Wednesday, September 22, 2004
BOSTON -- This is the story that jump-starts my week: A group of insurgents has threatened to kill three hostages unless Americans release all female Iraqi prisoners. Just female prisoners.
As the first of the grisly beheadings is posted on the Web, I wonder what strategy the spin doctors had concocted for these killers? Do they think the world will see female prisoners more as tender women than as ruthless enemies?
I add this to a story datelined Moscow. The Russian government has revealed that the two female suicide bombers were detained and quickly released before they bribed their way onto the planes.
Did the security forces dismiss the danger because of the dress? Did the corrupt officials assuage their conscience by discounting any risk from the "gentler sex"?
And what of the horrific takeover of the school in Beslan? There were a handful of women along with the two dozen men who took over the school. Yet many reports, especially from Europe, segregated their motives. The men were cold-blooded killers, but the women were "black widows," driven to avenge the deaths in their own families.
It was as if there were something unnatural about a female terrorist. The analysts had to explain -- or explain away -- their violence. But violent men needed no explanation. There were no "black widowers" because violence in men was natural.
Since 1999 Chechen women have taken part in at least 15 attacks. In the Moscow theater takeover, 19 of the 41 hostage-takers were female. On CNN the other day, a reporter remarked that the terrorism has a "feminine" face, as if blush and eyeliner were standard issue.
How long will it take us to get over the stereotypes of women as exclusively peaceful, nurturing, empathetic? Only when the stereotype becomes dangerous to society?
It runs deep
I know how deep this cultural bias runs. In the months after 9/11, as I unlaced my shoes again and again at the airport gate, I privately wondered why they were profiling middle-aged women.
Yet the stereotypes that I too carry are useful to terrorists. The leaders count on them when choosing women for their 'feminine' ability to get closer to the targets. And they count on them for giving their cause a moral advantage. When the terrorist is a woman, people talk about "why" she did it, not "what" she did.
In 2002, Wafa Idris became the first female Palestinian suicide bomber. The profiles portrayed her as a victim: divorced, infertile, hopeless and an easy recruit to the glory of martyrdom. Was her "female" despair so much greater than that of her male counterparts?
As Chechen women turned to violence, there were lurid accounts of women raped and videotaped, blackmailed and brainwashed into suicide. No one knows how many of these tales are true, but cultures tell ever-more-elaborate stories to fit their preconceptions. Surely women -- and men -- have individual psyches and histories. But surely too there is as much difference among women as there is between men and women.
"It's a fantasy that women are so much more caring and empathetic than men," says Caryl Rivers, co-author of "Same Difference," a book that takes a critical look at innate gender differences. "In all the systematic research, men and women come out about equal."
Indeed, in studies of domestic violence women initiate violence nearly as often -- though not as lethally -- as men. In a Princeton study using video games, men dropped significantly more bombs than women as long as their identity was known. But when promised anonymity -- when 'nobody was watching' -- women dropped more bombs than men.
When the social constraints are off -- surely when women are rewarded for violence -- they can mimic the worst behavior of men. So, in Iraq, two of those "female prisoners" were "Dr. Germ" and "Mrs. Anthrax," Saddam Hussein's henchwomen.
In America
In our own country, we now have more female lawyers ... and more female criminals. We have more girl soccer teams ... and more girl gangs.
And what more gender-bending icon have Americans seen this year than Pfc. Lynndie England with a naked Iraqi prisoner on a leash. If women can do it all, they can not only wear their country's uniform, they can shame it. They can even be pregnant and court-martialed.
Washington Post Writers Group