Empirically proven---socially constructed notions of masculinity are the root cause of war

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.