The Cosmo Girl Meets the Camouflage Brassiere

In her Mother's Day Proclamation, Julia Ward Howe speaks with the same voice as in her better known poem, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, but the sentiments are opposite. It is a woman's right to rearrange the furniture of her ideologies. Actually Battle Hymn is the anomaly; Ms. Howe was temporarily seduced by an episode of military showmanship. For most of her life she preached, sometimes from a Unitarian pulpit, for feminism and pacifism. After her death, the "great and earnest day of counsel" she wanted came to pass, in the Hague Women's Peace Conference of 1915. Ms. Howe's spirit can be detected in the rhetoric of Catherine Marshall: "But if women climbed up to the clearer air above the battlefield and cried aloud in her anguish to her sisters far off: 'These things must not be, they shall never be again!' would man indeed say, 'Down with her!' Would he not allow her prerogative?"

He would not. The ideals of the Hague Conference were already dissolving in the bloodbath of another popular war. Feminism lost its momentum to the War Effort; the ladies donned the khaki of the Auxiliary Services, and the only things to climb up to the clear air above the battlefield were Spads and Fokkers. Nonetheless the idea that the feminine spirit is antithetical to the military spirit has remained a staple of feminist thinking to this day.

This idea ought to be examined more closely. Can armed conflict be nothing more than an exaggerated mating ritual, like stags locking horns in the meadow? Perhaps organized and magnified by technology and tradition, but in essence just uncontrolled male hormones? Can we end War by taking the testosterone out of government?

That experiment is being tried within the military itself. The proportion of women in the Armed Forces of the United States has been rising. Women have been allowed into more categories of soldiering than ever before. Despite emotional opposition, social equity may require that women be allowed even into combat. In an age of push-button fighting, where upper body strength counts for little, it is hard to argue rationally that women do not have the capability. If the feminist theories are correct, we should see, as women gain power and influence, a softening of bellicosity within the armed forces, a kinder, gentler military.

Some observers feel the evolution has already happened. Even before the Cold War ended, the armed services were becoming involved in humanitarian, diplomatic, and peace-keeping missions. Military theorists have begun to question whether traditional armaments are appropriate any more. The armaments industry is developing rubber bullets, immobilizing gasses, and smart bombs which restrict civilian casualties. The hot buzz-phrase at the Pentagon is "non-lethal weaponry".

Traditionalists argue that military missions have not really changed. Alexander solved his knotty problems with the sword and so can we. Napoleon rose to fame by resolving a civil disobedience situation in Paris with "a whiff of grapeshot". The Russian czars found few crowd control problems that could not be handled by a troop of Cossacks. People who are serious about political objectives should understand that war is violence. Sherman didn't care a hoot about the "infrastructure" in Georgia. The fliers who bombed Hamburg and Hiroshima didn't worry about "collateral damage." If you want to see peace-keeping, go to a cemetery. Nobody there is making any trouble.

From the point of view of the old school, fighting with rubber bullets is as silly as shaving with a rubber razor, and it wastes the development effort of centuries. Man has gone from tree limbs to brazen chariots to steel bayonets to machine guns in a progression of weapons of ever increasing lethality. To reverse the trend, to decrease lethality, would be a sickening waste of ingenuity, not to mention funding.

However that argument comes out, "non-lethal weaponry" is a pretty thin modification of traditional combat techniques, and does not particularly require operation by women. However, the importance of recognizing the special characteristics of every portion of a force, and utilizing those characteristics, is a long-standing military precept; it is called Economy of Force. The addition of large numbers of women to the Troop Basis must therefore lead to major changes in the doctrines by which the Armed Forces exert the national will, changes in proportion to the ways women differ from men. Those changes will not be publicized, even if they are already underway; but careful observation will give us some hints.

