Life in the Shadows of #MeToo

What War Does to Women

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The essay that follows is an updated version of one I wrote in 2020. An abridged version was published in City Journal.  It was inspired by reading Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women by Sunday Times war correspondent Christina Lamb. I was deeply moved by its “extraordinarily powerful account of women's suffering in war”. But it also left  me with a profound sense of frustration with the narrow - you could almost say parochial - focus of most Western journalism on the subject of sexual violence whereby the casting-couch-type harassment experienced by famous actresses warrants more outrage than the rape, brutalisation and subsequent social ostracism of millions of women on the fringes of the Western media’s mental universe.

In saying this I am not oblivious to our natural human tendency to (in philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s famous words) prefer the near to the distant *. But the age of mass media has distorted this natural instinct. Celebrities are not really any nearer to us than nameless women in far flung war zones but mass media makes it appear so. And we are talking here about something huge. The violence inflicted - by a certain kind of male - on women powerless to resist has, historically speaking, arguably been the most neglected issue in human affairs. It is also the most bedevilled by selective reporting, selective outrage and a pervasive, if largely subconscious, denial of uncomfortable truths about relations between the sexes.

Life in the Shadows of #MeToo

What War Does to Women

Early March 2020 saw the publication of a remarkable book on a shamefully neglected subject: the brutality visited on literally millions of civilian women in war zones. Released for publication just as the Covid-19 pandemic cleared almost all other stories from the front page of the world’s media was unlucky timing for its author Christina Lamb. For to read her harrowing account  of sexual atrocities - in Burma, Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, Ruanda, Bosnia, Bangladesh  and elsewhere - is to be brought hard up against a recognition of the huge disconnect that can exist between the gravity of events unfolding around the world and the amount of attention they receive. And some of the atrocities Lamb describes were ongoing in 2017 when Western media attention was suddenly so mesmerised by casting-couch exploitation in the film industry that it seemingly left no emotional capital for anything else.

Combining historical accounts of recent wars with first-hand testimony from actual victims of the rape and brutalisation inflicted on both themselves and their neighbours, Our Bodies cannot but rend the heart of anyone with a heart. Her stories of rape, torture and sadistic maiming on a massive scale are so horrific that you are left emotionally punch-drunk and numb before you reach the end of the first chapter. But as a permanent record of brutality inflicted on literally millions of women – of a kind beyond the capacity of most people even to imagine – it is an invaluable document. The eminent war historian Anthony Beavor considers it the most powerful and disturbing book he has ever read. Our Bodies is a book focussed on the atrocities perpetrated on women. It should however not be overlooked that, alongside the stories - of villages where women and children are loaded en masse onto trucks and destined for horrific brutalisation - there is typically also a brief mention of the parallel fate of the village men; ending up as a pile of corpses riddled with bullets.

Much of the narrative is devoted to detailed accounts of the search – via organisations like the International Criminal Court  - for justice for victims by firmly establishing rape as a war crime and securing convictions of its perpetrators. But most of what is described leaves you dispiritingly aware of just how unequal it all is to the task it sets itself. And there is, in any case, a whole other dimension to any quest for progress that is way beyond the scope of any international criminal court however energetic. This other dimension is that the major atrocities of recent times have all occurred in places that are barely evolving from entrenched cultural tribalism and misogyny. But the institutions of international human rights seem rather precious about saying so. International realpolitik plus political correctness is partly responsible for the near silence on these atrocities but it is also a measure of the self absorption of Western liberal elites. The implications of all this are left largely unexplored in Lamb’s book.

One of the most deeply depressing aspects of the stories, is the often hostile reaction of women in traditional cultures to the plight of the raped or otherwise violated. Like the thousands of Bangladeshi women survivors of mass rape in 1971, living out the rest of their lives branded as birangonas - outcast and despised. This, in varying degrees of horror, is a ubiquitous thread in Lamb’s accounts of the fate of more recent survivors of rape and enslavement. They are often ostracised – even spat upon - by their neighbours and abandoned by their husbands - punished all over again for the crime of having been ‘dishonoured’. In contrast, opportunistic male rape and thinking of women as chattels is viewed as a natural state of affairs. But this huge aspect of what war does to women is not a ‘war crime’. What then is it – a sort of cultural crime? One in which women historically have been culturally programmed down the millennia into believing in such things as women’s primal shame, or that they should silently submit to male domination, even rape? Yes, to some extent at least, is the grim answer.

