Abu Ghraib lesson: ’A uterus is not a substitute for a conscience’

a uterus is not a substitute for a conscience
What Abu Ghraib Taught Me

By Barbara Ehrenreich, AlterNet

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18740

Even those people we might have thought were impervious
to shame, like the secretary of Defense, admit that the
photos of abuse in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison turned their
stomachs.

The photos did something else to me, as a feminist: They
broke my heart. I had no illusions about the U.S.
mission in Iraq — whatever exactly it is — but it
turns out that I did have some illusions about women.

Of the seven U.S. soldiers now charged with sickening
forms of abuse in Abu Ghraib, three are women: Spc.
Megan Ambuhl, Pfc. Lynndie England and Spc. Sabrina
Harman.

It was Harman we saw smiling an impish little smile and
giving the thumbs-up sign from behind a pile of hooded,
naked Iraqi men — as if to say, "Hi Mom, here I am in
Abu Ghraib!" It was England we saw with a naked Iraqi
man on a leash. If you were doing PR for Al Qaeda, you
couldn’t have staged a better picture to galvanize
misogynist Islamic fundamentalists around the world.

Here, in these photos from Abu Ghraib, you have
everything that the Islamic fundamentalists believe
characterizes Western culture, all nicely arranged in
one hideous image — imperial arrogance, sexual
depravity ... and gender equality.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been so shocked. We know that
good people can do terrible things under the right
circumstances. This is what psychologist Stanley Milgram
found in his famous experiments in the 1960s. In all
likelihood, Ambuhl, England and Harman are not
congenitally evil people. They are working-class women
who wanted an education and knew that the military could
be a stepping-stone in that direction. Once they had
joined, they wanted to fit in.

And I also shouldn’t be surprised because I never
believed that women were innately gentler and less
aggressive than men. Like most feminists, I have
supported full opportunity for women within the military
— 1) because I knew women could fight, and 2) because
the military is one of the few options around for low-
income young people.

Although I opposed the 1991 Persian Gulf War, I was
proud of our servicewomen and delighted that their
presence irked their Saudi hosts. Secretly, I hoped that
the presence of women would over time change the
military, making it more respectful of other people and
cultures, more capable of genuine peacekeeping. That’s
what I thought, but I don’t think that anymore.

A certain kind of feminism, or perhaps I should say a
certain kind of feminist naiveté, died in Abu Ghraib. It
was a feminism that saw men as the perpetual
perpetrators, women as the perpetual victims and male
sexual violence against women as the root of all
injustice. Rape has repeatedly been an instrument of war
and, to some feminists, it was beginning to look as if
war was an extension of rape. There seemed to be at
least some evidence that male sexual sadism was
connected to our species’ tragic propensity for
violence. That was before we had seen female sexual
sadism in action.

But it’s not just the theory of this naive feminism that
was wrong. So was its strategy and vision for change.
That strategy and vision rested on the assumption,
implicit or stated outright, that women were morally
superior to men. We had a lot of debates over whether it
was biology or conditioning that gave women the moral
edge — or simply the experience of being a woman in a
sexist culture. But the assumption of superiority, or at
least a lesser inclination toward cruelty and violence,
was more or less beyond debate. After all, women do most
of the caring work in our culture, and in polls are
consistently less inclined toward war than men.

I’m not the only one wrestling with that assumption
today. Mary Jo Melone, a columnist for the St.
Petersburg (Fla.) Times, wrote on May 7: "I can’t get
that picture of England [pointing at a hooded Iraqi
man’s genitals] out of my head because this is not how
women are expected to behave. Feminism taught me 30
years ago that not only had women gotten a raw deal from
men, we were morally superior to them."

If that assumption had been accurate, then all we would
have had to do to make the world a better place —
kinder, less violent, more just — would have been to
assimilate into what had been, for so many centuries,
the world of men. We would fight so that women could
become the generals, CEOs, senators, professors and
opinion-makers — and that was really the only fight we
had to undertake. Because once they gained power and
authority, once they had achieved a critical mass within
the institutions of society, women would naturally work
for change. That’s what we thought, even if we thought
it unconsciously — and it’s just not true. Women can do
the unthinkable.

You can’t even argue, in the case of Abu Ghraib, that
the problem was that there just weren’t enough women in
the military hierarchy to stop the abuses. The prison
was directed by a woman, Gen. Janis Karpinski. The top
U.S. intelligence officer in Iraq, who also was
responsible for reviewing the status of detainees before
their release, was Major Gen. Barbara Fast. And the U.S.
official ultimately responsible for managing the
occupation of Iraq since October was Condoleezza Rice.
Like Donald H. Rumsfeld, she ignored repeated reports of
abuse and torture until the undeniable photographic
evidence emerged.

What we have learned from Abu Ghraib, once and for all,
is that a uterus is not a substitute for a conscience.
This doesn’t mean gender equality isn’t worth fighting
for for its own sake. It is. If we believe in democracy,
then we believe in a woman’s right to do and achieve
whatever men can do and achieve, even the bad things.
It’s just that gender equality cannot, all alone, bring
about a just and peaceful world.

In fact, we have to realize, in all humility, that the
kind of feminism based on an assumption of female moral
superiority is not only naive; it also is a lazy and
self-indulgent form of feminism. Self-indulgent because
it assumes that a victory for a woman — a promotion, a
college degree, the right to serve alongside men in the
military — is by its very nature a victory for all of
humanity. And lazy because it assumes that we have only
one struggle — the struggle for gender equality — when
in fact we have many more.

The struggles for peace and social justice and against
imperialist and racist arrogance, cannot, I am truly
sorry to say, be folded into the struggle for gender
equality.

What we need is a tough new kind of feminism with no
illusions. Women do not change institutions simply by
assimilating into them, only by consciously deciding to
fight for change. We need a feminism that teaches a
woman to say no — not just to the date rapist or overly
insistent boyfriend but, when necessary, to the military
or corporate hierarchy within which she finds herself.

In short, we need a kind of feminism that aims not just
to assimilate into the institutions that men have
created over the centuries, but to infiltrate and
subvert them.

To cite an old, and far from naive, feminist saying: "If
you think equality is the goal, your standards are too
low." It is not enough to be equal to men, when the men
are acting like beasts. It is not enough to assimilate.
We need to create a world worth assimilating into.

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author, most recently, of
"Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America." This
article was first published in the Sunday Opinion
section of the Los Angeles Times.