Why the War Is Sexist

U.S. women from military families and wives of government contractors are saddled with the unpaid task of holding the family together until their “spouse” returns. As the heads of single-parent households, these women take responsibility for homemaking and childcare, on top of their jobs. One brother of a serviceperson put it: “Soldiers may enlist, but their families are drafted.” 

That the military depends on such women to figuratively “oil its machinery” by maintaining troop morale is evidenced by its creation of “support groups” for military wives, even while it lengthens troop deployments to cope with overstretch. Rather than being dismissed as a service for needy women, these support groups should be seen as an attempt to harness and propel women’s labor—including their performance of correct, sexually loyal roles—that the troops’ emotional functioning and lack of rebellion partly relies on. The Pentagon is responding to its post-invasion recruitment shortage by drawing on reserves, increasing deployment, and laying the economic, emotional strain on women in military families. 

At the same time, our government’s distorted agenda harnesses and compounds economic sexism that pre-dates the Iraq war. Given U.S. history, patriarchy’s operation cannot be disentangled from pre-existing structural racism either. Racist incarceration that disproportionately targets black communities intensifies black women’s unpaid labor heading single households. Arab, South Asian, Muslim, and immigrant women are strained by the detention of their partners and family members in the “war on terror.” 

3. Militarization intensifies the sexual commodification of women. Feminist anthropologists such as Cynthia Enloe have documented how the U.S. military perpetuates the sexual commodification of women around military bases to manage and motivate its largely male workforce. 

Following a pattern observed across different conflict regions by feminist scholars, Iraqi women face increasing pressures to earn their subsistence from men by bartering their sexuality. This is due to a lack of other economic options under both military attack and oppressive gender relations. In Baghdad prostitution reportedly became widespread between the fall of the Hussein administration in April 2003 and November 2003, as women disproportionately suffered growing poverty. Today, reports have surfaced of Iraqi teens working in Syrian brothels after being displaced from Fallujah, where U.S. forces launched brutal offensives and chemical weapons attacks on civilians. Sexual violence, as well as the trafficking of Iraqi women and girls, showed huge rises almost immediately after the invasion and continue. While initially perpetrated largely by Iraqi men, these rapes and abductions were exacerbated by the occupation force’s negligence and inability to establish security.  

Sectors of the U.S. anti-war left have been unsure how to address such violence, let alone suggest an adequate remedy to the problem, besides calls for resistance. But an understanding of the gender dynamics typical of wartime economies would press the need to provide solidarity for Iraqi anti-occupation movements for women’s rights and freedom from sexual violence as a human right equal to Iraqi struggles for food, water, shelter, and healthcare. Meanwhile, as the occupation persists, with growing contact between military forces and Iraqi civilians, sexual brutality by both U.S. troops and Iraqi police under occupation authority has increased. 

Jennifer Fasulo is co-founder of Solidarity with Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (SOWFI), a U.S.-based group providing political support to an anti-occupation, feminist women’s group in Iraq. She reminds us of the specific historical and geopolitical context of the occupation, pointing out that the conflict has intensified the growing religious fundamentalist movement in Iraq—opposed by Iraqi feminists and socialists—including segments that systematically perpetrate violence against and harassment of women. The rise of Islamist fundamentalism throughout the Middle East is not merely indigenous, but has U.S. support, which recruited and imported Islamist militias in opposition to secular, democratic, and socialist movements throughout earlier decades.

4. Militarization helps perpetuate sexual violence, domestic violence, and violence against women. Even though women serve as soldiers, the U.S. military is a misogynist, homophobic institution that relies on patriarchal ideologies and relations to function—with effects on larger society, as well as the countries we occupy or where we have bases. The U.S. military trains men to devalue, objectify, and demean traits traditionally associated with women. It molds men into a gender role of violent masculinity defined in opposition to femininity. “Violent masculinity” is a mode of operating that glorifies violence as a solution to tension. 

Furthermore, soldiers are purposefully trained to eroticize violence—from a heterosexual, male-aggressor perspective, even if some soldiers are gay and some are women. For example, during the first Gulf War, Air Force pilots watched pornographic movies before bombing missions to psyche themselves up. Until 1999 hardcore pornography was available at military base commissaries, which were one of its largest purchasers. 

The military teaches soldiers to internalize the misogynistic role of violent masculinity so they can function psychologically. At the 2003 Air Force Academy Prom, men were given flyers that read, “You Shut the Fuck Up. We’ll Protect America. Get out of our way, you liberal pussies.” They were then treated to a play that provided instructions on how to stimulate a female’s clitoris and nipples to get her vaginal juices flowing (in case she was otherwise unwilling?). 

Alarmingly, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs, over 80 percent of recent women veterans report experiencing sexual harassment and 30 percent report rape, or attempted rape, by other military personnel. Crimes of sexual violence by military personnel are shocking yet are institutionally ignored. Lawyer Dorothy Mackey of Survivors Take Action Against Abuse by Military Personnel reports that of the 4,300 sexual assault and abuse cases she is handling, only 3 were actually prosecuted. In Mackey’s own experience as a survivor of repeated sexual assault by military personnel, her attempt to press charges was opposed by the Department of Justice as a threat to national security. 

