Blog Post #4

Does the rapid advancement in military technology offer a step toward reducing or exacerbating gender inequalities? 

No. It does not. In fact, in my opinion, it will make it much more complicated. And there are three reasons as to why. One is more visible than the other, the third, I guarantee, has been and will always be denounced by somebody, and the one in the middle is a mix of both.

The first reason

In our lecture videos on this topic, it is mentioned that in the time of techno-war, men and women are now equal and are at odds with technology. This is technically true but is at best a surface-level view. 

The first issue to be highlighted here is that, much like the weapons used by humans on the field, this technology is being gendered, which is by no means a new concept.

Military technology, according to the lecture video and the interview shown, is considered objective, logical, calculated, efficient and shows no emotion. Supposedly, all humans are now feminine compared to robots. We all are subjective, irrational, reactive, susceptible to fatigue and we all show emotion.

“… advances in technology should favor women who want to participate in the armed services allowing them to bypass debates about the lack of upper-body strength that detractors often claim is a prime obstacle to their participation.” (Sjoberg and Tickner, 159)

This is a nice thought, I have to admit. And it would be fantastic if the world worked that way. And yet:

What the issue of the "them vs. us" idea is that it won’t stop at that. With gender norms being so prominent to many people, what’s below the surface of that idea is that now women will be taken less seriously than before.

Women will now be, compared to men, who are compared to robots: more irrational, more reactive, more emotional. With this in mind, women are now a kind of third-in-line concept because they will still be compared to human men even when both genders are “equal” compared to robots: the first-in-line to the logically capable actors in warfare and defense. And, as Eric M. Blanchard writes in Sjoberg and Tickner’s book, female tele-operators will still be up against similar “devaluing” of their work as computer programmers.

Wait. But I thought it was now men and women against robots.

“The unmanning of combat has complicated these boundary drawing practices greatly, troubling assumptions about women in combat (question about women’s capability in performing equal roles in combat)…” (Sjoberg and Tickner, 159)

The second reason

I feel a responsibility to the actively working military men during this analysis to give them some benefit of the doubt. 

In the interview we watched, the ex-drone pilot being interviewed spoke out about the backlash he received from those he had worked with during his service after revealing what damage his work had done to his thinking and mental health. (I’m sick over the idea of a friend of two and a half years suddenly saying he would shoot him because of his honesty and openness of PTSD.)

Although I don’t necessarily doubt that women would go through the same thing, they wouldn’t technically go through the same thing.

The man who speaks about PTSD and mental health issues after spending years taking lives of unknown people thousands of miles away is seen as weak and suddenly like he lost his masculinity. He needs to “man up.” He’s shamed by his colleagues and his superiors for being human.

The women who speaks about the same mental health issues after having the same sort of missions, might receive the same backlash, but it’s expected of her to not have been able to handle it.

Whereas the man is thought to be humanly equipped with the lack of emotions to make him capable of killing people without batting an eye, the woman is expected to be squeamish and unable to stomach such a task. (Tell that to my friend’s stepsister who stands at 5’2 and is a search-and-rescue sharpshooter for the IDF.)

Even if the concept of robots vs. humans was plausible, it already is not because of this view on the expected innate capabilities of men and women.

The third reason

Not to draw too much on Cohn’s writing, since it is not a part of this section, but it is the basis for my third reason as to why advancement in military technology will not offer a step toward reducing or exacerbating gender inequalities.

During Cohn’s experience viewing the (very masculine) field of nuclear proliferation, she wrote about two observations, among other things:

1.     Sterilized language

2.     Depersonalization of warfare as beneficial

These two concepts were brought up again in this section because two of the main similarities between nuclear missiles and militarized drones are that they are destructive, and they are technology.

I don’t believe that the advancement of military technology will suddenly make it easier for women to rank as fast as men or be given the same missions as them. If men in the nuclear proliferation field view their missiles as weapons of penetration and their victims as lifeless targets, there’s no stopping them from treating another piece of technology the same, especially when it’s capable of and tasked to do the same exact thing: to kill.

“The disciplining of soldiers to believe that simulations are reality… ‘produces “a kind of isolation” from the violence of war …” “Simultaneously, it rationalises and mystifies the disappearance of the body from war, and the denial of the ‘sentient physicality of human embodiment’ (Shepherd, 181).