- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
Here is the relevant passage from which Anon drew Hillary Clinton's quote, from her speech to a 1998 conference on domestic violence in El Salvador:
The experience that you have gone through is in many ways comparable to what happens with domestic violence. Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat. Women often have to flee from the only homes they have ever known. Women are often the refugees from conflict and sometimes, more frequently in today’s warfare, victims. Women are often left with the responsibility, alone, of raising the children. Women are again the victims in crime and domestic violence as well.
Reading it in the larger context, I can see why people have a problem with it. For starters, she draws a very dubious and strained comparison between war and domestic violence. I'm not even going to go into the reasons why that comparison is a bad one. She then proceeds to her very dubious assertion that women have always been the biggest victims of war--even bigger than the people, men, who've always constituted by far the greatest number killed and wounded in it. She tried to back up her assertion with examples. Let's examine them:
a) Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat. Well, yes, but how does that make the women bigger victims? If their husbands, fathers, and sons are being lost in combat, that means they're being KILLED. They're DEAD and gone, forever. It takes a rather warped view of affairs to consider a living and grieving person as a bigger victim than someone whose very life has been obliterated, almost certainly in a horrifically violent, painful, gruesome way.
b) Women often have to flee from the only homes they have ever known. And their men don't? If the men are in combat, they're already gone from their homes, and many of them will never return (or will have no homes to return to.) If they're not in combat, they'll be driven from their homes just as the women are, if they don't suffer even worse treatment, as I outlined in my last post.
c) Women are often the refugees from conflict and sometimes, more frequently in today’s warfare, victims. The first part of this statement essentially restates point (b) above, but again--if a civilian population is driven into exile or refugee status, the men will be refugees just like the women, and if there's a notable shortage of men among the refugees, then it's only because the men are actively fighting, dead, or prisoners. Being a refugee sucks, but is it worse than being dead? Than being in active combat? Than being held captive and tortured, or forced into slave labor by an enemy? I'll go out on a limb here and say NO it's not worse than those things. Refugees still have their lives, and though they face hardship and worry and grief, they're out of the war zone by definition and there are major international organizations that exist to assist them.
The second part of this statement is curious, following as it does on the heels of Clinton's assertion that women have always been the biggest victims of war. Only three sentences later, she stated that women are more frequently victims of war now than they were in the past? Those two statements are inconsistent. I'll dismiss the former as gynocentric twaddle, but I will agree with her on the latter.
d) Women are often left with the responsibility, alone, of raising the children. Not to be glib, but honestly, how does that differ from normal, everyday life? Isn't one of the biggest (and most valid) complaints of feminism that women are in almost ALL circumstances saddled with the burden of child care and child rearing, with little if any help from men (other than financial?) Again, this statement is open to the same criticisms I offered above: If during or after a war, women find themselves caring for and rearing children alone, with no direct or financial help from a man, it's almost certainly due to the fact that the man in question is involved in combat (where his life is in constant danger), dead, crippled, or a prisoner, possibly subject to horrible abuse, torture, or slave labor. Again, how does this prove that women are bigger victims of war than men?
e) Women are again the victims in crime and domestic violence as well. Uhm, what? Women of course constitute the large majority of domestic violence victims, but even you, AKA Smith, would acknowledge that they don't comprise ALL victims of DV. Women and girls also constitute the majority of sexual assault and molestation victims, although the gap between boy and girl victims is not that great and the gap between adult male and female victims is also quite narrow if we include male correctional victims of sexual assault, and why wouldn't we? Regardless, in every other category of violent crime males comprise the large majority of victims--75 to 80% of murder victims, to take just one example. So Clinton's implication that women constitute the "biggest victims" of violent crime like she thinks they are of war is also unsupported by the facts.
