Essay: The Feminist Response to War

I refuse to be a combatant on behalf of patriarchy. I declare war instead against Patriarchy

Julia, a Ukrainian school teacher and volunteer, weeps as she loads into a transport for deployment in Kyiv to fight advancing Russian troops Saturday. Photo Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

TW: sexual assault, suicide, war

The feminist response to war is to incite sedition and treason; it is to demand, in the loudest voice possible, for mutiny–against patriarchy.

I am not a pacifist. But I refuse to be a combatant on behalf of patriarchy. I declare war against Patriarchy–instead of supporting wars between patriarchies.

The feminist response to war is to contest the definition of “war.” The common definition is patriarchy doing to “enemy” men what it does to the rest of us every day, only with rules and conventions and uniforms as if regimentation and discipline glosses over the absolute barbarism that is war. That is the definition that cisgender, heterosexual men are most fond of because they are ever ready, whenever patriarchal violence against the rest of us is mentioned, to remind us of how many men have died in wars. As if it were not patriarchy that sent them marching to their deaths.  As if it were a defense of patriarchal violence, that men too die by patriarchal violence. 

As if the wars of men against other men harmed only men.

“It is clear that the indirect effects of armed conflict on women and children are far greater than the effects of actual fighting,” said Dr Halla Gattas of the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, who co-authored a four-part series published last year by the medical journal The Lancet on the effects of warfare on women and children around the world.

I am not a pacifist. But I refuse to be a combatant on behalf of patriarchy. I declare war against Patriarchy–instead of supporting wars between patriarchies.

Feminism–especially of the anarchist kind–calls bullshit on the magic dust of militarism that patriarchy promotes to laminate a hierarchy of gender determinism to socialize men into performing a “masculinity” it has made synonymous with the barbarism required to go to war. We are told again and again that it is in “men’s nature” to be violent; surely that should disturb and make those men who refuse violence understand that patriarchal constructs of masculinity confine them too. 

Women’s violence is considered acceptable only when it furthers the cause of patriarchy. The “nurturing” and “motherly” attributes that women are burdened with are essentially propaganda wrought by the patriarchy to keep things exactly as they are. I don't believe that women are saints and men devils; that there would be no wars if women ran the world or that women are “natural” peacemakers because they give birth and other such essentialist nonsense. When women rule in the name of patriarchy–remember British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher–they are allowed to forgo “nurturing” and “motherly” reductionism and launch wars and pass into effect policy that benefits patriarchy.

Countries boast when women begin serving in combat roles in their armed forces. But the wars female combatants will fight are fought in the name of patriarchy; they promote a violence that only the patriarchal state claims a right to. Fighting patriarchy’s wars is dangled as a way for women to lift themselves out of their lesser “femininity”, as if engaging in the barbarism of war were a reward to help us catch up to men.

A notable exception is the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ), which played a central role in routing Daesh/ISIS from their Syrian stronghold and which have become more than just combat units.

YPJ fighters at a military parade on 27 March 2019, to celebrate the elimination of Islamic State/Daesh’s last bastion in eastern Syria via The Guardian

Some claim allowing women into armed forces and to assume combat roles is a form of equality. Tellingly, it is the only form of “equality” many men are willing to countenance. But if men themselves are not free of the ravages of patriarchy, why should I aim so low?  I want something much more than mere equality with men. If men are dehumanized in the name of fighting patriarchy’s wars, it is beyond time for them to commit treason against patriarchy, and not for women to sign up to become footsoldiers, lieutenants, and generals of patriarchy.

Fighting patriarchy’s wars must not be our price of admission into full humanity and liberation. Too many times that is exactly the price that patriarchy demands of Black, Indigenous, and people of colour, women, and queer people, for a dignified life: armed forces around the world are filled with poor and working class people, whether conscripted, drafted or enlisted, who are trained to fight “in return” for education, health insurance, employment. 

Feminism demands that we destroy patriarchy, not other people in the name of patriarchy’s wars. 