The U.S. Inspector General reported that military service is more conducive to domestic violence than any other occupation, citing the military’s authoritarianism, use of physical force in training, and the stress of frequent moves and separations as factors. (The military’s institutional sexism and indifference to violence against women could be added.) A checklist used by the military to determine if rape reports are valid lists a women’s financial problems with her partner and “demanding” medical treatment as factors indicating she’s lying. The Army recently offered the perk of free breast implants for servicewomen, so its surgeons could “get practice.” Meanwhile, it has a drastic shortage of rape kits in combat regions and refuses to pay for servicewomen’s abortions even in the case of rape. 

A therapist who practices near a large Army base, and treats soldiers returning from Iraq, reported escalating domestic violence once troops began coming home. Wife-killings at military bases are at an all-time high, she says, but are being covered up by the Army. She also reported on soldiers’ addiction to pornography as a source of sexual selfishness and abuse towards their partners, training the soldiers to use women’s bodies as masturbatory devices. 

Prison torture was also outsourced to U.S. companies using personnel from domestic prisons. Beyond the prison-military complex, the impact of rape culture nurtured by the military can be traced through U.S. society further. In 1997 the number one reason for veterans to be in prison at the state, federal, or local level was for sexual assault. An exploration of the effects of militarism on socialization and institutions, from school to family, are outside the scope of this essay, but must be considered. 

The impact of violence against women cannot be separated from racial and economic hierarchy, even though these pieces are often analyzed without reference to each other. One result of Hurricane Katrina was the devastation of domestic violence shelters and sexual assault services. The Louisiana Coalition Against Domestic Violence describes poor women forced to live in homeless shelters, experiencing rape and physical abuse from partners. Needless to say, poor and non-white women disproportionately face a lack of resources to gendered violence. For instance, although violence against women cuts across class, women on welfare suffer especially high rates of domestic and sexual violence—a direct result of having less freedom to leave their abusers. Again, government policy is involved; welfare law, purportedly to encourage “strong” families, denies funds to poor women who leave their partners, requiring their economic dependency and endurance of abuse. 

5. Militarization and war decrease women’s control over their reproduction. Just months after the invasion, increased back alley abortions were reported in Baghdad, as women lost access to healthcare and contraception. In the U.S., budget stringency means that policies like universal healthcare and free contraception on demand appear to remain distant realities. The lack of reproductive healthcare is an issue of women’s equality, affecting women’s control of their labor, bodies, and futures. 

Further, a Christian right-wing takeover of the U.S. political scene has reframed debates over “morality” in terms of issues like abortion and gay rights —diverting outrage away from, say, economic exploitation by this Administration and its war policy to the treatment of a clump of cells and who one loves. The Christian conservative movement focuses its political intervention more on directly controlling individuals’ personal behavior than on altering the structures of society to alleviate inequality and meet human needs. In this historical context, the ideology and agenda of limiting women’s control over their reproduction is connected to U.S. imperialism and thus has much broader implications than strictly women’s reproductive health. For one, imperialism relies on a gendered reproductive division of labor, that trains poor men to be soldiers while valorizing motherhood for women, the better to exploit women’s paid and unpaid labor. 

Within the U.S., some of the anti-war movement’s troop-centered analysis has shaped women’s space politically, if not necessarily physically. Military mothers like Cindy Sheehan are publicly recognized for their connection to the troops. An analysis of gender that problematizes the effects of violent masculinity is less welcome. 

7. Occupation will not bring about women’s liberation . As an occupier with little accountability to the Iraqi people (or the U.S. public), the U.S. government is not capable of or interested in bringing democracy and liberation to Iraqis. U.S. officials have “played two sides of the fence” with regard to women’s rights, bartering them away when convenient in order to maintain power. But at worst, events have made it tragically clear that the continued occupation’s primary goals have been the economic, political, and military interests of a U.S. elite, with as much non-transparency as possible for the sake of public relations. 

Imperialism requires particular gender relations to function. Boys are taught that soldiering is a rite of passage, a vehicle to manly respect. The public learns that soldiering—and now serving as security or emergency personnel—entitles a special claim to citizenship to this country and its offerings, even if such promises do not actually materialize. By valorizing the violent, masculine protector, the state and society extract women’s labor at undervalued rates, preserving a gendered division of labor at women’s expense and reinforcing male sexual entitlement. Part of the military’s appeal to (heterosexual) men is the male privilege it promises to offer over economically dependent, sexually available women. 

Additionally, the military uses the work of women, sectored into patriarchal and exploitative economic relations, to function as marginalized soldiers, military wives, sex workers, or civilians. 

Recognition of the connections between imperialism and U.S. patriarchy widens the spectrum of people we must consider the casualties of war and deepens our understanding of imperialism. Not only does war perpetuate sexist inequality and patriarchy, it also enlists patriarchal relations—economic, sexual, and ideological—to carry out its operations. Righting these injustices requires special attention to gender, and is not guaranteed by merely opposing the war. We must recognize the connections between the war in Iraq and patriarchy at home and resist.