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’.