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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