kill the women first
Jun. 24th, 2009 04:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rmMany years ago, I was in a bookstore and saw a book entitled Kill the Women First which posited, among other things, that in any military action against terrorist or other movements, women involved with the movement must be targeted (e.g., killed) first, as a woman who engages in such activities is likely to be exceptionally dangerous motivated as she is by emotion, her own oppression and an instinct to commit action in a manner theoretically atypical to the female gender. Additionally, the elimination of such women would demoralize the others in the group being combated.
*
From what we can tell about what is going on in Iran, women are central to the demonstrations, the protests, the revolution -- whatever it is that is happening over there.
Maybe they are the leaders of it, maybe not. But they are its icons. And its participants, in what seems to be massive numbers.
Reports coming out of Iran today seem to indicate that the Basiji and others are specifically targeting women for the more extreme ends of violence. There have been reports of limbs hacked off with machetes, amputations due to severe beatings, murders, shootings and more.
*
We, the West, we romanticize this, all these brave and bloody girls.
We talk about how beautiful they are. We talk about the timbre of their voices. We talk about their hair. I think it is nearly impossible to avoid this, as a Westerner, no matter how hard we try.
We talk about how they pick up rocks and hand them to those with better arms to throw at the Basiji.
The rocks are all that are available, but I've become fixated on them; unruly women are so often stoned.
*
My father told me, when I was a little girl and like to watch Private Benjamin on the television, that a country that sends its women into war has lost its will to be civilized.
I was no more than eight years old and very angry with him.
I wonder what he thinks about the women in Iran.
*
My mother always used to tell me that because I was Jewish, I could not lash out at those who bullied me as a child, for we who were once treated as animals must not act as animals.
*
To be a woman, I think, is to always be some sort of animal: roaring or butchered.
*
From what we can tell about what is going on in Iran, women are central to the demonstrations, the protests, the revolution -- whatever it is that is happening over there.
Maybe they are the leaders of it, maybe not. But they are its icons. And its participants, in what seems to be massive numbers.
Reports coming out of Iran today seem to indicate that the Basiji and others are specifically targeting women for the more extreme ends of violence. There have been reports of limbs hacked off with machetes, amputations due to severe beatings, murders, shootings and more.
*
We, the West, we romanticize this, all these brave and bloody girls.
We talk about how beautiful they are. We talk about the timbre of their voices. We talk about their hair. I think it is nearly impossible to avoid this, as a Westerner, no matter how hard we try.
We talk about how they pick up rocks and hand them to those with better arms to throw at the Basiji.
The rocks are all that are available, but I've become fixated on them; unruly women are so often stoned.
*
My father told me, when I was a little girl and like to watch Private Benjamin on the television, that a country that sends its women into war has lost its will to be civilized.
I was no more than eight years old and very angry with him.
I wonder what he thinks about the women in Iran.
*
My mother always used to tell me that because I was Jewish, I could not lash out at those who bullied me as a child, for we who were once treated as animals must not act as animals.
*
To be a woman, I think, is to always be some sort of animal: roaring or butchered.
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Animal? Or simply property...
Date: 2009-06-24 10:07 pm (UTC)All efforts at political control are in the ultimate an effort to control the means of production. In a Marxist-feminist sense, women are the prototypical means of (repro)duction, without which no society, regardless of its political structure or economic style, can survive. It is perhaps inevitable, therefore, that almost every repressive or totalitarian society or movement makes the oppression of women a key tenet of its ideology -- particularly if that movement is reacting to an existing or external power structure with which it is competing.
Many fundamentalist movements (whether religious or cultural) are responses to an external cultural/political hegemony, which these days tends to mean what was once called Western Imperialism and today I suppose we could call globalization. Regardless of ideological pretense, much of that conflict is based on economic issues of territory and resources. The fundamentalist response to globalization/Western imperialism often begins with a call to traditional values, which frequently amounts to a reassertion of control over the behavior and status of women -- in short, a retrenchment of control of the fundamental means of production.
On that basis, some of the romanticization of the women in this situation reflects a malicious glee that a cultural opponent's efforts at maintaining control are breaking down. It also reflects an effort to lay claim to those women by describing them in Western terms -- that is, as sexual objects and public property, rather than private property -- in the same way a conquering army might raise its flag over a foreign capital.
(Did I mention that I feel cynical today?)