socially constructed notions of masculinity are the root cause of war –history proves

Masculinities in many societies, even in times that appear to be ‘peaceful’, are socially constructed through activities such as competitive sports and computer games in a form that is readily adaptable to serve well in war conditions. James McBride suggests that in the USA football is an allegory or metaphor for war, sharing its pursuit of male territorial gains. ‘Football, like war,’ he writes, ‘is a form of male aggression, consciously played out in a variety of cultural practices’ (McBride 1995: 4). He notes that domestic violence by men against women surges during significant football events and at the onset of wars. With its male bonding rituals, McBride writes, ‘the game of football reinscribes war and the concomitant values of the warrior as a tem- plate for the identity of football enthusiasts – the vast majority of men in America’ (McBride 1995: 86). An elite group of men continually engaged in readying the USA for war are the defence intellectuals who debate and plan the country’s nuclear weapons policy. Carol Cohn, a feminist social scientist, was shocked to find, during participant observation among such a group, that these articulate, charming, humorous and decent men routinely discussed the most horrific possibilities of vaporized cities and mangled bodies in light-hearted, abstract and euphemistic terms, revealing an ‘astounding chasm between image and reality’ in their techno-strategic language (Cohn 1990: 34, see also Chapter 1). The linking thread in the discourse of this nuclear ‘priesthood’, as she terms them, was sexism. It was their masculinity that enabled them to distance themselves from the actual death and destruction implied in their work, inescapable to anyone engaged with everyday human care and concern. It is not only masculinity, however, that keeps a society trapped on the continuum of war. Femininity plays its part too. Painful examples of women, deeply embedded in conventional patriarchal gender relations, urging their men to fight, and even to rape enemy women, were given above. Many less dramatic but quietly pervasive processes have been observed in which civilian women are induced to play an unquestioning part in support of societal militarization. Taking a country into war The moment of entry into war can be specially revealing of the causal effect of gender. Italian fascism and German National Socialism were able to draw on a radicalized masculinity emerging from the First World War, to reconstruct a sense of national community and prepare for the Second World War. More recently, it has been suggested that patriarchal masculinity was at the root of the erroneous political decision to take the USA into war against the Communist regime in Vietnam. Robert Dean found the policy makers of the time to have been ‘a small and strikingly homogenous group’, strongly formed by their shared class and gender belonging. He shows how those foreign policy decision makers ‘incarnated an imperial masculinity tied to patterns of class and education’. They shared a background in exclusive male-only institutions, such as boarding schools, Ivy League fraternities and secret societies, elite military service and metropolitan men’s clubs, ‘where imperial traditions of “service” and “sacrifice” were invented and bequeathed to those that followed’. They served to imbue men with a particular kind of manhood, indoctrinate them in an ‘ideology of masculinity’, ritually creating ‘a fictive brotherhood of privilege and power’ (Dean 2001: 4–5). These were the patriarchal gender relations that, intertwined with those of economic class and nationalism/imperialism, disposed a group of men to lead their country into a doomed war. Training men to fight In certain widespread and influential male subcultures, the masculinity fostered and rewarded is aggressive and violent. We see this in computer games, in certain forms of music, in popular film and in the fascination knives and guns hold for men and boys. These cultures predispose young males to see themselves as potential fighters and to consider armed conflict normal, even a fulfilment of their manhood. John Horne made a study of masculinity in war and politics over the hundred years from 1850. He proposes that to fully understand war we need to explore ‘the dense associative life of men’ (Horne 2004: 27). It is through hard cultural work, the shaping and manipulation of that sociality, that military managers create their armies. Those destined to be leaders are educated in an authoritative masculinity in officer training courses, while those destined to be the rank-and-file are subjected to acquisition of a different masculinity in the disciplinary torture of ‘boot camp’, where drill sergeants prepare their recruits for war by reinforcing their racism, misogyny and homophobia, annihilating any vestige of the feminine in them. War fighting A feature of many, if not most, wars is mass sexual violence inflicted by men