A Girl, Alone

2013-05-14T11:44:53-07:00Categories: war, women's rights|Tags: , , , , , |

If he’s still alive, he’s old and probably fat by now. That guy I try never to think about. His face has faded, but I remember him as a little doughy. That guy who did to me what I could not bring myself to call rape at the time. I was traveling alone. I’d missed the overnight train from Geneva to Paris. He offered me a spare bedroom; swore I’d be perfectly safe. To my 19-year-old eyes, he looked trustworthy, this 30-something pilot in an expensive trenchcoat. So surely it was my fault, right? When I woke up in the wee hours of the morning and he was on top of me? Judge me if you will. Call me stupid and naïve; that much is fair. But who ever judged him? No one. Yet I knew I didn’t have a story to tell a Swiss police officer. So I got on the train and went back to my study-abroad dorm room in England, feeling a little wiser and a lot older. When I got back to the States, I wrote a short story about it in which I tried to be very Hemingway-esque, starkly describing what happened but leaving out all details about how I felt. Because of course I didn’t know I felt. Or rather, I felt so many different feelings I didn’t know which was the real one: shame? Anger? Sadness? Outrage? They were all real and they have all been flooding back to me this month, which has not been a good one [...]

Women Warriors

2013-01-29T15:04:12-08:00Categories: politics, Uncategorized, war, women's rights|Tags: , , , , , , |

I claim I want to better understand war. But my gut reaction to the news about women being allowed to serve in combat positions? Queasy. As if what the headlines are shouting is: “Hooray! Women will now be allowed to do the most dangerous, spiritually challenging, morally ambiguous dirty work on the planet!” New York Times columnist Gail Collins set me straight, reminding me that “They killed the Equal Rights Amendment to keep this from happening, but, yet, here we are. And about time.” Collins goes on to recall the words of retired Air Force Brigadier General Wilma Vaught, who once told her: “I think people have come to the sensible conclusion that you can’t say a woman’s life is more valuable than a man’s life.” The logic is clear: if we invest our nation’s security in professional warriors and if we believe women deserve equal access to all career paths, then women who make the personally huge commitment to serve in the United Sates Armed Forces must not be barred, on the basis of gender, from combat roles. So why my retrograde queasiness? Because, like any pacifist, I find it so difficult to turn my thoughts to combat at all, no matter what the context. But—as I learned from Karl Marlantes’ book, What it is Like to Go to War (see last week’s post)—I know turning our backs on war is not the answer. Especially the wars we support with our tax dollars. It has been 40 years this month since we ended the draft. [...]

The Invisible War

2012-11-20T14:47:41-08:00Categories: women's rights|Tags: , , , , , |

The other night, I walked out of the SIFF Cinema Uptown smoldering. I had just seen a film called The Invisible War, and I was angry. I was not alone. Everyone who walked out of that Women's Funding Alliance-sponsored screening had what you might call a smolder-y look. Because what we’d just watched bore vivid witness to one of those facts that are meaningless until you start attaching names and faces to them. In this case, the fact is this: one in five women in the United States military have reported being raped. And no one’s willing to guess how many more have been raped but have not reported it, out of legitimate fear, as we saw depicted in this film, of what it would do to their careers. As long as “rape victims” are referred to collectively and anonymously, they are not human beings that we need to personally worry about. But once you’ve seen a woman tell her story on camera, you can’t go back to how you felt before you saw her. Phrases like, I screamed and screamed and no one came; I woke up and he was on top of me; He threw me so hard he permanently damaged my spine have a way of lodging in your brain. These were women who wanted to serve their country. Young idealists. Soldiers as fit and fearless as the men with whom they served. They reported being raped because they believed justice would be done. In nearly every case, “justice” turned out to be protection [...]

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