For me, the first of those hints came through the mail. I am on a lot of strange mailing lists. I get a catalogue from a place in Kentucky which is basically the haberdashery for the Armored School at Fort Knox. The catalogue offers dress uniforms and fatigues, caps and berets, webbing and holsters. It's a good source of information if you are curious to know what the Airborne wears under their jump boots--I do know--but it contains nothing stylish or flashy. So I was a bit startled, about a year ago, when this catalogue began to offer camouflaged underwear for both sexes. One could choose between jungle, desert and arctic patterns. Up to now the Army's approach to underwear for the enlisted ranks had been strictly utilitarian, so I had to discount any idea of an attempt to be fashionable. We are talking about people who would regard Victoria's Secret as a breach of security. Moreover camouflage, although popular among civilians for casual wear, is used by the Army only in the field. So, we must consider: What tactical scheme of maneuver would require the young men and women of our armed forces to get so close to an adversary that it was important to remain unobserved, while dressed only in their skivvies?

The second hint came to me in a Virginia supermarket. I had stopped by a Safeway close to the Pentagon to pick up some Diet Coke. As I stood in the checkout line I noticed an officer reading a magazine with a well-endowed but scantily clad young lady on the cover.

Please don't get me wrong. I am no prude. I have no objection to a lonely serviceman buying an ordinary skin magazine like Playboy, Hustler, or Sports Illustrated. But this officer was reading Cosmopolitan--and not just flipping through the ads, but reading intently. The lead article for that issue was the same old twaddle that Cosmo has been running for years--something about When and How to Use Sex as a Weapon. And then my hair stood on end. What if the Pentagon is taking Cosmo's stuff seriously? What if the Armed Forces intend to use sex as a weapon?

Let's suppose ten years ago, some think tank held a BOGSAAT. (That acronym stands for Bunch of Guys Sitting Around a Table--Pentagonese for bull session) So these guys are sitting around trying to figure out what special characteristics women bring into the Services. If you know guys you know how that could lead to an off-color joke. And then suddenly the egghead in residence wakes up, wipes his glasses, and says: "Wait a minute. Up to now every army in history has devoted its efforts to attacking an adversary's survival instinct. We advance on them with some gizmo so threatening to their lives that their survival instinct gets the better of them, they cut and run, and we get what we want. Unfortunately, we can't attack their survival instinct using non-lethal weaponry. But, gentlemen, there are other instincts...."

Of course I have no proof that such a conference ever occurred. But from our own experiences we can get some idea of the relative power of the forces that the military industrial complex could conceivably tap into. Let's have an honest show of hands: How many of you here in the congregation today have had the direction and pace of your lives affected by sustained artillery bombardment? Sustained artillery bombardment has been the Army's most effective weapon in two World Wars. Now, how many of you have had the direction and pace of your lives affected by sex? You see what I mean? Which weapon is more powerful?

Another way to tell what really frightens us is to see what we teach our children. For example, auto accidents are a leading cause of death for toddlers, so we teach our kids not to run out in the street. Now, landmines, I think we would all agree, are vicious and dangerous weapons. But in this church we don't teach our children anything practical about landmines--like how to detect them, or how to unearth them safely. In this neighborhood, at least, we are not sufficiently scared about landmines that we need a class about them. (That situation might have changed if we had not stopped the concert series.) Instead, we have a course called About Your Sexuality.

The introductory hoopla for AYS tends to gush about joyous forces in our lives, about encouraging responsible experimentation and satisfying natural curiosity. But we parents don't send our kids to that course because we really want them to learn all the neat stuff we know about sex. We'd prefer that they never thought about it, or at least learned later, maybe after finishing med school. But we know they won't wait. The truth is that we are afraid for them. Sex is a good way to mess up your body or mess up your head or mess up your finances. We send them to AYS class with fingers crossed, hoping against hope that a little extra information will weigh in the scales and keep them safe. And we are a brave denomination. Plenty of folks out there are so dead scared of sexuality they can't even talk about it.

Fear of sexuality is not just an American trait but a human trait. And so anyone harboring a desire to bend a group of humans to their will might well want to make use of the sex drive to do it. The question is, can they? The very thing that makes sexuality so powerful--the fact that it is a wild card in our lives, sucking us out of our expected courses and setting our feet on paths we never dreamed to tread--makes it a very difficult force to harness and control. If the military did, years ago, start a project to use sex as a weapon, it would be only reasonable to expect that project to have as many difficulties as any new weapon, or more.

