From: pw@panix.com (Paul Wallich)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: Military Quote
Date: 6 Oct 1992 14:06:57 GMT
Organization: Trivializers R Us
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: remarque.berkeley.edu
Originator: muffy@remarque.berkeley.edu

In article <1aoj4iINNlku@agate.berkeley.edu> cortese@skid.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese) writes:
>In article <1an2d0INNdlk@agate.berkeley.edu> walker-john@yale.edu (John Walker) writes:
>>[...]Is our society ready for
>>women to serve in the military?  Is our society to see female soldiers (or
>>sailors, or pilots) on propaganda videotapes, being shot, raped, or
>>tortured?  Are we ready to see dead women on the cover of the New York
>>Times?  Evidently not.
>While I agree with your general comment about the public being ready for
>this (or not ready), I feel compelled to bring up how the public is
>evidently fully capable of seeing women harassed and tortured on a daily
>basis in the movies, TV and popular music.  We hear about women getting
>raped and killed in evey major city in the US without batting an
>eyelash.  We see women in chains and getting beaten in music videos by
>the hundreds, literally.  Movies will sometimes stick in gratuitous
>rape scenes for the BOX OFFICE VALUE
..
>We see dead women, stabbed, raped, shot, whatever, on the covers of many
>more magazines and newspapers than the New York Times.  Go to your
>neighborhood video store and check out the horror section; see how many
>tape boxes have pictures of half-naked women being menaced by hatchet-
>wielders and stuff like that, with marvelously erotic expressions of
>bald fear on their faces.  Look at movie posters and TV promos.  Take
>notes on how many of them have a scared woman clutching a bedsheet to a
>naked chest while a man looks on -- there are many variations of this.
>Listen to your TV next time a promo comes up; take notes on how many
>times a woman saying, "No!  Don't!  Stop!" is used as an exciting teaser
>to make the show sound more sexy.
>
>I appreciate your sentiment, and think that your opinion about seeing
>this and how it will impact the public has merit.  But, we're seeing it
>happen to our daughters, sisters, mothers, and wives RIGHT NOW and doing
>nothing about it.  It's all over.  And there has been NO public outcry.
>I have to wonder why.

I think this is among the clearest signs of the fact that most
people have been conditioned to see women as passive objects of
other people's actions.  It isn't just the idea that a woman
in combat is most definitely a subject (as measured :-( by the
ability to treat others as objects) imo, but also the nature of
death in combat: when you see someone killed in a war, you think
of the life they could have had in peacetime, of the things they
could have done. But this conflicts with the traditional role of
women, which is to have someone else's life rather than their own.
If you see an image of a woman raped or killed in peacetime, that
somehow doesn't conflict with the traditional role as much, perhaps
because women victims of crime appear suddenly in the media, with 
no apparent past life, no future. Being a victim _is_ their role
rather than a disruption of their role. The whole point of the
(military) honored dead, on the other hand, is that death was a
disruption of the role they were supposed to play.

I know, this and $1.25 will get me on the subway, but sometimes
even superficial causes have their place.

paul






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