By Kathleen Barry




I did not set out to write a radical feminist book exposing the masculinity and war.  But with the US and Israeli wars and invasions come daily news reports that over and over again distinguish between innocent (civilian, but particularly women and children) and soldiers' in combat. The former are recognized under the Geneva Convention as a protected class, even though in reality they are the everyday victims of male violence in combat. The latter, soldiers in combat, as I show in Unmaking War, Remaking Men, are killable in combat.  They go into combat knowing that, realizing that they may not come out alive and that there is no law or human right that will protect them. Further, society, politics and the military conspire to put their manhood at stake if they do not put their lives in jeopardy.  They are filled with aggression and violence as well as revenge and weapons to keep from getting killed, protect their buddies.  They believe they are protecting their families, wives and children, their communities, their country.

As I began to absorb the implications of making a class of people killable and therefore training them to kill, I realized that I had to understand this more fully. I had never thought about war and combat in that way before and upon reflection realized that most of us who never fight in war zones have not thought about it either.  I decided to write an article to expose this.  The more I wrote and then began to interview soldiers who have been in combat both in the U.S. and abroad, the more I realized that the very core of all of the violence against women I have spent my life fighting against is tied up with the masculinity of war.  The article morphed into a book and took me down many unexpected paths.  In order to unearth the masculinity of war from patriotic myths and just plain ignorance held by those unfamiliar with war zones, I had to understand what the experience of war is for the soldier in combat and what that means to all women everywhere subjected to male violence.

From my experiences of feminist-consciousness raising in the late 1960s and through the 1970s where the personal became political for us through our identification with each others' experiences of male supremacy, intense empathetic listening to personal stories while looking for the political forces that frame them has been my "methodology."  It took the world a long time to catch up with feminist consciousness raising and for the social and psychological sciences to recognize that empathy is a basic characteristic of being human. 

I am a radical feminist and human rights activist and a sociologist who is a researcher.  I look for patterns and when I identify them, I analyze them.  In interviewing men who live in war zones as well as soldiers who are sent by their state, and here I look particularly at the United States, surprising to me was finding that men in and around combat speak of protection, protecting your Palestinian family from Israeli raids, protecting your country from the threat of another 9/11 attack, refusing to think of oneself as "occupied" because it means you have lost your ability to protect your family.  I began to see that this "protection" men we are talking about was their justification for fighting and killing. And when they are out of combat they speak of losing their soul the first time they killed another human being, their words, not mine. And as I show in Unmaking War, Remaking Men, it is perfectly clear that the justification for fighting requires a socialization into violence that enables boys and men to protect themselves so they can protect women and children, that is what I have called "core masculinity" because it appears to be a socialized universal of male domination.

But they do not protect us as I point out in my book and as every feminist and most women who have been subjected to male violence knows. Their violence in war provokes more violence against their people; they bring the violence of war home to abuse their wives and partners. And if all women recognized this we would be much further along in dismantling male domination.  The tragic consequence of female socialization under every patriarchy is found in women who believe their husbands instead of their daughters who come to them saying that daddy had sex with them, the women who buy pornography for their husband and watch it with them, the sugar babies, young women who seek out sugar daddies to put them through college in exchange for a sexual relationship, the women who return with their children to their abusing husbands, the women who buy toy guns and plastic drones for their boys, poles for pole dancing for their girls ...  Indeed girls are socialized into and many women act out siding with men over any woman or girl.  It is the complicity expected of women that makes the myth of the male protector work so effectively in sustaining male supremacy.

I did not find it particularly easy to empathize with men in combat in order to understand their experiences which are so foreign to my own. Nor do I recommend it.  Instead, from that empathy I was able in my book to speak to men in the first person, to appeal to them personally to reject, renounce the manhood of male supremacy.  Further for the last 45 years one focus of my work has been to get men to take responsibility for getting violent, aggressive, raping men off of our backs. In this book, I appeal to men from a standpoint of empathy, with a very clear insistence that it is not women's responsibility to take care of men again. That is, I am asking men to begin with their own personal experiences that set them on the path of violence and aggression, raping and killing and to make the personal political by refusing and insisting that other men refuse that kind of manhood, that political and social expectation of masculinity.

That I know some men (far too few) who rejected or never followed the violent, aggressive path to manhood makes it possible for me to believe that men can and must change. I have chosen, in writing this book, to make that a demand of them in my political activism because the liberation of women from them is always my primary focus.  See Prostitution of Sexuality and Female Sexual Slavery and my article of a few months ago on Abolishing Prostitution which presents the feminist human rights treaty I developed. It became a model for laws feminists struggled to win in states like Sweden and Norway. Both books brought me into an activism that has had its costs, but its rewards are in seeing and supporting the women who have freed themselves from prostitution and come to the forefront of a global feminist movement to abolish it. 

Feminism is not one singular set of strategies and commitments. As the movement of liberation it cannot thrive under dogmatic beliefs. Many of us come to feminism deeply harmed by men, and far too many turn their anger against other feminists.  I am keenly aware that many feminists will place their commitments elsewhere than the arenas I have chosen.  It’s the optimist in me that makes me believe that when we are all working for the liberation of women at all levels of society and from every kind of domination, we will eventually all meet up together.

Kathleen Barry

Santa Rosa, California

January 28, 2013

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