Battle Lines - It's a guy thing

   Contributions    

Précédente Remonter Suivante

   

 

Battle Lines - It's a guy thing

April 12, 2003

BATTLE LINES It's a guy thing   And it has been for eons, but there's more to men and warfare than biology.  
http://www.calendarlive.com/cl-war-johnson12apr12.story

By Reed Johnson, Times Staff Writer

Brash or heartbroken, macho-cool or terror-stricken, the complex face  of modern masculinity stares out at us from TV screens and newspaper  pages in these fractured days of war. One minute it's a pensive U.S.  medic cradling a wounded Iraqi girl in a gender-reversed Pietà. Next  it's a line of smiling Marines, stripped to their T-shirts and  camouflage trousers, handsome and buff as Abercrombie & Fitch models,  shouting frat-boy bonhomie to a passing convoy of comrades. And now  it's Army Staff Sgt. Chad Touchett, sprawled in a dainty chair in one  of Saddam Hussein's rubble-strewn palaces, puffing a cigar. Take  that, Mr. Mother of All Battles, the photo seems to say, and your  sissy French-style furniture, too!

If these images conjure up a portrait of the fighting man that's far  more complicated and contradictory than those flashy, MTV-style  Marine recruiting ads, well, Leo Braudy is here to help. For  "x-thousand years," the USC professor says, war has been "the  crucible of masculinity."

It was Dr. Samuel Johnson, the 18th century man of letters and London  bon vivant, who may have best expressed the immutable link between  warfare and manliness. "Every man thinks meanly of himself for not  having been a soldier or not having been at sea," he said. But as  Braudy documents in his forthcoming book, "From Chivalry to  Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity," to be  published this fall by Alfred A. Knopf, the difference in definitions  of manhood between the time of Homer or the crusaders and today is  nearly as great as the difference between a tomahawk and a Tomahawk  missile.

Sifting through sources from history, literature and art, Braudy  traces the metamorphosis of the warrior ideal across a millennium,  roughly from the Norman conquest of England in 1066 to the collapse  of the twin towers in 2001. What he finds is that testosterone and  animal instinct alone aren't enough to explain why generations of men  have measured their self-worth by their actions on the battlefield.  Instead, he argues, centuries of social, cultural and technological  change have shaped, and been reshaped by, warfare, and this in turn  has altered our definitions and perceptions of manhood.

"I don't deny biology," Braudy says. "What I'm trying to do is ...  give masculinity a history rather than just to see it as a biological  essence."

In times of war, Braudy says, masculinity is often defined as much by  what it is not -- or at least by what it supposedly shouldn't be --  as by what it is. In wartime, men aren't supposed to be soft or  sensitive, introspective or self-doubting. With rare exceptions, such  as the Spartan armies of ancient Greece, they're also supposed to be  rigorously heterosexual, though what goes on in bunkhouses and below  decks often bears little relation to what gets preached in training  manuals.

At the same time, war tends to polarize relations between the sexes  by creating an imperative for men to behave more "like men" and women  to act more "like women." It is then common, Braudy says, to  discredit one's enemy by pinning to him all those qualities --  "softness," "weakness," "effeminacy," "cowardice" -- that are  considered polar opposites of the qualities that make up the  masculine warrior ideal.

"The thing about war is, because it's an 'us versus them' situation,  it frequently gathers into its sphere, its atmosphere, other  polarities," Braudy says. "So 'If we're men, then they must not be.'  ... In order to minimize [the enemy], you call them women or you call  them vermin or whatever your repertoire [is] of things that aren't  you, that you don't want to be."

 The ultimate trophy

Variants of those ancient taunts have been heard on many sides of  America's 11Z2-year-old war on terrorism. Saddam Hussein and his  aides, before disappearing into Baghdad's smoldering ruins,  repeatedly insinuated that America's leaders were cowards and that  its troops lacked the necessary red blood cells to wage a tough urban  war. Similarly, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, some U.S.  journalists remarked on Osama bin Laden's "effeminate" appearance.

If traditional warrior cultures conceive of women as a threat to  proper masculine identity, female sexuality also has represented the  ultimate trophy for the male warrior. Braudy's book reproduces two  wartime images that proffer female sexuality as a prize, yet from  utterly different perspectives. In a World War I recruiting poster, a  porcelain-skinned beauty coos "I Want You for the Navy." In the  other, a Vietnam-era anti-draft poster, a miniskirted Joan Baez and  her two sisters, looking very counterculture chic, sit on a sofa  below the slogan "Girls Say Yes to Boys Who Say No." This come-on,  Braudy says, is "sort of the opposite of a Dear John letter."

