Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, March 26, 1991                   TAG: 9103260470
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: THOMAS BELMONTE
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

NO VICTORY FOR FEMINISM/ . . . AND ON THE BATTLEFIELD

If permitted to fight at the side of men as attendants to the diabolical machines that will wage the next century's wars, women's demonstrated ability will quickly annihilate all barriers to their full participation. It is because of the very inevitability of female distinction on the laser-streaked fronts of the future that I urge all women to consider carefully whether they want to valorize the pursuit of military careers.

As every reader of the Old Testament knows, the germ of what we call "civilization" (or the state) was the transformation of the whooping primitive war-gang into a hierarchical, disciplined, all-male group. Humanity now faces the challenge of whether the constructive contributions of the state can transcend the original purposes of its "mafiosi" founders.

Feminism has a crucial role to play in this labor of transcendence. I fear for the future of humanity if all that feminism achieves is a change in the sex of the personnel who guard the bastions of the sacred (pentagonal) precinct.

The gender arrangements of any society are caused not so much by nature's blueprints as by the work that has to be done if people and institutions are to survive. In frontier societies bent on territorial and economic expansion, better to keep females at home in the interest of a pro-natal strategy which assures that the colonies will be settled and the ranks continually refilled.

As anthropologist David Gilmore points out, in societies organized for predatory warfare, men and women collaborate in separating little boys from the little girls whom they still so much resemble. Adult males then systematically shame and terrify the boys into believing that flight from danger is unnatural.

Since war-making cultures quickly dispose of pacifist ones, most cultures today adhere to the macho ideal: Male self-worth is ultimately certified only by the loss of one's life in war's "valley of death."

As long as weapons depend for their efficacy on the brute strength of the warrior, women will locate their own interests in the active encouragement of male ferocity.

This changes when the weaponry goes high-tech.

Revolutionary progress for women came after World War II. When modern push-button weapons neutralized the muscular edge that initiated male dominance, the linchpin of patriarchy was removed.

If the reasons for fighting a war happen not to be connected to population pressure and the desire to expand territorially, the biological logic that keeps potential female combatants at home does not apply. If the weaponry is easily handled by either sex, then the last impediment to mixed-sex armies is removed.

The military is finding that efficiency in a high-tech age demands that it maximize access to qualified voluntary workers. There is no reason now in nature or culture for these not to be female.

The benefits of a gender-integrated military would appear obvious. A broader range of skills, experiences and cognitive styles - intellectual, social and managerial - would be brought to bear on an increasingly more complex technical and decision-making apparatus, where things that can go wrong might easily go wrong, with apocalyptic effect.

Why then might gender-equal military be a costly victory for feminism? The problem hinges not so much on the fact that men alone have made war, but that war makes "men" of whoever wage it.

If the hard-edged, emotionally distant masculinity that we associate with the fighter-male is a product of years of unrelenting pressure on generations of choked-up little boys, then there is no reason to presume that this same constricted style cannot be inculcated into females.

In other words, patriarchy can still preserve its martial essence by turning everybody, males and females, into psychological males, indifferent to fear and pain, mistrustful of one another, turned inward and withdrawn in love.

In such a world, both men and women would be dedicated not to the ancient prerogatives of mother and child but to the instrumental logic of the trained killer. Imagine a society where the psychological profile of most people was male, in the present macho sense of the term. How ironic a betrayal of the feminist vision of human liberation.