If the post-9/11 climate for women has been artfully misunderstood, the same is true for men. The immediate gendered analyses of the rescue and response suggest something far more complicated than a society grateful to its male firefighters and police. What happened on that tragic day was experienced as an assault on the virility, on the maleness of our nation, sorely compromising the traditional male role of protector and provider.
The twin towers, whether we consciously made the connection or not, were the phallic symbols of the whole nation. They stood for American prowess. Soaring, tall, a sign of our dominating financial strength and world position. Then, monstrously and suddenly, they were cut down. Less spectacular but equally devastating was the attack on the Pentagon, the heart of our military power. The loss of life was transforming. And so was the loss of face, although few of us dared to say it.
Our nation had been in effect “castrated,” leaving us fearful, threatened, impotent, humiliated, and ineffective. The assumptions around which we organized our lives collapsed. No longer could we think of ourselves as strong or secure. We couldn’t escape the feeling that our leaders had failed miserably to protect us. Strangers on the street asked each other, “How could this have happened? How could our security have been so penetrated?” And that it had been done by Osama bin Laden, a man who’d taunted America as being feminized, who’d scoffed at the “weakness, feebleness, and cowardliness of the U.S. soldiers” in Somalia, made it even more galling.
September 11 didn’t make women feel weak and vulnerable, that was how it made men feel. But few things are more verboten in the canon of maleness than to acknowledge inadequacy and fallibility. So rather than admit those feelings, men projected them onto women, and our nation set out to establish its macho bona fides with all the excessive showmanship of the insecure.
Proving to the world and to ourselves that we weren’t a bunch of ineffectual eunuchs became a key issue for our leaders as they debated an appropriate response to the terrorists. Washington Post columnist George Will warned against “appeasement tarted up as reasonableness,” Rear Admiral Kevin P. Quinn worried that the attacks “left many of Washington’s power players feeling impotent,” and Senator John McCain spoke heatedly of the dangers of returning to the “soft,” emasculated foreign policy we’d had during Vietnam. Using sexualized comments like these, our leaders constructed the conflict as a way to prove our nation’s masculinity.
To read through our top officials’ speeches in the wake of the atrocities is like looking at language on steroids. Muscular and bulked up, the rhetoric deliberately invoked images of strength, men of decision, the hero, and the cowboy. We talked of a “bold response,” “extreme action,” our “steel resolve,” of it being “the warriors’ time,” of “smoking ’em out,” of getting bin Laden “dead or alive,” and of “full-spectrum dominance.”
When “men [becomes] the operative word, [b]rawny, heroic, manly men,” to use journalist Patricia Leigh Brown’s words, women are demoted to ancillary and decorative. Before 9/11, those on the right castigated femin ist leaders, ideas, and agendas. Now anything feminized was tainted.
Our new machismo made us scornful of men who have “become feminized due to legislative actions and by law-makers” to the “touchy-feeliness of Alan Alda,” and the “vaguely feminized man-child Leonardo DiCaprio,” said a variety of reporters. But nothing produced masculine disgust as much as our feminized military. Strong women made men soft. Military analysts, especially those who’ve always opposed women in the armed forces, like Gerald L. Atkinson, a former commander in the U.S. Navy, raged about how the terrorist attacks had exposed our nation’s major vulnerability: the “feminization of our nation’s combat arms.”
We can almost hear the echoes of ancient cultural taboos about women, especially menstruating women, who allegedly contaminated food and rendered weapons useless, as men rushed to differentiate themselves from the “weaker sex.” In their femophobic haste, they ran roughshod over gender equality as a concept, a fact, a goal.
Hypermasculine war whooping eclipsed traditional military values of valor, loyalty, and justice and turned our fight against terrorism into a messianic, patriarchal, punishing crusade. Any alternative to military action—negotiation, peace—smacked of womanliness, therefore totally unacceptable.
The assault on Afghanistan, fought under a virtual media blackout, hid from sight images of the Afghan women we were “saving,” injured, bereaved, and rendered homeless by our attacks. But even the collapse of the Taliban with the fall of Kabul right before Thanksgiving in 2001 in no way spelled peace. A quickly assembled string of terror alerts seized the news. The menace stayed real, our siege mentality everlasting. Afghanistan represented just the opening salvo in the global war on terrorism. We were in this fight to the end.
“Men make war for many reasons, but one of the most recurring ones is to establish that they are, in fact, ‘real men,’ ” historian Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in the late 1990s. Her words are particularly applicable to 2001. With bin Laden effectively cave-hopping, the saber-rattling began again.
After saying flat out a week after the attacks that Saddam Hussein had no connection to them, Vice President Cheney reversed himself. On December 9 on Meet the Press, he told Tim Russert of new developments since they’d last talked. It was pretty well confirmed that one of the hijackers had met with senior Iraqi intelligence service in Prague several months before 9/11, he said.
Immediately the story spread and magnified. The New York Times carried a front-page article with enough details about Saddam’s program of weapons of mass destruction to send scores of Americans dashing off to their doctors for sleeping pills. No matter that the details were false and the source a liar, no matter even that the administration most likely knew all that at the time, this was the war the neocons had long dreamed about. Rumsfeld started lobbying to bomb Iraq right after 9/11, not only because it had more high-profile targets than “moonscape” Afghanistan but because it was step one in Project for a New American Century’s grand imperialistic design.