on women – and on some men (see Chapters 10 and 11 for fuller discussions of this issue). It occurs in phases of fighting that afford particular opportunity for it, such as invasions, occupations and the imposition of state terror on political insurgencies. Many authors have explored the relationship of so-called ‘peacetime’ rape and war rape. Rape in both circumstances may be opportunistic and ‘recreational’, a product of the deep misogyny among men (and unfortunately among many women) characteristic of societies in both conditions. However, we are now more alert to situations where military commanders make deliberate use of mass rape by their soldiers to demoralize enemy communities, a strategy that is the more effective the more these are known to value female chastity as a property of masculine honour (Seifert 1995). Negotiating peace Declarations of peace usually involve a victorious and a defeated side. While this provokes a crisis for the defeated, it can also be a demanding moment for the victor, for he must ensure that the defeated enemy is not totally reduced. Patriarchy as a generalized system of masculine authority demands at least a partial restitution of the defeated male’s masculine dignity. This imperative is apparent in the fact that in contemporary armed conflicts there is a clear reluctance to remove responsibility for the negotiation of peace from the hands of the men who made war, even though they may, due to their part in the conflict and by experience and training, be inappropriate for the task. The passing of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 of 2000, on Women, Peace and Security, which among other things calls for women to be included in peace negotiations, recognizes this problem. The Resolution can be seen as an interestingly anti-patriarchal measure introduced, under organized pressure by women, by the most masculine and authoritiative body (the Security Council) in the United Nations system (see also Chapters 12 and 14). Recovery from defeat After the ignominious withdrawal from Saigon in 1975, the shock to the US psyche of the defeat of its massive military power by a small guerrilla force brought about a kind of national trauma, felt as a collapse of manly pride and self-respect. This post- war period has interested several gender researchers. James Gibson and Susan Jeffords for example analyse novels and films of the period, and dwell in particular on the characteristic ‘lone hero’ of post-war culture. Rambo and others like him are hyper- masculine warriors with a vicious and insatiable appetite for destruction, ‘the epitome of masculine power and self-development, and combat as the only life worth living’ (Gibson 1994: 32). These authors see such cultural productions as part of a strategy of remasculinization, invoking a masculine bond across class and colour, excluding women from the masculine realm, and taking revenge on the state and the anti-war movement, both despised as effeminate and effeminizing. Jeffords is emphatic that we should not perceive and respond to war as merely the antithesis of peace. Rather, we should see the discourse of warfare as the primary vehicle for the stiffening of masculine resolve in American society (Jeffords 1989). Constituting citizenship as masculine and military In some cultures the link between masculinity and war is highly explicit and is not dependent on an imminent war. Since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk brought the modern Turkish state into being in 1923, Turkey has seen itself as not merely a nation but a ‘military-nation’. The Turkish man has been visualized before all else as a soldier. Ayse Gul Altinay shows the two-way productiveness of gender and militarization in Turkey through analysing the militarizing role given to schools and the educating role given to the military. She suggests ‘that the practice of compulsory military service has created a major gender difference administered by the state, and that the decision-makers were well aware of the gender implications of this practice from the very beginning’ (Altinay 2004: 7). Others have suggested that the modern national armies of nineteenth-century Europe both were made by and were makers of gender relations. One study has pointed to a connection between male suffrage and conscript armies in the making of citizenship. When working-class men got the vote it enabled them to enter for the first time into relations of notional equality with men of other classes, while simultaneously male citizenship was being constructed crucially around military service in the new conscript armies. Increasingly, these authors say, masculinity was ‘virilized’, differentiated ever more emphatically from femininity (Dudink and Hagemann 2004: 11). Modern armies were ‘established through strongly gendered discourses’ and were at the same time ‘co-producers of a universalising discourse of sexual difference’. As such they became ‘the pillars of social and political order’ (Dudink and Hagemann 2004: 17).