Wednesday, May 05, 2004

A brilliant piece by Debra Dickerson in The Washington Monthly about the women involved in abusing Iraqi prisoners. She says, "As surprised as I was to learn that GIs were abusing prisoners, nothing floored me as much as seeing the grinning faces of women gleefully celebrating torture of the helpless (however complicit in terrorism they might be). I take pride in being an unapologetic feminist (why not? The world is unapologetically sexist.) but maybe I shouldn’t. Without those photos, not only would I have been difficult to convince that the abuse happened, I would never have believed that women participated. So perhaps the problem isn’t the military’s feminization but its lack of it."

I'm appalled by women's participation in this abuse, but not surprised -- women are not essentially more moral than men, despite the arguments of some feminists. Women simply haven't been able to engage in such abuse because we haven't had the power to do so.


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