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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
I don't wish to get deeply involved in the debate between you and Anonymous. I agree with you that Anon was engaging in absurd hyperbole to say that Clinton's election would be bad for men. That's just sexist propaganda. However, I have to disagree with your statement:
Also, war uproots and makes refugees of probably more women and children than adult, fighting age males because it makes sense not to characterize participants in war a "victims."
First of all, as Anon correctly pointed out, you implied that all adult, fighting-aged males are actual participants in any war or conflict, and that's far from the truth. The definition of "adult, combat-aged males" will differ somewhat depending on country, region, culture, who's offering the definition, etc. but in many, if not most cases (particularly in conflicts that are not organized, conventional wars between nation-states) that label will encompass all males from teen boys through men in their 60s. Just look at the US military's definition of "legitimate military targets" in Iraq and Afghanistan--it pretty much corresponds to all able-bodied males between the ages of 16 and 64, even if those males aren't directly involved in hostilities against US armed forces. They're considered to be "potential" enemies and thus are legitimate military targets in ways that females of any age or really young males are not. And, therefore, they've suffered death, injury, torture, arrest, and wrongful or at minimum questionable imprisonment in vastly greater numbers than any other demographic in the country.
Regardless, many males in that "combat-aged" demographic--no matter how broadly or narrowly it's defined--do not participate directly in war or conflict. Perhaps they're too old or too young (only in unusual or extreme circumstances do males younger than 18 or older than 30 take part in war in any sizable numbers); perhaps they're barred from military service for some reason; perhaps they have medical conditions that restrict or prevent their service; perhaps they're conscientious objectors; perhaps there just aren't the resources to have all of them armed and in uniform at any one time and they're helping out the war effort in non-combat or indirect ways, or not at all.
The point is that when they encounter enemy military forces, "combat-aged" males, even if they're not involved in the combat, are often treated as combatants anyway and are abused and mistreated, and frequently killed or held as prisoners far more than any other non-combatants, with the important exception of rape in the case of female non-combatants. The Bosnian war provided a major example to illustrate the point, in the capture of the Muslim enclave of Srbrenica by the Bosnian Serbs. The Serbs separated the women and children (only very young males) and elderly males from the teen boys and adult men up to their 60s, and then put the women, elderly, and children on buses and sent them to safety. The males from age 12 or 13 up through their 60s--all 8,000 of them or so--were held as prisoners, and then marched into fields, massacred, and dumped in mass graves. Many of them--arguably most--were non-combatants. According to Hillary Clinton, their wives, girlfriends, mothers, and daughters, who were sent to safety out of the war zone on buses, were bigger victims than the thousands of men and boys who were bound, blindfolded, and machine-gunned into hastily dug trenches. I find that attitude puzzling and worrisome, to put it mildly.
Finally, I disagree with your point that participants in war can't be described as victims. Why not? Many of them are conscripts rather than volunteers, meaning they're being forced to serve on pain of death, imprisonment, or some other serious legal penalty. Many of them go AWOL or mutiny once in service to protest their circumstances. Many of them serve and fight not due to any great passion but out of a sense of duty, or a desire to just survive and go home as quickly as possible. Many of them have been swept up in hysteria, sometimes manufactured hysteria by government agents. Many feel that they're fighting to protect their families and homes from a dire threat--whether or not that belief is justified. Many are shamed into serving against their better instincts, for example look at the "White Feather" movement among women and girls in Britain during World War I that sought to shame men in civilian life into joining the military, in order to become little more than meat for a murderous grinder. Many of them die in horrendous ways, of course, and many of those who don't end up horribly wounded and crippled or debilitated for life, and/or psychologically traumatized. Other than those who deliberately commit crimes during war, I see everyone involved, combatants and non-combatants alike, as victims of terrible circumstances and of forces larger than themselves. How can you not?
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.
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