Monday, November 29, 2010
Response 11/30
The one line that stood out to me the most in all of our reading was in Cynthia Enloe's "Spoils of War" chapter: "I think it was absolutely stupid, as I've said several times. For the price they paid to rent the car, they could have had a girl" (119). This was the response of the U.S. Pacific Command commander in chief, Admiral Richard Macke, after three U.S. Marines had been accused of assaulting and raping a twelve-year-old girl on a Japanese island. Enloe goes on to say that these words provide a "glimpse of the patriarchal assumptions that encourage U.S. men in uniform to see women as warriors' beauty" (119). However, I think we need to recognize that patriarchal assumptions like these about women can be seen in many men, not just military men. In our society, it seems like many men feel entitled to women--they feel like they deserve and can get any woman they want, and if they for some crazy reason are turned down, they feel like there is something terribly wrong. I feel like many guys here at Colgate are like this. However, it is just not the men, who should be blamed; girls play just as much into this sense of entitlement by giving themselves over too easy to guys. As we've discussed previously in class, we all feed into the patriarchal society that still exists to this day.
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I really liked this post by Olivia. I think that it was really good that she extended the discussion beyond just men in the military to men in all professions and then even to take it a step further and relate it to men at Colgate also. I thought it was really important that she brought up the fact though that at Colgate (I think unlike the war victims) women play a part in allowing men to feel entitled. I think that this goes back to Johnson's article "Patriarchy" in which he notes that it is not only men that are creating and supporting the patriarchal system that is in place. Although I do think that it is good that we can take the readings and relate them to our own lives, I do think that it is important to remember that the women that are being discussed in both of Enloe's chapters were victims of rape, and I do not feel like did anything to bring that upon themselves. Although they may have supported a military system in their own countries, that does not necessarily mean that the support the means that some men in the military have employed in order to take victims of war. No women who was raped can be viewed as having allowed that to happen to her, but I do think that we should be taking a closer look at the roles that women are playing in supporting the men in the military.
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