuary in eastern Afghanistan, the military said tonight.

Most of those killed in the air strike were “adult males, but some were women and children,” the United States Central Command said in a statement tonight.

What’s wrong with this picture?

A Melissa Morrison article in the current issue of Bitch Magazine, “Women and Children First!,” by Melissa Morrison, puts it very well:

When it comes to depicting the horrors of war, the media seems strangely unable to describe an equal-opportunity peril in equitable terms. Just as the Titanic’s captain ordered that women and children be first to the lifeboats, his latter-day counterparts express a kind of anachronistic gallantry by being especially appalled when women turn up among the drowned.

The way women are held linguistically apart from the actual participants in these events carries with it several layers of meaning. When victims are all male, their gender is assumed (“people” are men, of course, while women must be specified). Men, even if they’re dovelike citizens who think a grenade is something you add to a Shirley Temple, are somehow implicated among the perpetrators by virtue of their sex. When women die, it’s an affront to the natural order of things, and thus noted. (The assumption of women’s vulnerability and men’s culpability is particularly misplaced in news form the Middle East, where women have long served in the Israeli army, and where the last year has brought female suicide bombers to the public attention.) […]

Highlighting the number of women in death tolls disrespects them by implying that they are somehow separate from the events that killed them, just as not acknowledging the men who died dehumanizes them as inevitable casualties of war. And giving a human face to tragedy means acknowledging every human whose life that tragedy changes.

“Women and children” is a phrase that we’ve seen too much of. Women are not children, and should not be grouped with children; men are not natural casualties, and men’s deaths shouldn’t be reported as if less notable.

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