[Media-watch] Women must shout above the bombing

[John Rooney]

Hi All

Further commentry on Women's role.
See http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=12&ItemID=3590


On Tuesday, May 6, 2003, at 01:00  pm, david Miller wrote:

> From the Scottish Socialist Voice
> http://www.scottishsocialistvoice.net/pages/page2.html
>
> Women must shout above the bombing
>
>
> by Ellie Carr
>
> War puts women in 'their place'. Or so a cursory glance at the pages 
> of our mainstream media would suggest.
> As the terrible events of the last four weeks began to unfold in the 
> form of acres of newsprint and rolling TV coverage, the last vestiges 
> of gender balance began to evaporate from view.
> If truth is the first casualty of a media war, the idea that women's 
> voices are as vital as men's must run a close second.
> War, after all, is a man's game. And just as patriotism is given a 
> three-line whip during armed conflict, so too are the traditional 
> gender roles to which we're asked to return when 'our boys' head out 
> to battle.
> As bombs began raining down on Baghdad in mid-March, a subtle shift 
> took place. Female reporters, hardly copious in numbers, began to 
> slide off the front pages and disappear from TV news.
> Celebrity stories were replaced with a new national obsession - the 
> hot-breathed, salivating, endlessly-detailed description of the might 
> of men and machinery, of the 'surgical' precision of B2 bombers, the 
> grim effectiveness of 'pincer movements', the distancing rhetoric that 
> describes dead people as 'collateral damage'.
> "Lightning fast troops, cutting-edge weaponry, breathtaking 
> opportunism - Gulf War 2 changed the nature of military conflict for 
> ever."
> Scotland on Sunday could not hide its breathless enthusiasm as it 
> 'assessed' the events that led to the made-for-TV toppling of Saddam's 
> statue in Baghdad on April 9.
> Also writing in Scotland on Sunday, 'left-wing' media commentator, 
> Brian McNair, saluted the return of 'male courage'.
> "British and American soldiers have displayed qualities which before 
> September 11 had been ... pushed into the corner for embarrassing 
> guests. Call it altruism and self-sacrifice. Call it heroism... this 
> conflict has helped make [it] respectable again."
> Could these be the same male soldiers who told journalists: "I'm 
> sorry, but the chick got in the way," after gunning down an innocent 
> Iraqi female?
> You could call it heroism. Or you could quite simply call it brutality.
> Reporters too, became covered in the 'glory' of war. Even the BBC's 
> Rageh Omaar, whose breathy tank-side reports culminated in a gushing 
> account of US marines entering Baghdad's Firdouz Square pre-topple, 
> was dubbed 'Scud Stud' of the war by US housewives.
> This - not the pictures of maimed civilians that we must be shown if 
> we are to understand the true horror of conflict - is the real "war 
> porn".
> And just as women don't tend to write these stories (sorry boys, the 
> tech spec of a Black Hawk helicopter just doesn't turn us on) - 
> neither do they tend to appear in them.
> According to the UN, women (and children) make up 70 per cent of those 
> displaced by war. But they are notably absent from the coverage.
> Not simply because the majority of soldiers are still men but because 
> what happens to women in war zones is the bit we can't stomach - the 
> bloody, messy, starving, grieving awful truth of it.
> And so, in the theatre of war, women take supporting roles. The BBC's 
> website recently carried a photo-gallery reminding us of the key 
> 'faces of the war'. The only woman whose picture appeared was Private 
> Jessica Lynch.
> And so the abiding image of women's role in modern conflict is that of 
> a pretty blonde teenager being carried off on a stretcher by burly US 
> marines, pursued by a 100-strong press pack with 'Saving Private 
> Lynch' headlines ready to roll.
> On the home-front, the media reverted to those handy divisions: 
> mothers and whores.
> It's a strange fact of modern warfare that women's chief role (after 
> keeping home and hearth warm for 'our boys') seems to be donning 
> sparkly Union Jack g-strings and pouting temptingly from the pages of 
> our newspapers with the promise of post-conflict sex.
> In the first days of invasion, The Sun carried a double-page spread 
> titled 'Weapons of Mass Seduction'.
> The message to the vast majority of UK women who opposed the war at 
> its outset seems clear. If you want to make your voice heard above the 
> crossfire of male opinion: get your tits out for the troops.
> So if war is a man's game, to whom belongs peace? Despite the 
> existence of the little-known UN resolution 1325, calling for women's 
> involvement in all peace and re-construction initiatives 
> post-conflict, there was only one woman at last Wednesday's meeting 
> laying plans for interim government in Iraq. This was not widely 
> reported.
> If this is 'liberation' of any description, it certainly isn't women's.
> One image stays with me through this. It is not of human carnage, or 
> looting, or Saddam's statue hauled to the ground.
> It is of a Kurdish freedom fighter, a woman, sweeping through the 
> streets of Khanequin - Kalashnikov slung round her hips, face beaming 
> proud defiance.
> Her picture appeared over and over. But her story was never told. Her 
> voice never heard. For her, and other women like her, we should make 
> our voices louder than ever before.
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Okay Dude. Til later ...

John Rooney
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