If you think back a bit, you will recall that the nature of newspaper articles concerning our armed forces has changed. Scandals used to be monetary--some reporter would discover that billions had been spent on an armored tie tack, and then the thing wouldn't even stop a 20mm shell. We were comfortable with that kind of screw-up. But now all we hear about is sexual activity--and always people who should be among the military elite. Our ace naval aviators go to parties called Tailhook--a code name, obviously--and engage in behavior that would have embarrassed John Belushi. Our B-52 pilots practice adultery more often than carpet bombing. Commentators tell us that the military merely reflects the moral breakdown in our whole society, but couldn't that be mere spin? Couldn't these incidents be--training accidents?

The top sergeant of the whole army got into trouble not long ago for sexual harassment. Where did that happen? Aberdeen Proving Ground. And where do we test all our new weapons? Aberdeen Proving Ground.

It is a standard principle of military leadership never to order your men to do something you would not do yourself. That principle could be applied all the way to the very top, to the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, Bill Clinton. The newspapers have been very hard on Mr. Clinton, but if there is a sexual weapon system being deployed I think it speaks very highly of him to want to test it himself. Of course we can't be sure that is what happened, but consider the few facts we know: (1) Monica wears a Special Forces beret. (2) The affair started when she invited Bill to inspect her underwear. Could it have been camouflaged? (3) The only nation in this hemisphere we might want to attack, Cuba, is best know for a single product--cigars. (4) Somehow Ken Starr has overlooked possible Pentagon involvement--and Ken Starr doesn't overlook anything. (5) All of a sudden the Republicans are shying off the whole issue. Are we to believe their unity is solely because of a mildly disappointing election? Not likely, considering how split they are. In the Republican party the right hand doesn't even know what the far right hand is doing. But they would all get in line if they discovered the National Security was a stake.

Whatever the effect on our politicians, sexual weapons systems might show up in other ways. The Pentagon habitually employs cutting-edge technology on everything they do. Unfortunately, the reduction in defense spending no longer allows them to fund projects completely--which forces defense industries to market the technology to the general public under a subterfuge. For example, suppose we have developed a method for disrupting enemy communications by flooding their electronics with pornographic images. We could not use such a weapon unless we could install a special chip to recognize and block out those images from our own screens. If the Pentagon can't afford to fund that chip, the manufacturer can create a domestic market by getting parents upset about what their kids see on the Internet. If we called it the V-chip, would anyone suspect the V really stands for Victory?

Here's another example: Suppose the Air Force sets out to develop a Stealth Prophylactic. It's hard to ask Congress for funding for a project like that; Congress doesn't believe sex is ever safe. So the manufacturer markets a condom with strange shapes and textures along with advertising which talks about sensations. And nobody who buys it ever considers that the thing might be radar reflective.

You might think the idea of applying stealth technology to sex is silly. But you know that the United States has had problems with Islamic Fundamentalism. Consider what could happen if the Air Force finds a way to parachute men into every harem in the Middle East while reducing the radar image to the size of a bird's. Months later all the virgins are pregnant and nobody has seen anything but doves. Islam could be swept away in a torrent of messiahs.

Obviously if the United States develops techniques for sexual warfare it will not be long before other countries follow suit, with who knows what effects on international relations. France and Sweden could become Great Powers again. The UN might relocate from New York to Bangkok. Our GNP would suffer terribly if terrorists slipped Viagra into our water supply. That technique would stop production in my office.

The Olympic Games, always reflective of power politics, would be very different: They'd have to add another sport to the Pentathlon. Russian athletes would be suspected of taking estrogen. Maybe Tonya Harding could make a comeback.

