I’ve written five books for traditional publishers. Hideous Dream—A Soldier’s Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti (Soft Skull Press), Full Spectrum Disorder—The Military in the New American Century (Soft Skull Press), Borderline—Reflections on War, Sex, and Church (Wipf and Stock), Mammon’s Ecology—Metaphysic of the Empty Sign (Wipf and Stock), and Tough Gynes—Violent Women in Film as Honorary Men (Wipf and Stock). It’s that last one I’m returning to today, as I react to the creepy new propaganda genre that I’m naming “fuckable-women-in-combat-garb” (FWICG). It’s not my standard (this “fuckability” thing), but an industry standard. Let me quote from Tough Gynes, which was about the mostly-male representation of “tough women” in film.
Film, in particular, an industry long dominated by rich white men, is unlikely to be the medium for a great deal of serious counter-cultural resistance, though it retains tremendous potential. In fact, film tends to magnify the cultural trends that are seen as the trendiest, “sexiest,” and most “cutting edge” (read: commodifiable) among the social groups of the filmmakers themselves. If strong women characters are seen as trendy and/or profitable, Hollywood and its ilk will produce strong women characters; but they will then drain them, by design or default, of their most fundamentally subversive and authentically counter-cultural qualities, beginning with ensuring that female leads—no matter how strong—remain fuckable. (p. 109)
The FWICG propaganda genre is illustrated above with a photograph from the Israeli Defense Forces of one of its FWICGs, that is, a provocatively posed, well-coiffed IDF female with a CAR-15 slung across her ass (killing is sexy now). The building in the background is intact, so we can assume it’s not Gaza, where the genocidal IDF have leveled the place: since October 7, 28,000 civilians, mostly women and children dead, 8,000 missing, 68,000 maimed, the rest now cut off from food, water, and medical assistance.
I remember well how US neoconservative propagandists tried to turn the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 2002 into a “feminist” issue. The Taliban were anti-feminist, therefore bombing Afghan wedding parties was advancing feminism. This is also the implicit message about women soldiers in FWICG propaganda. Women with guns—tough gynes equality.
Of course, I also remember those prehistoric feminists of the second wave who suggested—much to the chagrin of men left, right, and center—that representing women as sexual objects—sexual objectification, that is—was not good for women and definitely not some form of “liberation.” But then along came the demon spawn of liberal feminism (I don’t abhor liberal feminism, but liberalism generally [that includes conservatism, which is liberalism])—”power feminism,” and “grrrrl power,” and then post-structuralist feminism (which has come to deny that women are even women), and finally post-feminism (that objection to objectification is soooo passé) . . . no obscure philosophical modifiers necessary. I’ll admit that my own sympathies were (and still are to some degree) with the more Marx-adjacent and eco-conscious varieties—radical feminists and eco-femininsts: Andrea Dworkin, Carole Pateman, Maria Mies, Silvia Federici, Carolyn Merchant, and like that.
The liberals and their offspring rather easily found a way to rehabilitate sexual objectification and even “lean into” it. They got paid, of course, because—as we’re suggesting—entitled-ass men who were still squirming about how well women adapted to being lawyers and doctors and stuff were happy to preserve and expand this male entitlement (sexual objectification) in the realm of sexual relations. The entertainment industry won big. The cosmetic industry won big. The porn industry won big. The ad industry won bigger, because it had always been on the front lines of objectification. Sexual objectification sells like hotcakes.
Some will argue—being philosophical liberals and not realizing it—that men are now routinely sexually objectified, too . . . and this constitutes “progress” and “equality.” It’s not convincing me, because I’m highly suspicious of both of those terms; but this is how late capitalist culture rolls now. Progress is not measured by acknowledging the dignity of either female or male persons as irreducible image-bearers of God, or by personal restraint as constitutive of good character, but by making women as venal as venal men and reducing a few qualified males and females to fuck-toys (thereby devaluing everyone else). idk
A commitment to sexual equality with men is a commitment to be coming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.
—Andrea Dworkin
Now we can add the uniformed killer. But the cultural price of being a “kick-ass grrrrl” was you had to submit to being sexually objectified, because we all know, in this compartmentalized liberal universe, that this is still the truest value of women . . . and boys will be boys.
My book was about films, and I’d named the associative film trope “hot chick with a gun” (HCWAG).
[G]iven the injustice of the gendered order, of male supremacy, we have to be sensitive to the ways that vulnerability . . . as a virtue for women in cinema . . . reinforces the masculine-feminine stereotypes for an audience who has already internalized it. And we should recognize how attractive the aggressive, competitive, and instrumental woman in film is to the vast majority of women who suffer under male hegemony and feel policed and cut off when they display—in situations where it is set up to be perfectly appropriate—aggression, competition, and instrumentality. How could women not feel a little celebratory at a female character that quits putting up with injustice? While the response may be subject to our criticisms, the reason for the response is understandable and points to the real suffering of real women in the real world.
This complication is why we included the late Andrea Dworkin’s quote at the beginning of the book. This “radical” feminist recognized that those traits generally identified with men were identified with men in-power, and that a few women achieving that kind of power does not address the injustices that inhere in the exercise of that power. Liberal feminism had fenced itself off within “gender inequality” in such a way that white affluent feminists could focus on the inequalities between them and white affluent men and confront that power without addressing the ways that gender is nested into class, race, and nationality as historically unjust power structures perpetuated in part by the ignorance of and denial of structures of power other than sex-gender. Some early American feminists argued forcefully about the “injustice” of the franchise being afforded to black men before white women, clearly stating their conviction that black men were inferior to white women because white women were white. Elizabeth Cady Stanton said, “What will we and our daughters suffer if these degraded black men are allowed to have the rights that would make them even worse than our Saxon fathers?”
