the_ragnarok (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
the_ragnarok) wrote2011-08-04 01:51 pm
the_ragnarok) wrote2011-08-04 01:51 pm
Entry tags:
How The Army Turned Me Into a Humorless Feminist
Disclaimer: Some army terms may have been translated wrongly in here. If you catch any, do let me know!
A little while ago my darling asked me why feminism, in this day and age, was still necessary. The answer I settled on, at the time, was "My dad". [1] But after a couple of conversations (one with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
adrianna_r, one with my study buddy) it occurred to me that "The army" is just as likely an answer.
Basically, I'm glad of my time in the army - let that be said. I learned a shitload of valuable skills, only a part of which were a formal part of my training, I met a lot of wonderful people and a few less-wonderful people with whom I still had to get along. I'm glad I chose the course I did (programmer's training, which meant 3 mandatory years rather than the standard 2, plus six months of training and 2 years and 6 months of nonmandatory service), even though there were easier and shorter routes.
And yet.
Throughout my life, I always felt kind of uncomfortable about feminist discourse - specifically, I felt very uncomfortable claiming that there was any sort of privilege I didn't share. I'm an Ashkenazi, middle-class Jew - you don't get much more privileged than that in Israel. The whole being-female thing never felt like it mattered, when I was young. Yeah, okay, possibly I got fat-shamed a little more, but Patriarchy Hurts Men Too and anyway it didn't seem like it was anything major or worth noting.
The army, however, changed that. It wasn't the first time in my life I've been in a male-dominated environment: The gifted school I went to, the math and physics classes in my high school and my first steps into SF fandom were all very male-saturated. But I never felt troubled by that. Mostly, I thought it was funny that my best friend kept referring to me with male pronouns because he was that unused to speaking to girls. At worst, my existence was ignored, which I was fine with as it left me free to read and ignore everyone else in return.
But during my service, I wasn't just part of a very small minority of women in my department. In the beginning of my service, there were four women in my sector, out of about 40 soldiers: Me, the programmer I was replacing, a nonskilled technical worker and the secretary [2]. And there, for the first time in my life, I learned what it was like to be punished and humiliated for my gender.
I feel odd even writing it like that. Because what am I even talking about? Okay, so I had to do kitchen duty while none of the guys had to do any turn of duty outside our sector. Crai moar, humorless feminist. Let me explain.
The thing is, out-of-sector duties were intended as punishment and humiliation, or so it felt. Not by my commanders, not at all, but by the staff sergeant and his minions. Soldiers with technological, non-combatant training - programmers like me, engineers and practical engineers - were perceived, by him and by many others, as too haughty and not real soldiers. We needed to be taken down. The staff sergeant - and the base's logistical component with him - felt it was his duty to show us we were still lowly soldiers, who must obey any order, no matter how pointless.
There was no such thing as satisfaction in a job well done: We were cheap working force, and communication with us was conducted mainly via yells. There was no point in getting something done quickly or well: If we finished too soon, they'd just think of something else for us to do. They intentionally let us do jobs that we did poorly when the work could be done better and more easily by others. Possibly they were right to do it. There were many soldiers I served with who felt they were inherently superior to other soldiers because they had an engineering degree, or knew how to program, or worked on a particularly glamorous project.
But those soldiers didn't have to do any duties. Not guarding nor kitchen duties, because they were men.
My sector had an Understanding with the base, you see. My sector did hard, demanding work that required people that really gave their all to the army. They worked insane hours, taking very little time off and always keeping a sense of joy in their work, which was both physically and mentally difficult. For this, the base absolved them of doing external duties. However, sadly, this privilege was reserved for the men.
Why? Basically, it was assumed that the working force of the sector was purely male, and the women were trivial support staff that didn't do the same hard work. This was partially because the physical work, which had grown less significant during my time there, was a deciding factor, and the sector simply didn't take women because the sector didn't want to ask women to do physical work. Partially because most of that working force were electronic engineers and practical engineers, and women are a tiny minority in those fields. It was held as implicit assumption that women couldn't and wouldn't work as hard as men, and so shouldn't be taken in as anything more than secretaries.
The programmers were sort of a grey area. There was less physical work in our job description, but the Spirit of the section implied that when a physical challenge was at hand, everyone should help and job descriptions be damned. There were far more female programmers, and better reason to take them on. So they took on female programmers - me, and my predecessor - but treated us like unskilled labor when it came to interactions with the base at large.