Like many men of his generation, Braudy, 61, fell between World War  II and the Korean War (too young to fight) and the Vietnam War (too  old). He didn't set out to write a book about men and warfare. But  after finishing "The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History" (1986),  which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, he  penned a series of essays whose themes coalesced in the new work.

Possibly the most provocative idea in Braudy's 800-page tome is that  notions of warfare and masculinity have, in a sense, come full  circle, "from chivalry to terrorism," over the last 1,000 years.

During the Middle Ages, the European knights invented the chivalric  code of honor to govern their behavior. Among its primary tenets was  protecting women, who were viewed as weak and defenseless, a  presumption that reinforced the Christian, male-dominated social  hierarchy of the medieval period.

Gradually, the introduction of gunpowder to European warfare made the  armored knight irrelevant. And as nation-states emerged to replace  the old feudal system, and new mass armies of citizen-soldiers fought  wars for territorial gain or political change rather than personal  glory, the chivalric codes faded away. Along with them went the myth  of the gallant knight charging to the aid of the damsel in distress,  which already had grown musty when Cervantes parodied it in his novel  "Don Quixote" (1605) -- though remnants of it persist, for example,  in some of the more sentimentalized media depictions of last week's  rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch.

But in some countries, an archaic warrior culture endures, as Braudy  suggests in his book's final chapter, "Terrorism as a Gender War." He  believes that a parallel exists between that long-ago world of  armored horsemen and certain present-day fundamentalist societies  where war is waged through "terrorist" acts carried out mostly by  honor-seeking men, and women are usually relegated to second-class  citizenship.

"I wouldn't call it chivalric, particularly, but it's certainly the  old warrior code," he says. "What's happened in the West is that over  the centuries, and I think under the impact of wars, democracy,  citizenship, all these things that are going on, is that gender is  seen as a continuum, not as a polarity. But in radical Islamic  culture -- well, I mean it's there in Islamic culture in general and  it's pushed to another extreme in terrorist stuff -- men have to  remain men, and you have to keep women, whatever is 'polluting,'  whatever is 'corrupting,' [from] undermining that warrior self."

It's a delicate argument to make, Braudy acknowledges, particularly  when images of U.S. tanks rumbling through Baghdad are bombarding the  Arab-speaking world. Yet he believes that the United States is not a  true "warrior culture."

"We're warlike, but we're not warriors," Braudy says. "I think one of  Bush's models, it's not John Wayne, it's Alan Ladd in 'Shane.' It's  like we have to be pushed -- push, push, push, and then finally,  whammo! And I think in all those kind of '50s westerns where the hero  has to be pushed before he's going to do anything, is that being  pushed shows you have self-restraint and gives you the moral high  ground."

 A changing culture

For fighting men in Western democracies, the greatest challenge to  traditional concepts of manhood may now be technological rather than  sexual. If the knight and the cowboy were rugged individualists, the  modern high-tech soldier is more of a cog in an impersonal killing  machine.

At least since the Renaissance, Braudy says, popular culture has  reflected this belief, which has dovetailed with a growing skepticism  about the aims of warfare in general. In Stephen Crane's Civil  War-era novel "The Red Badge of Courage," the grunts marching toward  mass slaughter question whether their deeds will ever match those of  Homer's heroes. And by the time British war poets like Wilfred Owen  and Siegfried Sassoon and novelist Ernest Hemingway were facing  machine guns on the battlefields of World War I, it had become  devastatingly clear that technology had overtaken the individual  combatant.

The allied forces currently in Iraq are trying to counter this  depersonalization, Braudy says. For example, some British troops have  been careful to remove their helmets and replace them with berets or  tam-o'-shanters after taking possession of Iraqi towns, so as to look  more like humans and less like Robocops.

But an even bigger crack may be emerging in the traditional manly  warrior persona, Braudy says.

His students, he observes, tend to be "much easier about disparate  sexual identities. They sort of take it for granted" that people can  be heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual.

"The interesting thing to speculate on would be, does this mean that  in fact war is detaching from gender?" Braudy continues. "Because  masculinity and nationalism are so connected too, historically. So  will nationalism itself disappear? If the United States was the first  country to truly break away from a monarchical system, will it be the  last country to hang onto a nationalist one?

 

Précédente Remonter Suivante