Sandra’s Miscellany

The NY Times today reports on George Allen’s attack of his opponent for the U.S. Senate race in Virginia, Jim Webb. Webb’s crime? Having written novels containing sexual elements and disturbing imagery.

My disclaimer: No, I’ve not read Webb’s work. He wrote military/war novels and I don’t normally include those in my TBR pile. On the other hand, the Drudge Report contains a nice article with the offending excerpts of Webb’s novels. Webb’s got an ear for language and a clean writing style. I might have to add one of his books to the pile.

Allen alleges that Webb’s war novels are sexually exploitative of women. Well, I’ve got a question for Allen: Ever heard of “comfort women”?

War is sexually exploitative of women. If you look back through military history, sex and war have been linked on more than one level. Blame it on the uncertainty of the future. Or the sudden, blinding fear of being faced with one’s mortality. In the most fortunate cases, the women involved in assuaging these fears have been willing participants in le petite mort, the “little death” that reminds us we’re haven’t yet suffered the real one.

But in other cases — and there are plenty if you Google “war history women exploitation” — the women have no choice and the crimes against them have nothing to do with something so tame as desperation to live. Instead, the acts committed against women are intentionally demeaning and exploitative as a way of subduing the civilian population.

Try this gem of an observation from Patricia Hynes over at ZNet:

A unique harm of war for women is the trauma inflicted when men wield their penises as weapons to demean, assault, and torture. Military brothels, rape camps, and the growing sex trafficking for prostitution are fueled by the culture of war which relies on and licenses male aggression, and by the social and economic ruin left in the wake of war which is particularly devastating for women and children. Rape and sexual exploitation in war, however, were not systematically documented and named as war atrocities and crimes until the recent investigations of the genocidal rape of Muslim women during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia and of Tutsi women in Rwanda. Yet, history reveals that senior officers of war and military occupation have always sanctioned and normalized the sexual exploitation of local women by military men. Governments on all sides of war have initiated, accommodated, and tolerated military brothels under the aegis of “rest and recreation” for their soldiers, with the private admission that a regulated system of brothels will contain male sexual aggression, limit sexually transmitted diseases in the military, and boost soldiers’ morale for war.

Maybe Allen should do a little reading up on the link between war and sex before he gets so upset over Webb’s novels. Webb is a Vietnam veteran. He likely saw a lot of ugly things and saw firsthand the depths to which humans sometimes sink in circumstances of war.

Does his writing make Webb a mysogynist? I doubt it. Likely he was exploring the attitudes of the people he was writing about. If Allen has a problem with that, maybe he should think carefully before casting a Yea vote to engage in any sort of war in the future.