I want to expand on my thoughts about the military and feminism, I didn't have time to do this earlier but I have some now. I also want to clarify that I don't want to contribute to harassment directed to any user on here. I just want to give my thoughts because, as a Women studies and Holocaust studies major, I've read a lot on the matter, and because I think it's a shame that we, Western feminists, don't discuss this topic more, even though women in Ukraine, Africa and the Middle East are being harmed by male soldiers right now.
To me, violence against women is one of the core tenants of the military. You can't separate the military from violence against women. Susan Brownmiller, a radical feminist who pioneered the concept of rape culture, was the first to study rape as a tool of male violence. In her book Against Our Will, she dedicated a full chapter to the army, in which she writes:
War provides men with the perfect psychologic backdrop to
give vent to their contempt for women. The very maleness of the
military—the brute power of weaponry exclusive to their hands,
the spiritual bonding of men at arms, the manly discipline of orders given and orders obeyed, the simple logic of the hierarchical command—confirms for men what they long suspect, that women are peripheral, irrelevant to the world that counts, passive spectators to the action in the center ring.
She shows that sexual violence towards women has always accompanied battles. The heroes of the Iliad raped Trojan women. The Romans held the rape of the Sabine women as a founding myth. Military rape left traces in archives: the Crusades, the sack of Constantinople in 1204, the Hundred Years War, the French Wars of Religion. German soldiers raped French women during WWI, and French soldiers raped Rhenan women while occupying the region in the 1920s.
In all those instances, women from marginalized communities were particularly vulnerable. Jewish women were among the first victims of rape during the Crusades.
In another book, Women and Genocide (2018), a collective of feminist historians and sociologists showed that sexual violence is a core tenant of the military during total wars, genocide and in colonial settings. From this book we can see that military sexual violence falls into three categories:
(1) rapes committed against indigenous women, which serves as a symbolic taking of the land they inhabit by the invading army (see America, Namibia)
(2) rapes committed in a process of biological absorption (see Armenia): Armenian women were raped by Turkish soldiers to destroy their sense of Armenian identity and 'absorb' them and their offspring in the Turkish nation
(3) measures intended to attack women's reproductive abilities through forced sterilization (see Roma)
But in all three cases, sexual violence always serves two main purposes:
(1) sexual violence dismantles the family unit because women are most often cast out of their group after having been assaulted; it is a symbolic humiliation of the men of the victimized group, who (in patriarchal societies) are supposed to take care and protect "their" women (seen, in a sexist way, as private property); the group is therefore less likely to propose organized resistance
(2) at the same time, sexual violence against women reinforces male solidarity. Quoting:
Guatemalan soldiers were trained to think of gang rape as a bonding exercise among the troops as well as an effective weapon for the extermination of the civilian enemy. Because the troops were not being directed to engage an armed insurgency, but rather to annihilate villages and terrorize civilian communities, the army needed to dehumanize the soldiers as well as their intended victims. The Counterinsurgency War Manual (Manual de Guerra Contrainsurgente) states: “The soldier, normally has great aversion toward police-type operations and repressive measures against women, children, and sick civilians, unless he is extremely well indoctrinated in the necessity of these operations.”30 One survivor testified to the truth commission: “There were always rapes inside the army bases . . . sometimes by [soldier’s] choice, other times by order [from superiors]. They would say: ‘We have to break the asses of these whores’ or even worse things.”
In that sense, the military - all military - is a manufacture of male domination. It institutionalizes sexual violence against women, weaponized to reinforce male domination and male solidarity.
In Against Our Will, Susan Brownmiller studied the phenomenon of gang rapes. She showed that male-only groups dominated by a strong leader creates the conditions to push any man, even the ones you'd think "inoffensive", to commit sexual violence: ""Sharing the girl among us fellows" strengthens the notion of group masculinity and power." You could say the same about the military.
You can say, "not all wars are like that", but yes, they are. Total war is a characteristic of modernity. Colonial wars and invasions are still a recurring thing.
You can say, "not all soldiers rape", and that is true, but all soldiers contribute to fostering a virilist environment in which rape is endemic. The ones who turn a blind eye, the ones who remain silent and protect their male buddies, the ones who make sexist remarks (and we have so many testimonies of female soldiers who experienced sexism in the military to know that most of these men are overtly sexist) contribute to rape culture. Not all the soldiers involved in the Al-Mahmudiyah killings raped 14yo Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi; one of them decided to stay in his post and did nothing while his mates were planning to rape and kill her. He is still complicit.
There's a reason feminists have historically been involved in peace movements: it's because women are always the first victims of war. Today, you have feminist organizations like Not a Weapon of War working to help female victims of war rape; you have feminists raising awareness about Ukrainian women being raped and trafficked. To me, being a radical feminist is being anti-military: the military relies on sexual violence and on the perpetuation of male domination. It wouldn't exist without it. As radical feminists, we have to address the roots of female oppression and fight to destroy the institutions perpetuating it. The military is the first on the list. As a Western feminist, it is also particularly important that we support women from the Global South and women living in Ukraine and in the Balkans (who are still dealing with trauma from the Yugoslav wars) by opposing the military.