Oh, they didn't say it quite that baldly. When I joined up, they told me women have to do kitchen duty because they work less hours. "If you work 300 hours a month," they told me, "we'll get you off kitchen duty for that month."
Then I did. And they didn't. Instead they said, "The exemption isn't really based on work hours. It's more a question of [specific activity]. If you do [specific activity] for a given number of days, we'll get you exempted."
I didn't reach the number of days. I wasn't the only one, though - most men in the sector didn't, either. When I pointed that out, I was told to hush. Because all speaking up would accomplish would be taking away the privileges of others, and why would I want to hurt others when it couldn't give me anything?
I didn't. So I shut up. And I got sort of used to being the only one who did kitchen duty. Even when I had days when I came off eight hours of washing floors and dealing with messes that soldiers, including my sector mates, made, and then stayed at work until 1AM to finish fixing a bug. (That didn't feel like a concession, you understand. That felt like a reward. I loved my actual job.)
Time passed. After my first two years, I was discharged from doing kitchen duty. I could rest on my laurels, in theory, and enjoy my seniority. Except just after then, another woman joined up, a practical engineer, and I had to watch the same story unfold all over again with her.
It made me even more furious, because now I was privy to all the things people hadn't told me to my face when it was my problem. Things like, "She doesn't have a right to the exemption because she doesn't work as hard as [the hardest-working practical engineer]." When I pointed out that she still worked harder than, say, the least-hard-working practical engineer, I was met with an uncomfortable shrug. The people of my sector were enlightened, and knew that it was Wrong to deny her the exemption for being a woman, but if they told the staff sergeant to make exemptions according to actual amount of work, that may get the least-hard-working practial engineer's exemtion revoked. And of course nobody wanted that.
What made me really furious there, I think, was that shrug. The "Oh well, too bad for you, but we must guard our privilege first" shrug. If you demand of a person to put the interest of the group at the top of his concerns, than it is the duty of the group to put the interests of its members at the top of its concerns. If you think it's my duty to help you at your work, joyfully, without you even having to ask - which for most of my service, I did - then it's your duty to help me achieve status equal to yours, even if it puts your own at risk. (This was worst when it came from my commanders, when I came to them asking for help. I was pretty fucking furious there.)
All this doesn't even touch other topics that bothered me - the fact that the army as an environment is inherently xenophobic and sees women and LGBT folk as 'other', the skin-crawling feeling of Rape Culture surrounding me even though I had no name for it back then, the sheer glee some of my sector mates took in hurting others (not me, fortunately) and presenting it as a rite of passage, the sheer problematicness of the "A citizen is a soldier, and a soldier is combatant, and a combatant is male" worldview.
But the army was the first time I was denied the same rights as my equivalents because I was a woman, and that I can't forget.
----
[1] If you've heard me tell stories about him, you know why. If you haven't here's a choice one: One time my dad told my darling(to his face and mine) he thought my darling was gay, because my darling had expressed (also to my face) a lack of interest in sleeping with women who aren't me. Yep. The fail, I cannot even begin to enumerate it.
[2] Ah, the poor misrepresented army secretary. Slandered as slutty if she's pretty, worthless if she's not, and stupid in any case, she's purported to not do any meaningful work except provide the soldiers (who, remember, are all straight guys - female soldiers don't really count and gay ones don't exist) with eye candy. I've seen the work those women do, it's hard and ungrateful and necessary. I don't envy them at all.
A little while ago my darling asked me why feminism, in this day and age, was still necessary. The answer I settled on, at the time, was "My dad". [1] But after a couple of conversations (one with
adrianna_r, one with my study buddy) it occurred to me that "The army" is just as likely an answer.Basically, I'm glad of my time in the army - let that be said. I learned a shitload of valuable skills, only a part of which were a formal part of my training, I met a lot of wonderful people and a few less-wonderful people with whom I still had to get along. I'm glad I chose the course I did (programmer's training, which meant 3 mandatory years rather than the standard 2, plus six months of training and 2 years and 6 months of nonmandatory service), even though there were easier and shorter routes.
And yet.
Throughout my life, I always felt kind of uncomfortable about feminist discourse - specifically, I felt very uncomfortable claiming that there was any sort of privilege I didn't share. I'm an Ashkenazi, middle-class Jew - you don't get much more privileged than that in Israel. The whole being-female thing never felt like it mattered, when I was young. Yeah, okay, possibly I got fat-shamed a little more, but Patriarchy Hurts Men Too and anyway it didn't seem like it was anything major or worth noting.
