Each time you see pictures of United States soldiers humiliating Iraqi prisoners, what do you feel? Revulsion, probably. Compassion. Sadness. Anger, perhaps. But there’s something else puzzling in there, too: a more acute visceral reaction to the women’s involvement than the men’s.
Yes, there’s the grinning idiot with the moustache, standing with his arms proudly folded above a pile of naked Iraqis. But the protagonists who stand out are the women. There’s one on top of the human pyramid, grinning like she’s at a children’s sleepover. And there’s one dragging a naked man on a leash. ”Witch”, screamed the London Sun’s stark headline last week, the male perpetrators seemingly forgotten.
Like most pictures of cruelty, there is a tantalising inscrutability to them. They are images that make you want — need even — to find out more. How, you wonder, does one get to this?
London’s Mail on Sunday was so transfixed by the woman’s leering, triumphalist little face that it delved into her background. Her name, it emerged, is Lynndie England. She’s 21, and when she isn’t on tour, she lives in a trailer park in Fort Ashby, West Virginia. Fort Ashby isn’t, would you believe, a wildly cosmopolitan town — residents describe it as ”backwoods and proud of it”. Those who spoke to journalists didn’t conjure up an image of somewhere with a keen understanding of world politics. ”We went there to help the jackasses,” said one, ”and they started blowing us up.”
According to her mother, Lynndie enlisted to make money and see the world — presumably the same package that attracted the men in those ghastly trophy snaps. And yet each time you return to them, it remains hard to separate the obvious repulsiveness of what she is doing from the fact that a woman is doing it.
We ought, then, to ask why one expects women to behave better in such a situation. Is it really out of respect, because we expect certain admirable qualities — compassion, gentleness — to be at least closer to the surface in women? Or is it, in fact, born of a more complex lack of respect? We’ve graciously allowed women to serve in the military, but we’re doubly sickened at their inability to retain these admirable qualities better than male soldiers.
It depends on that old chestnut of what equality really means — the right to be equal or the right to be different. It seems unlikely that there is room in the lower reaches of the US army, perhaps the most necessarily homogenising institution in the world, for perceived female strengths to be drawn on. In the loftier ranks there are women interrogators, women spies, women whose very femaleness, rightly or wrongly, is made a useful weapon. But these big shots are a far cry from Lynndie, who graduated from the macho culture of her home town to the rank and file US army and noticed, one imagines, not an awful lot of cultural difference.
Explaining why she was being toasted as a hero in Fort Ashby, one local told the Mail on Sunday: ”To the country boys here, if you’re a different nationality, a different race, you’re subhuman. That’s the way girls like Lynndie are raised.”
Disappointingly, this could be the logical extension of subsuming women into male army culture. Given the line of work, the pack mentality and the still tiny proportion of women to men, it seems unfair to expect your basic idiotic female to behave any differently from your basic idiotic male.
Which brings us back to those pictures. Their very hideousness makes one hesitate to speak about them in terms of rights at all. But we may have to swallow one unpalatable fact: if we’re willing to argue that women soliders can be equally brave and dedicated as men, then we must accept they can be equally repulsive, too. — Â