The liberal feminism that seeks a theoretically “meritocratic equality” between men and women, within the existing power structures of industry, finance, and the war-justified state—like all power that has been destabilized by historic change—can eventually be embraced by those in power as a buffer against any deeper critique or action. A few black people can have equality with most white people so long as they perform exactly like “respectable” white people. A few women can have equality with men so long as they do not disrupt the power structures established by men, the processes and procedures that support those structures, or the fundamental way of knowing that interprets and mystifies the role of power. The violent masculinity that has underwritten the male exercise of power and which has become essential to male identity can remain intact, so long as we only allow a few women—like the person of color performing in ways that feel nonthreatening to white people is accepted as an honorary white person—to be accepted as honorary men. This way we can retain on a broader scale those same power structures without the danger of destabilization, while entertaining the masses with the imagination of equality through identification with a few real or fictional tokens. The fissure in this whole construction—as the radical feminists have long pointed out—is sex. The tough female cop in the police procedural flick is a “strong female character” who nonetheless perpetuates the idea that the police are what “stand between civilization and savagery,” instead of the far more morally ambiguous class/race realities of actual police and actual policing. And women who “kick some ass” in film and television will almost always manage to retain enough of their “femininity” to appeal to metropolitan male adolescents as sex objects. The problematic popular message for young women, which accompanies this narrative in entertainment media and advertising is: “You don’t have to surrender your sex appeal to be a kickass grrrl. (Tough Gynes, pp. 9-10)
The shameless use of these tropes as FWICG war propaganda are yet another indicator of the accelerated cultural degradation of liberalism as it enters into a kind of deathworks phase—Nietzsche’s unfortunately accurate prediction that liberalism ends in nihilism. This isn’t just some doomer dig, but a reminder that we exist in a specific somewhere along the continuum of history. The very real physical and even psychological differences between men-in-general and women-in-general have always articulated some kind of cultural and even epistemological “gender.” By that I don’t mean the floating signifier of post-Butlerite trans-ideology, but the Venn overlap of male and female spheres that stubbornly persists even today (probably because—stating the controversially obvious—men and women are actually, in some respects, different).
At one point, these separations were so strict and thoroughgoing that very few people questioned them. But with rapid changes in technology and economy, sometimes during the nineteenth and more often in the twentieth century, women were, by economic necessity more often than not, impressed into the same work forces as men, in factories at first, then later in office spaces with computers. Men and women were suddenly using the same tools, and being formed by the same work; and this was very destabilizing of the gender order. Men grew to fear that with the erosion of these social boundaries, they would lose their place, their gender identity, and their power. They experienced a kind of sexual vertigo.
During periods of gender destabilization, there is always a social backlash, and if that fails to re-establish the old gender order, a new one is—as Zillah Eisenstein said—“renegotiated” to set male social power back on a new and firmer footing. As women have increasingly made incursions into formerly male terrain, gender has been forced off its footing in many tools, spaces, and work, and it has been correspondingly amplified in the realm of sexuality proper: in our shared constructions of male and female sexual attraction, and in the manifold ways that sexual desire is triggered and maintained. If we both work in a cubicle with a computer, at least I—the man—can prove my male bona fides by ramping up my objectification of you—the woman. This is—pardon my français—what we can refer to as the “fuckability” factor. I can put every woman I see on a fuckability scale from one to ten, and thereby redefine and recapture women who have in other respects “invaded” the male sphere. Puts her back in her place. (Tough Gynes, pp. 11-12)
One of the most popular tropes among male pornography consumers, for example, is the eroticization of women’s humiliation and degradation.
I mentioned the ad industry. Since we’re talking about sanitizing war using the FWICG (or filmwise, HCWAG), let’s make note of the fact that war and “public relations” have a conjoined history. Wars have to be hard-sold, because wars are expensive and horrifying in their actuality. They have to be camouflaged with propaganda and ideology.
We covered the “feminist” sales pitch for Afghanistan, when—by the way—the US and its allies were simultaneously empowering the most anti-feminist elements in Iraq, where women had enjoyed a far more modern settlement under Saddam. It was Churchill—gasser of Kurds long before Saddam was even thought of—who once said that war “must always have a bodyguard of lies.” He was referring, of course, to deception operations against “the enemy”; but, as I’ve written about voluminously, having seen it from the inside, wars require the thorouoghgoing deception of the warmakers’ own citizens as well. Psyops is just a military term for public relations, and public relations is just a euphemism for propaganda.
The Ukrainian government has started using FWICG propaganda too.
I expect the Russians to publish their own fuckable-women-in-combat-garb any minute now.
I guess what I’m getting at—apart from the depths of death-works degradation into which modernity has descended—is that if “equality”—and for me this means spiritual equality, because any other form is a political fiction—is to be a Good Thing, it can’t be ramped up with the redistribution of the absolute worst aspects of former gendered orders . . . with men being as equally reduced and objectified as women have been, and women becoming equally as violent as men have been.
The synthesis of objectification and violence in this cheap, manipulative, and insulting war propaganda is a new bottom of disgrace.
Excellent essay.