Whilst clearly not the book’s intention, Our Bodies can bring you uncomfortably up close to the conclusion that, on some level, acceptance of male aggression is, in varying degrees, culturally hard-wired. Whilst civilisation has brought romantic love, monogamy, chivalry and mutual sex-for-pleasure, the human animal nevertheless still shares some characteristics with the animal kingdom; gangsters and molls, sheiks and harems; stags and does. Lamb’s book can leave you puzzling over the question – one which she does not really explore – of what  it is about humankind that war or ethnic conflict can unleash - in quite large numbers of men and even former ‘friends’ and neighbours - such orgies of unbridled sadistic savagery? The concept of ‘war crime’ doesn’t really take the measure of it. The rape itself, morally abhorrent as it is, can at least be comprehended in terms of opportunistic lust. But the accounts of orgiastic brutality that take up perhaps a quarter of Our Bodies’ 400 pages tell of a darkness that is hard mentally to take on board. What can induce a soldier to force a long wooden stick or a bayonet into their victim’s vagina or to stamp on her baby? And, as Christina Lamb bitterly acknowledges, no amount of prosecution-and-defence, courtroom-based justice, however well meaning, has ever convicted any actual perpetrator.

Feminist Myopia

Evidence of the persistence, in parts of the world, of an embedded cultural misogyny do occasionally surface, albeit fleetingly, in Western media. Like the chilling interviews in the documentary India's Daughter about the notorious 2012 Delhi bus rape: “When being raped, she shouldn't fight back. She should just be silent and allow the rape". This caused as much public outrage in India as in the West (and of longer duration) but this was no one-off horror as these stories make clear. And it is not unreasonable to suppose that the stories that do ignite media attention are only a tiny fraction of those that do not.

Lamb is passionate on the question of why the atrocities she recounts have been so low on the radar of Western public outrage. She locates this in a historically entrenched pre-conception that war is really about what men do to other men. But she is disappointingly silent on another, arguably, even more salient reason for this myopia – a large degree of self-absorption in most feminist discourse on sexual oppression which has much more to say and gets much more animated about sexual abuse and predation within the rich majority white nations of the Western world. Yes, media attention on what war does to women does occasionally – albeit briefly - reach a critical mass. But, as the Bring Back Our Girls Twitter campaign of 2014 showed, sustained outrage on the plight of actual people in benighted regions of the world (as opposed to abstractions like ‘global warming’) is not in the nature of mass media.

Will globalism perhaps eventually ‘liberate’ these women? Only the most determined optimist could think so looking around at the global political landscape of 2023.  The spread of the West’s technologies like social media has not had the effect (so hoped for in the Bush/Blair era) of awakening an appetite for its liberal democratic institutions. [The unimaginable fear, frustration and disappointment that must currently be being felt by Afghan women in the wake of The West’s ignominious abandonment of its ‘liberation’ project has, for example, largely become a non-story for a media machine currently fixated on Russian war villainy.]  

The grim truth is that this huge and enduring story of oppression gets refracted through a prism of political correctness. It only really gets the attention it deserves, for the most part, if it can be partnered up with certain other agendas – the obsession with celebrity is one example; ‘white patriarchy’ is another. And thus the sexual exploitation faced by some Western women on their way up the ladder of fame is a bigger story than an Indian woman sentenced by village elders to be gang-raped as punishment for the supposed transgressions of her brother and now hiding in terror of her neighbours.

Even more shamefully, Western governments and media alike have averted their gaze from the importation of such cultural misogyny and oppression as an unwonted by-product of mass immigration. In the UK, for example, it took many years for the widespread, often violent, sexual exploitation of underage white girls in towns like Rotherham and Telford by gangs of mainly Pakistani men to be recognised either in the mainstream media or in public policy. And the reason for this cowardly media and institutional silence?  Fear of appearing ‘racist’.

And there are reasons to believe that this monstrous myopia continues to this day. There is a similar wilful myopia about 'honour killings' occurring on European soil and second generation immigrant girls being shipped back ‘home’ for forced marriages or genital mutilation. These latter horrors have inspired the commissioning of no ’brave’ tv dramas.