The army, however, changed that. It wasn't the first time in my life I've been in a male-dominated environment: The gifted school I went to, the math and physics classes in my high school and my first steps into SF fandom were all very male-saturated. But I never felt troubled by that. Mostly, I thought it was funny that my best friend kept referring to me with male pronouns because he was that unused to speaking to girls. At worst, my existence was ignored, which I was fine with as it left me free to read and ignore everyone else in return.
But during my service, I wasn't just part of a very small minority of women in my department. In the beginning of my service, there were four women in my sector, out of about 40 soldiers: Me, the programmer I was replacing, a nonskilled technical worker and the secretary [2]. And there, for the first time in my life, I learned what it was like to be punished and humiliated for my gender.
I feel odd even writing it like that. Because what am I even talking about? Okay, so I had to do kitchen duty while none of the guys had to do any turn of duty outside our sector. Crai moar, humorless feminist. Let me explain.
The thing is, out-of-sector duties were intended as punishment and humiliation, or so it felt. Not by my commanders, not at all, but by the staff sergeant and his minions. Soldiers with technological, non-combatant training - programmers like me, engineers and practical engineers - were perceived, by him and by many others, as too haughty and not real soldiers. We needed to be taken down. The staff sergeant - and the base's logistical component with him - felt it was his duty to show us we were still lowly soldiers, who must obey any order, no matter how pointless.
There was no such thing as satisfaction in a job well done: We were cheap working force, and communication with us was conducted mainly via yells. There was no point in getting something done quickly or well: If we finished too soon, they'd just think of something else for us to do. They intentionally let us do jobs that we did poorly when the work could be done better and more easily by others. Possibly they were right to do it. There were many soldiers I served with who felt they were inherently superior to other soldiers because they had an engineering degree, or knew how to program, or worked on a particularly glamorous project.
But those soldiers didn't have to do any duties. Not guarding nor kitchen duties, because they were men.
My sector had an Understanding with the base, you see. My sector did hard, demanding work that required people that really gave their all to the army. They worked insane hours, taking very little time off and always keeping a sense of joy in their work, which was both physically and mentally difficult. For this, the base absolved them of doing external duties. However, sadly, this privilege was reserved for the men.
Why? Basically, it was assumed that the working force of the sector was purely male, and the women were trivial support staff that didn't do the same hard work. This was partially because the physical work, which had grown less significant during my time there, was a deciding factor, and the sector simply didn't take women because the sector didn't want to ask women to do physical work. Partially because most of that working force were electronic engineers and practical engineers, and women are a tiny minority in those fields. It was held as implicit assumption that women couldn't and wouldn't work as hard as men, and so shouldn't be taken in as anything more than secretaries.
The programmers were sort of a grey area. There was less physical work in our job description, but the Spirit of the section implied that when a physical challenge was at hand, everyone should help and job descriptions be damned. There were far more female programmers, and better reason to take them on. So they took on female programmers - me, and my predecessor - but treated us like unskilled labor when it came to interactions with the base at large.
Oh, they didn't say it quite that baldly. When I joined up, they told me women have to do kitchen duty because they work less hours. "If you work 300 hours a month," they told me, "we'll get you off kitchen duty for that month."
Then I did. And they didn't. Instead they said, "The exemption isn't really based on work hours. It's more a question of [specific activity]. If you do [specific activity] for a given number of days, we'll get you exempted."
I didn't reach the number of days. I wasn't the only one, though - most men in the sector didn't, either. When I pointed that out, I was told to hush. Because all speaking up would accomplish would be taking away the privileges of others, and why would I want to hurt others when it couldn't give me anything?
I didn't. So I shut up. And I got sort of used to being the only one who did kitchen duty. Even when I had days when I came off eight hours of washing floors and dealing with messes that soldiers, including my sector mates, made, and then stayed at work until 1AM to finish fixing a bug. (That didn't feel like a concession, you understand. That felt like a reward. I loved my actual job.)
Time passed. After my first two years, I was discharged from doing kitchen duty. I could rest on my laurels, in theory, and enjoy my seniority. Except just after then, another woman joined up, a practical engineer, and I had to watch the same story unfold all over again with her.