Well, maybe not. Actually the world might not be that different, because sexual warfare is not really new. From Mata Hari to Delilah, sexuality has been an accepted part of intelligence work. The CIA refers to a sexual ploy as a "honey trap". Their Civil War counterparts in the Pinkerton agency used female agents in Richmond, while Southern belles in Washington were familiar with a number of Union officers who could not keep information to themselves when having a good time. A lady in Revolutionary War New York so successfully delayed the operations of General Howe that she has been immortalized with her own verse to Yankee Doodle:

"Sir William, he, as snug as a flea,
Lay all this time a-snoring;
Nor dreamed of harm, as he lay warm
In bed with Mrs. Loring."

What is surprising is that, although many of the societies employing sex for spying purposes were uptight and straight-laced, neither the women, nor the leaders who employed them knowing what they must do to gather information, were subject to much criticism, certainly not as much as the weak male officer who fell prey to sexual wiles. If those same women had attempted to enlist and fight the enemy on the battlefield, their help would have been refused and rejected, even though they would have kept their chastity and personal integrity intact.

Even on the battlefield there is one, as Gibbon put it, "singular exception...a woman is often acknowledged the absolute sovereign of a great kingdom, in which she would be deemed incapable of exercising the smallest employment, civil or military." In other words, women are allowed to participate in military operations as leaders of a nation or a contingent, but not as members of the rank-and-file. There is a lineage of female British belligerents, from Boudica to Good Queen Bess to Margaret Thatcher. The French can boast of St. Joan; the Russians of Catherine the Great; the Germans share Countess Matilda with the Vatican. Renaissance Italians were so impressed with the military abilities of Caterina Sforza in her battle against the Borgias that they revised the game of chess to include a queen as the most powerful piece on the board.

It is the same with non-European countries. The Romans had a tough time taking Palmyra from Zenobia. Her contemporary, the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra, did not perform as well in the sea-fight at Actium; however, she is better known because of her English publicist. One of the Twenty Four Generals of the Takeda Clan, the military elite of the samurai, was a woman. Queen Jinga of West Africa frightened the Portuguese; a little later the Rani of Jansi fascinated the British even as she led the Great Indian Mutiny against them.

To be leaders of nations or armies, women pay a special price: their normality. For female leaders are not the norm; soldiers will not feel secure being led by an ordinary woman. Thus the Feminine Great Captains are always rumored to have an exceptional sexuality. It hardly matters which way. Elizabeth I was reputedly a life-long virgin; the Commonwealth across the Potomac was named for her. Joan of Arc too was a virgin and a saint. If virginity is deemed impossible due to some technicality, like children, fanatical chastity will do, or more commonly a voracious and titillating sexual appetite. That charge may have been justified by the behavior of Catherine or Jinga; in other cases, like Zenobia, Cleopatra, and the Rani, there is little historical evidence to support an enlarged sexual appetite. If a leader is remotely attractive, enemy propaganda against her character often backfires; her male followers feel proud of her voracity and perhaps hopeful. In a way, the great warrior queens always use sex as a weapon, because the ferocity of their male subordinates arises from sublimation.

Two more traits of feminine war leaders are significant. First, they seldom come to their positions by their own efforts. Male generals can rise to the top for no better reasons than a brawny arm or a bad temper; but female generals must inherit their positions through some deceased male connection--a father, brother, husband, occasionally a lover. For example, Tamara of Georgia was the daughter of a capable warrior, and inherited his ability; her court poets sang: "A lion's cubs are lions all, male and female alike." It helps also to have a male child too young to rule. In some cases a masculine term, like King, will be used in preference to its feminine equivalent. The more capable a female proves herself to be, the more likely she is to become, in the minds of her subordinates, an honorary male.

Secondly, a female leader must be able to invoke the supernatural. The widow Boudica is said to have recruited her army by releasing a rabbit from her robes--the direction it ran being a Druid method of divination--and calling upon the aid of the goddess Andraste. Judith's bloody hand was directed by Jehovah. Joan followed the instruction of angels (according to the French) or devils (according to the English). Many cultures venerate goddesses adept at violence: the Celtic Maeve, the Welsh Rhiannon, the Germanic valkyries. Athena and Artemis are skilled at arms. The Hindu goddesses Durga and Kali frighten all comers with multiple arms wielding multiple weapons. If a soldier in such a culture is uneasy under female leadership, the leader can don the mantle of the goddess to reassure and overawe him.