Lamb’s chilling stories do not necessarily entirely disprove – but do rather take the shine off - Professor Steven Pinker’s celebrated thesis in Better Angels of Our Nature that, statistically speaking, violent oppression of women is on a slow secular decline. If there is cause for optimism it is perhaps that there are few men alive today in the most technologically advanced societies who would consciously demur from the proposition that women are entitled to absolute equality with men in the opportunities that life has to offer. And only the most fevered denouncer of capitalist wealth creation – whether Western or Chinese – would deny that increasing wealth has brought in its wake at least some reduction in the incidence of sexual violence and oppression.

If actual violence is statistically on the decline within Western societies, a disturbing appetite for voyeuristic virtual violence is on the rise. A major study of sexual violence on primetime American tv found a 120% increase from 2004 to 2009. World Drama on British C4 currently has over seventy European drama series almost all of which feature murders of attractive young women – often serially. Some claim that fantasy violence is just harmlessly cathartic; others are not convinced.

Feminist Circumspection?

Do the paroxysms of rampant sexual brutality that Lamb so chillingly recounts, give weight to the currently fashionable idea that there is such a thing as ‘toxic masculinity’? This idea – in its politically correct feminist version - can itself be toxic and unhelpful in its failure to discriminate between the soldier who rapes and the soldier who doesn’t. But it is not misandric to recognise that a degree of sexual aggression is in the nature of most men – especially so-called ‘alpha males’  - and whereas this aggression can be channelled positively into the kind of enterprise and inventiveness that changes the world for the better, history tells that under certain circumstances (and especially in wars) it can turn to lustful violence and mayhem.

[Something that most radical ‘3^rd wave’ feminists never grasp, in their fixation with powerful males with multiple mistresses or sex slaves, is that if one man has ten women, then nine men have none. The 66-year-old man in India's remote northeast who has 39 wives sharing a dormitory near his private bedroom is presumably something of a problem for 38 of his male neighbours.]

When it comes to confronting aspects of male/female sexual psychology that few people are inclined to articulate none have been bolder than dissident  American feminist Camille Paglia: “Aggression and eroticism, in fact, are deeply intertwined. Hunt, pursuit and capture are biologically programmed into male sexuality. Every generation, men must be educated, refined and ethically persuaded away from their tendency toward anarchy and brutishness.” The maintenance of civilised norms, in other words, is the key. She has spoken up too for the “men [who] have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters.”

How to marry up these timeless truths about human sexuality with an effective – and not merely legal/theoretical – protection of women from male aggression? That is the Question. All utopian ideologies of ‘Progress’ are predicated on the belief/hope that human nature is capable of being re-modelled by ‘politics’. Whereas conservatives view human nature as essentially unchanging and that the measure of a civilisation is to be found in the extent to which that civilisation encourages mankind’s virtuous/generous tendencies and discourages its vicious/predatory ones. And could that 1960s ‘Progress’: Women’s lib have had some unintended consequences - actually harmful to women’s interests – with its various iterations of the liberated sexy ‘superwoman’?

Two recently published feminist books: The Case Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry and Feminism Against Progress by Mary Harrington have popularised new lines of thinking on this. Both have proved best sellers (albeit only within the conservative ecosystem). The real superwomen – the women currently running some great multinational corporations and political leaders like Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel – would be savvy enough to understand that [Paglis again] “society is not the enemy, as feminism ignorantly claims. Society is woman's protection against rape.”

No amount of female prudence could prevent the atrocities described in Our Bodies nor would it have saved the Delhi bus girl. No woman has ever wanted to be violently raped in wartime or any other time. But, in the context of the liberal West, it should not be unsayable that there are aspects of the psychology of female sexual desire that can put women at increased risk of harm. It is cowardly of feminists to be in denial that some women – particularly young women - are attracted to aggressive males like moths to a flame. Like this seventeen year old British girl: “[if a boy] could kill someone or people thought he could then yeah I’m not gonna lie, he’s gonna be more attractive to me.” The dangerous heartthrob spiv is a staple of just about every soap opera ever made. Some kinds of violent misogyny can even be ‘woke’: rap artists boasting of subjugation and even rape of their 'bitches' can be lapped up by adoring college kids.

It is not that any of these truths are entirely absent from feminist discourse but it is the case that have always been drowned out in mainstream media and mainstream political debate by the much safer and less challenging pc narratives. Let us hope that the new wave of feminist thinking mentioned above will rise to this challenge.

Note:

* this Michael Oakeshott quote is worth recording in full:   “To be conservative.... is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”