The Pinking of Peace Politics

Because I am a woman who enjoys hockey, finds snuggling as comfortable as a straight-jacket, and, until recently, thought DKNY was a computer chip, I felt like a spoiled sport not pumping my fist and hooting robustly after reading Margaret Talbot's recent article, "A Woman's Work?" in The New York Times Magazine.

After all, her argument -- in which she attacks the idea that women are innately anti-war because of their nurturing and peaceful natures -- seems sensible enough. Such a view, she contends, is tiresome, essentialist, and, given that women make up 15 percent of the military, now outdated.

Again, sounds about right. I've never thought women were natural softies, or men allergic to feelings or feather dusters. I don't have kids, but when I do, I'll expect my husband to be as caring toward them as I am. And until then, I'll have to be satisfied with the bolt of energy I get from watching him clean the cat litter box. In my house, fair is fair.

I am also wary of political movements wherein to participate women must defend their children instead of themselves, or don a pink feather boa and chat oh-so-naturally about their vaginas. On this front, Talbot's article dismisses anti-war groups like Code Pink that embrace this idea that women have an inherent respect of human life and community. She argues that this belief not only ignores the fact that "half of all American women are for the war," but also dumbs down the situation in Iraq because such pink politics are more "homey" and "simple" than "policy-oriented antiwar messages."

"Right on," I wanted to say. But then, despite how reasonable the article sounded, I couldn't help feeling that, as a woman opposed to the war, I was being had. After all, this wasn't the first time I had heard this argument. America has of late been infected with a widespread panic: the fear of being too girly, in that peaceful touchy-feely way. Talbot's article is only one example of this.

Others, like Brooke Schreier, the voice behind the blog asparagirl.com, which has recently received 3,500 hits a day, have been even more blunt. In a profile on her in the Los Angeles Times, Schreier derided anti-war women's groups like Code Pink, the Lysistrata Project, and Women Against War, saying, "What...galls me is that these women are claiming not only sex but femininity itself as a uniformly passive, gentle, loving, pacifist attribute. What rubbish."

Jenny Brown, a member of Redstockings, a radical feminist group, expressed a similar view in The Nation. "Since when are women naturally peaceful? Harriet Tubman carried a gun when she ran the underground railroad."

Given all these valid arguments against essentialism, what's an anti-war female like myself to do? If I confess to feeling compassion for Iraqi civilians, should I be told to go home, soak my ovaries in napalm, and get over it? But am I really supposed to crush a Dixie Chicks CD against my forehead just to prove anything an M-16 toting Marine can do I can do better? Or does this double bind suggest something more about how women's voices are muted and manipulated in wartime? Let's take Curtain Number Three.

The fear of being too girly, after all, is nothing new -- it was there before 9/11. Decrying the so-called decline of masculinity, John Derbyshire, less than two weeks before that dreadful September day, lamented in The National Review Online that: "Even war, that most quintessential of masculine activities, is probably a thing of the past...Those boisterous manifestations of masculinity -- physical courage, danger-seeking, the honor principle...chivalry...once accessible to all men, in episodes of war or exploration if not in everyday life, have now been leached out to the extremes of our society."

Of course, 9/11 brought some relief by replacing, in Derbyshire's words, those feminized men in their sterile, "de-masculinized" workplaces with brawny, brave ones in hard hats. If only for a short time, it seemed, the proper gender order was reestablished. "When everything's going well, maybe it's the corporate executive who sits at his desk and doesn't have a muscle in his body. But when push comes to shove, let's face it, women want the guy who can kill the saber-toothed tiger," Sam Keen, author of "Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man," told USA Today in November 2001.