"The military isn’t feminized enough and that includes the females."

Here's a piece from Debra Dickerson from Washington Monthly about the role of women in the prison abuses at Abu Ghraib. We should be seeing many meditations on this subject in the coming days (and years). Those who have liked to think that the world would be more civil if only women had a bigger role to play in public affairs will need to theorize or retheorize. One gambit, whenever women participate in anything that is other than what you were hoping women would do if given power, is to say that somehow these particular women don't really count as real women. Dickerson has personal experience behind her theory:

I spent the first few years of my 12 in the Air Force trying my damndest to be one of the boys. I started smoking, drank like an idiot, cursed like a sailor, always wore fatigues and combat boots, didn’t carry a purse. Even wore a man’s watch. Once, when they took me to a club (in 1981 South Korea) which hosted live sex shows, I refused to punk out and leave until after the first ‘act.’ Longest half hour of my life but I was too bought into my macho new environment, the environment which was oh so much more empowering than the misogynist ghetto I was fleeing from, to back off from any of it. I told myself that keeping up with the men, whatever they were doing, was feminist.



After a few years, though, I rebelled, if only in my personal comportment, and determined to be both female and a GI. ...

Still, I'm pretty skeptical of this idea that when women do the things you've associated with men, it's because those women were still in thrall to men. It's really a twist on the retro notion that the real women are the good women.