And at what cost?

Sexual violence as a weapon of war against “enemy” women–and at times men too–is finally recognized for the crime that it is. But women in the armed forces are often in more danger from their fellow servicemen–of “friendly” sexual assault to appropriate the “friendly fire” phrase–than from enemy soldiers. 

The feminist response to war is to insist on connecting the barbarism of war to the barbarism of sexual violence in and out of war zones, to the barbarism of domestic abuse and intimate partner violence.

Almost two-thirds of women in the UK armed forces have experienced bullying, sexual harassment and discrimination during their career, according to a parliamentary report that says the UK military is “failing to protect” female recruits. The report included evidence of gang rape, sex for career advancement and trophies to ‘bag the woman’

There were more than 2,000 reports of sexual misconduct within the Canadian military between 2016 and 2021. The number of military sexual misconduct class action claims jumped by 170 per cent between late December 2020 and mid July 2021 amid a reckoning over abuse of power and the toxic culture in the Canadian Forces.

Women make up only 16.5 percent of the U.S. armed services, and yet nearly one in four U.S. servicewomen reports being sexually assaulted in the military, and more than half report experiencing harassment. Reports of sexual assault increased at U.S. military academies for the 2020-21 school year, when several of the institutions allowed students to return for in-person classes. There were 131 combined sexual assault reports by cadets and midshipmen in the 2020-21 school year, a jump from the 88 reported in the pandemic-shortened 2019-20 year and 122 the year before that, military officials told AP.

Women make up almost 10 percent of the Ukrainian armed forces. Ukrainian rights groups say that although sexual abuse of enlisted women is widespread, it remains unacknowledged and is typically overlooked because people have been reluctant to criticize soldiers fighting since 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea and backed pro-Russia separatist groups in eastern Ukraine.

And militarist violence–the violence that patriarchy sanctions against the “enemy,” most definitely goes home–the barbarism of war, of training someone to kill, does not stop when that trained killer takes off his uniform.

In that part of Ukraine at war since 2014, Amnesty International described an “epidemic of violence” against women, saying “Women living in conflict-affected eastern Ukraine do not feel safe – neither in public nor at home.

In 2017, Russia decriminalized some forms of domestic violence with support from the Orthodox church. Since then, campaigners have warned that Russian women suffering domestic violence have been deterred from going to the police.

A two-year investigation by CBS News found roughly 100,000 incidents of domestic abuse have been reported to the U.S. military between 2015 and September 2021.

"Incidents of spousal abuse in the military" were "more than twice that of the national population," according to 2019 data cited by the nonprofit Blue Star Families. 

Feminism demands that we destroy patriarchy, not other people in the name of patriarchy’s wars. 

The feminist response to war is to insist on connecting the barbarism of war to the barbarism of sexual violence in and out of war zones, to the barbarism of domestic abuse and intimate partner violence. And feminism calls bullshit on patriarchy’s “justice.” in and out of the armed forces. Troops who are sexually assaulted by fellow troops and spouses who are abused by their military husbands rarely see justice under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, military commanders decide whether to investigate and pursue legal action — responsibilities that in the civilian world are overseen by dedicated law enforcement. And in that civilian world, remember that of 1,000 sexual assaults, only 230 are reported to the police, nine cases get referred to prosecutors, and only 5 result in a prison sentence.

The system is stacked against us. The system is called patriarchy.

It takes war and revolution to give men a crash course in power and authority–war opens their eyes to just how little power and authority they have vis a vis the State–which is patriarchal everywhere, differing only in degrees–and revolution is their opportunity to demand for themselves some of that power and authority. Men can at times see how the State oppresses us all, and yet too often they fail to recognize their complicity, happy to enjoy the power and authority that patriarchy portions out to them against the rest of us–women and queer people.

In response to reports that Ukraine has banned all Ukrainian men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving after Russia invaded, so they can fight for their country, it was telling to hear “Where are the feminists?” from men who don’t give a flying fuck about feminism or feminists. Because they do not listen to feminists, they are incapable of recognizing what we tell them all too often: that patriarchy hurts them too.