To the disgruntlement of both chauvinists and feminists, history demonstrates that female leaders are just as capable, but also just as likely to engage in warfare, as their male counterparts.

Examples of female combatants among the rank and file are rarer. The Amazons seem to be a myth. I know of isolated examples of women serving in the ranks disguised as males; the frequency with which that occurred is hard to estimate, since the only Mulans we know about are the ones who were found out, most commonly after being wounded. Sometimes women who accompany an army will take up the sword temporarily

in the stress of a dramatic incident. Molly Pitcher, for example, served as a gunner at the battle of Monmouth after her husband was wounded. But organized, sanctioned enlistment of women is almost never done. In modern times both the Russians and the Israelis formed specialist units of women, but found the intense reaction of opposing male units unpalatable; neither country fields such units today.

One would think that soldiers outnumbered and surrounded would welcome female reinforcements, especially if nothing valid can be said against their efficiency. The history of sieges tells us otherwise. Women inside a besieged city are in a bad situation.They must endure privation and bombardment while the siege continues; should the city fall, they will most likely face rape and enslavement. They should make highly motivated troops, but they are never enlisted to fight--only as nurses and laborers. The tabu against women in combat is so strong that desperate men facing death and defeat never think to give women a chance to affect their fate. Why should that be so?

In part the answer may lie in a doubt as to female loyalty. It is easy to see the source of that fear in feudal societies. Where alliances are cemented by marriages, a wife is also a hostage, who may be killed if the father-in-law breaks faith with the husband. A scheming father, like Saito Dosan, may foist an attractive daughter on an adversary as a spy; if the adversary is clever, like Oda Nobunaga, he may use his new wife to spread disinformation. In a famous incident Nobunaga let his wife discover false plans to a conspiracy with Dosan's top advisors. When his wife betrayed the plans to her father, Dosan was induced to execute his loyal advisors, weakening him for Nobunaga's next move.

Feudal property laws could leave a wife in independent command of strategic properties. Thus Henry II was forced to imprison Eleanor to keep her from using the Aquitaine against him. Takeda Shingen acquired his wives from the families of men he conquered and killed; he advised his sons: "Even when husband and wife are alone together, he should never forget his dagger."

Medieval literature is full of wives whose loyalty proves false at a critical instant. In the Icelandic saga Njala, a besieged hero is killed after his wife refuses him a strand of her hair to replace his broken bow string. In the Niebelungenlied, Krimhild destroys her second husband's kingdom in a plot to avenge her first husband. King Lear is an old fool because he trusts all his daughters. Of course intimate relationships can be betrayed by men as well as women. Yet stories of feminine treachery during combat hold a special resonance for men.

We have a sentimental view of Nurture. Most of us recall being fed and cared for by our mothers. So when we hear of the mother sparrow nurturing her young, flying far to find the tenderest, juiciest worm for them, and carrying it back untasted in her beak so that her young may have sustenance, we picture this selfless act from the point of view of the nestlings. Few people consciously consider this event from the point of view of the worm, who is yanked out of his innocent existence, suffers a terrifying journey in unpleasant circumstances, and disembarks only to be torn apart and eaten alive. The worm, I submit, has as valid a view of the Nurturing Female as the nestlings do. At some subconscious level, we males identify with the worm.

In the earliest and most primitive human communities, just descended from the trees and subject to an environment with many dangers, we can theorize an instinctive division of labors in proportion to those dangers. Childbirth would have been quite dangerous, and since only females would be subject to that danger, it is reasonable to suppose that males would shoulder the other great danger of prehistoric life, that of protecting the small band of humans from predation. This duty would not be easy, as the naked human has few good survival characteristics. His skin is thin; his nails have not the

sharpness of claws; his teeth could never serve as fangs; his gait is not swift. Against a wolf, a bear, or a big cat he is in danger of being overrun and overpowered. Nor is that all bad, because the predators he hopes to fight off must still be kept close by. Before the advent of hunting, human bands received most of their protein by scavenging the kills of more agile predators. From time to time, a human must lose the contest for survival, for the predators will not stay close unless they get meat.