With 80 percent of the talking heads on television drawing from conservative lines, supported and coached by powerful think tanks and foundations and all reading from the same doomsday script, the stories of annihilating weapons of mass destruction came at us all the time, everywhere we turned. But Americans weren’t buying it completely.
As a people, we’ve always been steadfastly committed to the idea of a just war, a defensive and necessary war. So the powerbrokers ratcheted up their pitch and started the hard sell, opportunistically manipulating our 9/11 grief and outrage into support for an unprovoked, unilateral invasion of Iraq.
Bush said it; Cheney said it; Powell said it: a definite link existed between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein; Iraq had inspired and financed the plan. And slowly, we began to believe it. Two weeks after the terror attacks only 6 percent of Americans thought there was a connection, but by 2003, right before we invaded Iraq, 70 percent were convinced, with a good number even (falsely) accepting that several Iraqis had been among the hijackers.
The lead-up to war gave the neocons and their Christian conservative allies unprecedented authority and legitimacy in the government. Evangelicals supported the war and became “an ardent lobby for the U.S. military.” Fundamentalists believed, as did our president, that God, putting him in power at this particular time in history, was directing Bush’s actions.
When asked, Bush repeatedly said his advice comes from his “higher father” (as opposed to his real-life one, the senior Bush). With God on our side it was easy to see the war in terms of good versus evil, us versus them, with us or against us. Terrorists, and nations sponsoring them, replaced the communists as our enemies, as those actively plotting our destruction. Scarier, more diffuse, and less predictable than the reds, terrorists became the new foreign deviants. Bush’s phrase “the axis of evil” was a clear and purposeful reference to Reagan’s evil empire.
President Bush may have stopped short of blaming abortionists, feminists, and gays for 9/11, as Jerry Falwell did, but Bush did link abortion to terrorism. Having declared the anniversary of Roe “National Sanctity of Life Day,” Bush said, shortly after the attacks, “On September 11th we saw clearly that evil exists in this world, and that it does not value life. . . . Now we are engaged in a fight against evil [the pro-choice movement] and tyranny to preserve and protect life.”
As Reagan had done, Bush adroitly joined together our “enemies” abroad and at home to affirm what his administration believed to be the core values of society. And, as we launched our war on terror, those values increasingly became aggression, domination, violence, and control, the driving force of the new military. Women, if they figured at all in this scenario, were victims, helpmates, supporters. Still largely out of sight. And, again, the other.
The sidelining strategy is evident in the 2002 State of the Union Address. Assessing our victories in Afghanistan, Bush declared, “mothers and daughters were captive in their homes, now they are safe.” The president honored Michael Spann, a CIA officer who died at Mazar-e Sharif, and his wife, Shannon, the brave widow, in the audience. He also paid tribute to the heroes of 9/11: a fireman whose two sons died at Ground Zero, a little boy whose football-playing father did as well, and the “fierce brotherhood of firefighters.”
When I asked Mary Carouba, coauthor of The Women of Ground Zero, why, even months after the attack, women rescue workers still hadn’t gotten any recognition, she said it was a “deliberate effort to make them invisible and bring [certain groups] back to where they want to be. It reverts the nation back to patriarchy. The focus on the war epitomizes big strong guys.”
Big strong guys have big guns. And we fixed them on Iraq. Our Shock and Awe strategy, known militarily as rapid dominance, wasn’t about getting Saddam or finding his weapons cache. It was all about mounting an assault so intimidating, inflicting such damage on Baghdad, it would compel the people to submit. The excessive use of force against a nearly unresisting population resulted in far more devastating civilian casualties than what we would have imagined from the televised high-tech “clean strikes.”
Colin Powell’s wish proved prophetic: we’d become the bullies on the block. The alpha men in Washington reveled in our new status. Bush had already perfected his swagger and straight-shooter look to the applause of the media machine, which lauded his muscular foreign policy, religious righteousness, and steadfast opinions. His chest-thrusting style let it be known that he was the decider (even as events have since shown that he’d decided little). Those who dared to disagree with him were sissified and branded as “girlie-men,” the fate that would befall his opponent in the 2004 race, John Kerry, a Vietnam veteran who was decorated for his valor.
But Bush’s Top Gun–style landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln back in 2003 was without a doubt the testosterone moment of his presidency. Numerous pundits have commented on the staging of that event, timed just perfectly so that when the president walked across the deck, the sun illuminated the crotch of his fighter-pilot uniform.
G. Gordon Liddy, of Watergate notoriety, was positively giddy at the way Bush’s parachute harness “ma[d]e the best of his manly characteristic.” It showed him to be “virile” and “hot” and “powerful,” an excited columnist gushed in the Wall Street Journal, while Richard Goldstein, writing for the Village Voice, thought that flaunting his balls was a defining moment in the president’s troubled quest for manhood.
When Bush donned the uniform of the warrior he never was and told us of a mission accomplished, with the real slaughter just beginning, it was a defining moment. Defining because it hinted at the deception, the artifice, the cynical use of the press and of our nation’s money and good will to advance a single and dangerous agenda.