It made me even more furious, because now I was privy to all the things people hadn't told me to my face when it was my problem. Things like, "She doesn't have a right to the exemption because she doesn't work as hard as [the hardest-working practical engineer]." When I pointed out that she still worked harder than, say, the least-hard-working practical engineer, I was met with an uncomfortable shrug. The people of my sector were enlightened, and knew that it was Wrong to deny her the exemption for being a woman, but if they told the staff sergeant to make exemptions according to actual amount of work, that may get the least-hard-working practial engineer's exemtion revoked. And of course nobody wanted that.
What made me really furious there, I think, was that shrug. The "Oh well, too bad for you, but we must guard our privilege first" shrug. If you demand of a person to put the interest of the group at the top of his concerns, than it is the duty of the group to put the interests of its members at the top of its concerns. If you think it's my duty to help you at your work, joyfully, without you even having to ask - which for most of my service, I did - then it's your duty to help me achieve status equal to yours, even if it puts your own at risk. (This was worst when it came from my commanders, when I came to them asking for help. I was pretty fucking furious there.)
All this doesn't even touch other topics that bothered me - the fact that the army as an environment is inherently xenophobic and sees women and LGBT folk as 'other', the skin-crawling feeling of Rape Culture surrounding me even though I had no name for it back then, the sheer glee some of my sector mates took in hurting others (not me, fortunately) and presenting it as a rite of passage, the sheer problematicness of the "A citizen is a soldier, and a soldier is combatant, and a combatant is male" worldview.
But the army was the first time I was denied the same rights as my equivalents because I was a woman, and that I can't forget.
----
[1] If you've heard me tell stories about him, you know why. If you haven't here's a choice one: One time my dad told my darling(to his face and mine) he thought my darling was gay, because my darling had expressed (also to my face) a lack of interest in sleeping with women who aren't me. Yep. The fail, I cannot even begin to enumerate it.
[2] Ah, the poor misrepresented army secretary. Slandered as slutty if she's pretty, worthless if she's not, and stupid in any case, she's purported to not do any meaningful work except provide the soldiers (who, remember, are all straight guys - female soldiers don't really count and gay ones don't exist) with eye candy. I've seen the work those women do, it's hard and ungrateful and necessary. I don't envy them at all.
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You know what this reminds me of? Working in IT in the City of London (reinsurance, mostly) in the early 1990s. That same thing about having to do the dirty work because of being a woman; the thing about not being One Of The Boys, not belonging, not ever being part of the team despite being told repeatedly that you were expected to be.
An example: being ordered to make coffee for a male colleague and a client. By the client. On the client's site. Even though I was there to fix a database problem and colleague was there to network.
Grrrr.
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Also, ALL THE GRRRRs at your client. I just can't comprehend how people can DO that.
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They hated me in the Officer's Mess (Air Force Intel), because I would talk back and refuse to remove the plates from the tables (yeah, we had to actually bus the tables) and one time an Officer actually called me a waitress.
Being in Intel, the sexism was felt going further and further up the ranks (although my first branch commander was she who now censors the newspapers and hates the internet because you can't control it), but man, it was felt - felt HARD.
I always tried to be friendly and helpful to the secretaries, they really did get treated the worst.
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Also I'd sing obscenities as I work. And then get asked why I was singing opera. *facepalm*
Man, our secretary did so much important work. I always told her I was glad someone competent had her job (and that it wasn't me XD).
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I still don't honestly know what to say other than I am sorry. I am sorry you had to go through that and I am sorry other women had to (and still do) go through that. It's wrong and it's... evil. I don't think that's too strong a word.
The older I get, and the more I see the pressures one women (especially young women), the angrier I get, and the more I feel like feminism is important. And there are no easy answers, but I really wish there were.
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While I appreciate your sympathy a LOT, I don't think you should feel sorry for it. I'm not. It was pretty crappy, but it taught me a lot and I'm glad for the experience. Even being oppressed, if I can use that word, teaches you what it's like, and why it's bad.
And the most important lesson, I think, is to limit the power people have over you. Because things got better when I had better commanders, but all it would have taken was one more crappy commander to send everything sailing right down.
But really, thank you for reading. <3 just, don't take it too much to heart - it ended up all right.
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I am very, very glad it ended up alright for you - but that shouldn't be a matter of chance.
Oh I am expressing myself very badly tonight. <3
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I UNDERSTAND YOUR FEELINGS. I AM QUITE PRONE TO FEELINGS MYSELF. And yeah, it shouldn't be a matter of chance, you're right.
idk, you're coming through pretty well, I think. <3