Although those earliest battles are not recorded, the tactics are not hard to guess. Most of the fights would be at night. The band would take up a hopefully concealed position in a woods or a ravine. The men would form a rough circle. The women and children would be in the center, the women as caregivers and possibly as a last defense, the children as the predators' objective. We can understand their preference; we are baby eaters ourselves. We prefer lamb to mutton, pullet to rooster, young steer to old bull. We apply the principle even to vegetables, and devour baby limas and bamboo shoots. For an animal predator, the young of any species are likely to be more tender and less able to run or mount a defense.

Any soldier on the front line will feel some resentment to those in a safer position. It must have been so to those early males, waiting in the dark with only a stick or a rock or perhaps a crude spear, and the company of the men on either side. Each man would worry not only about a sudden death, but about being wounded. Without effective medicine an opening in the skin would be an invitation to death, a slow suffering death incurred in trying to fight off the swifter death of being devoured. Yet a wounded man could honorably leave the line, seek temporary safety with the women. A reflective man might think about how much the vagina resembles a wound. That wound, through some magic, does not disable a woman. That wound resists inflammation, causes a woman only a little pain, yet never heals. Most horrifying of all, from time to time, like a wound, it bleeds.

Blood has a special meaning for a soldier. It is the sign of honor, the red badge of courage, the signal that someone has made his special sacrifice. Blood is the emblem of life and the mark of violent death. Great battles are consecrated with names of blood: Bloody Run. Bloody Lane. Bloody Ridge. Warriors are purified and baptized in blood. I have talked with some Marines who served in the Gulf about their opposition to homosexuality. Much of that opposition derives from the fear of AIDS, of infection from being splashed with blood. How can you trust the man next to you, they say, if you cannot trust his blood?

Menstrual blood is the ultimate tabu, dark magic beyond male endurance. I know guys who are not particularly hygienic, guys who would smash a fly in their hands and keep on eating, guys who will think nothing of taking out what the cat has brought in, who nonetheless would not be caught dead taking a cellophane wrapped package of Kotex off the supermarket shelf. If these admittedly not very enlightened moderns still harbor the tabu, imagine its strength and power among primitives. It is entirely common for primitive cultures to require strict seclusion for women during their menstrual period, a seclusion made easier by the fact that the cycles of women in close groups tend to synchronize.

I am still in doubt whether there is some reason why the reproductive cycle and the lunar cycle should operate in the same period. The connection between a planetary event and a biological event is hardly self-evident; but in the magical world of the primitive there are no coincidences. The deity of the moon is always feminine, and her most powerful attributes are her ability to withdraw the light from the night sky and to cause all the women to bleed.

The moon deity is a huntress too, for in many species of predator the hunting is done by the females. In this deodorized age we do not give much consideration to the sense of smell. In a primitive band the power of the olfactory could not be hidden. There could have been no more dreadful time on the calendar for the men in the picket line than the nights of the new moon, when the goddess would take the light they needed for fighting and leave them vulnerable to predators who could see by starlight, and when their women, obedient to the goddess, would send an iron, coppery scent downwind on the breeze, redolent of meat, a beacon to other females with claws and teeth: Here we are.

Over the eons this betrayal must have occurred month after month, every year; good men killed or maimed, until humans learned themselves to be predators; but meanwhile the uneasiness about women wired in by evolution--an inescapable, if dwindling, part of the thought process of males. Even today some husband sits at dinner with his attractive and respectable wife and makes small talk, and only in the very back of his mind, well below his consciousness, notices a glitter in her eyes as he slices the meat for them both, and thinks with the dimmest of thoughts that the carving knife is a weapon of sorts, and that it would be just as well if he kept it in his own hands.