July 15, 2005

Soldiers as Trollops???
by Lorraine Berry

I have read and re-read this editorial in today's NYT, and I swear, I can't make sense of it.

The Times is objecting to the "techniques" used by American interrogators at Guantanamo. Specifically, the ways in which women interrogators used sexual humiliation to try to get information from prisoners. But the position of the editorial seems to be that it's especially degrading for women soldiers to be used in this way. Well, yes. Of course.

Surely no one can approve turning an American soldier into a pseudo-lap-dancer or having another smear fake menstrual blood on an Arab man. These practices are as degrading to the women as they are to the prisoners. They violate American moral values - and they seem pointless.

But isn't it the case that torture is degrading, period? It makes no difference whether the perpetrator is male or female--participating in the degradation of another human being ultimately destroys one's own humanity--regardless of gender.

We are back to the argument, again, about whether the death or injury of women soldiers is somehow more unsettling than the death of men. Ask their parents: losing a child is painful, and it doesn't matter what gender that child was.

The editorial writer seems to want to defend the "honor" of women by resorting to some sort of chivalrous ideal of womanhood.

If devout Muslims become terrorists because they believe Western civilization is depraved, does it make sense to try to unnerve them by having Western women behave like trollops?

The entire chain of command who ordered the torture at Guantanamo deserve to be punished--including the soldiers, male and female, who didn't refuse those orders. Please don't make what the female soldiers did any better or worse than their male counterparts.

I appreciate the outrage that our soldiers, given orders by their commanding officers, set out to humiliate and degrade other human beings. But save us the codified language of chivalry. Groups like CWA already have a thousand-and-one reasons why it's not okay for women to be in the military. This kind of rhetoric plays directly into their hands.

Posted by in Accountability, Body, Gender, Human Rights, Sexual Politics, Terrorism, W T F, War
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