A form of hazing of new conscripts in the Russian military, known as “dedovshchina” in Russian, has caused major scandals, including the case of a soldier who had to have his genitalia amputated in 2006 after being beaten and forced to squat for several hours on New Year’s Day. The ritualised bullying, which can include beatings and psychological torture of conscripts by officers and older soldiers, has been a suspected cause for hundreds of suicides and thousands of desertions in the Russian army. Human Rights Watch documented accounts of the hazing that kills dozens of young men each year.

Many millions of men have been killed in wars begun by men against other men. Yet it is only when women target patriarchy or demand to defend themselves against patriarchy are women accused of “inciting violence.” 

“The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves,” bell hooks wrote in her 2004 book The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. “If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.”

And what is militarism but precisely such rituals of power that ensure men emotionally cripple themselves? 

For those of us who are not cisgender, heterosexual men, we know a much broader and mundane war–the violence we are subjected to every day by what I call the Trifecta of Patriarchy–the State, the Street, and the Home. If men recognize that the State oppresses us all, they are happy to ignore how the State, the Street, and Home together oppress women. In that war, patriarchy drafts cishet men as unwitting–too often witting–combatants, as a reward.  The State’s reward to men for subjecting themselves to it, is to give them free hand to oppress women in the Street, and in the Home.  Remember that patriarchy is a system of oppressions that benefits male dominance. 

The feminist response to war must demand that we connect all these “wars” as manifestations of patriarchal violence that on the macro level is often married to imperialism and capitalism and on the micro level jeopardizes our daily existence.

To be clear: fuck imperialism and occupations of every flavour—Russian, US, Chinese, Israeli, and any other I’ve left out. And fuck invaders of every flavour. See the previous and any others I’ve left out.

When we make those connections, when we ask who defines “war” and who has the right to launch “war,” it forces us to question: who has a right to use violence and whose violence is celebrated as “honourable” and as “resistance”? That in turn forces us to ask which lives and which deaths matter? Unless patriarchy has declared something a “war”, resisting it is not considered “honourable” or as “resistance.” And all those heavy words are unsurprisingly laced together with the thread of white supremacy and white privilege:

Mona Eltahawy @monaeltahawy

White privilege, white supremacy: the war edition courtesy via @CBSNews #Kyiv #Ukraine "This isn't a place with all due respect like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European city..."

Many millions of men have been killed in wars begun by men against other men. Yet it is only when women target patriarchy or demand to defend themselves against patriarchy are women accused of “inciting violence.” 

My chapter on Violence in The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls disturbed many people because I asked “How many rapists must we kill before men stop raping us?” One of the reasons a TV episode I was on in Australia was banned was because I asked “How many rapists must we kill.” Millions of men have been killed in wars begun by men against other men. And yet I was accused of inciting violence against men.

Mona Eltahawy @monaeltahawy

One of the reasons a TV episode I was on in Australia was banned because I asked how many rapists must we kill “How long must we wait for men and boys to stop murdering us, to stop beating us and to stop raping us? How many rapists must we kill?"

I agree with Dilar Dirik when she states that “liberal feminists’ blanket rejection of women’s violence, no matter the objective, fails to qualitatively distinguish between statist, colonialist, imperialist, interventionist militarism and necessary, legitimate self-defence.”

Not only are women socialized into submission, but we are told, essentially, not to be violent even as a form of self defense, to wait until men decide to stop being violent towards us. When that would happen exactly is unclear, and how that would happen exactly is quite unrealistic, seeing as patriarchy has been using violence to keep us in line for centuries.

The feminist response to war is to demand the right to launch wars—not between countries but against patriarchy. The feminist response to war is: fuck the patriarchy in every time zone and in every universe.

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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell! And Other Stories: Adventures in Menopause from Across the Personal and Political Spectrum. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.  

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