Fox News (6/12/20) noted that Capt. Emily “Thompson had an all-female maintenance crew to launch her historic flight.”
Have you heard the good news, ladies? You too can bomb the Middle East!
Some corporate media have recently been taken with the “inspirational” story of Emily Thompson, the first woman to pilot the super-costly F-35 jet in combat. At an unspecified time earlier this month, Thompson took off from her base in the United Arab Emirates to bomb an unnamed country.
The New York Post (6/13/20) described her as “breaking the glass ceiling—at lightning speed.” Other outlets used the words “historic” (Fox News, 6/12/20), “awesome” (Australian, 6/15/20) and “empowering” (Jerusalem Post, 6/11/20) to describe the event. “What an inspiration,” concluded Unilad (6/12/20).
Thompson’s ground crew was also all-female, a number of outlets reported, with the International Business Times (6/13/20) including a quote from her bomb loader, telling young girls: “Be confident and never let anyone tell you that you can’t do something because you can.”
The story was picked up primarily in the military press (e.g.,Task and Purpose, 6/10/20; Air Force Times, 6/11/20) and in more conservative media (Breitbart, 6/13/20; Epoch Times, 6/16/20), with notable right-wing figures like Ivanka Trump (Twitter, 6/14/20) and Fox anchor Martha MacCallum (Twitter, 6/15/20) hailing the event as a step forward for women.
Many of the reports gave background about Thompson’s life, the cost of the F-35 and other military matters. But none questioned whether this was really a victory for equality, nor the ethics of nearly two decades of continuous US warfare and occupation in the region. The effect was to use the language of social justice to cloak the violence of wars in the Middle East, which were started under false pretexts (FAIR.org, 3/19/07, 7/6/16) and have killed huge numbers of women, men and children.
CNBC (1/16/19) reported that after Gina Haspel became director of the CIA, the agency “celebrated its progress towards gender parity.” Haspel was confirmed by the Senate despite overseeing torture and destroying evidence of the CIA’s torture program (FAIR.org, 6/6/19).
While Thompson’s story was primarily retold by conservative media, outlets with more liberal audiences have also put a progressive face on inherently violent, oppressive institutions. Last year, CNBC (1/16/19) essentially presented the CIA as a feminist institution, now that women head its key directorates for the first time, while many outlets (ABC News, 7/13/18; LA Times, 8/8/18; The Week, 1/2/19; MSNBC, 1/3/20) cheered the news that four of the five largest weapons manufacturers were headed by female CEOs.
Politico (1/2/19) described the news women now headed the major weapon-producing corporations as a “watershed” moment in what “has always been a male-dominated bastion.” Women “knocked down” the barriers of machismo, the outlet declared, quoting individuals who praised the defense industry as a “meritocracy” that now “generally rewards high performers regardless of color or creed or gender.” The piece, headlined “How Women Took Over the Military/Industrial Complex,” included a section entitled “questioning orthodoxy,” but at no point did it examine the unstated Washington orthodoxy that endless wars are necessary, a premise that industry depends on.
The term “military/industrial complex” was popularized by President Dwight Eisenhower in his farewell address to the nation, where he warned that weapons contractors were beginning to dictate state policy for their own benefit:
Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government…we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military/industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
That this structure still exists, reaping untold violence across the world, only it is now headed by women, is hardly a step forward for feminism, which is about the emancipation of billions from an oppressive system that hurts everyone.
Featured image: MSNBC graphic (1/3/20) celebrating female heads of weapon-making corporations and military agencies.
Identity imperialism
I agree that bombing a country as either a male or a female does not alter the ethics of the act. However, I strongly disagree with the implicit notion that women should not be in the top ranks of the military since the military employs ethically questionable tactics. You do argue frequently – and I agree – that women should have gender parity in leadership of companies. Whether a company engages in what you or I define as ethical practices does not alter that argument. A women flying F35 combat missions does break a glass ceiling even if we would prefer nobody flying such missions!
Has the CIA improved its record of foreign intrigues and general pot-stirring around the world in pursuit of American advantage since it had female leadership? How about that Theresa May – what a leader! There is no mystical quality about femininity that makes it the magic bullet for leadership, and women fail catastrophically at least as often as men. I suppose we should all cheer the fact that they’re getting more opportunity to take their chances, but reporting which suggests they bring some breathtaking new pizzazz to everything they do for the first time does everyone a disservice, and making a big fuss about it does those first-timers no favours unless they happen to be attention-junkies.
In the wake of Thatcher’s ascent to CEO of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, many feminists reconciled their cognitive dissonance with ‘Thatcher isn’t a woman because she is acting as a man’. Thus they revealed their own pathetic compliance with the prevailing patriarchal stereotypes of how women and men ‘ought to be’.
Feminism is a bourgeois ideology of equality and represents the last cry of the Enlightenment. By seeing society’s principle divide as the sex line, with its highest aim women’s equality, feminism is limited to women having equal rights and representation with men to be the CEO, the commander-in-chief or chief oppressor. It’s quite consistent that feminists celebrate women in these positions. And also that bourgeois mouthpieces shout it out from the rooftops, just as they ludicrously shouted ‘post racism’ when Obama became commander-in-chief of the American plantation.
But women’s liberation, and how to achieve it, is completely alien to feminism and should never be equated with it. Women’s liberation requires far more than simply equal opportunity to be part of administering an iniquitous system, to be part of the ruling class in exercising its power. It requires the replacement of the nuclear family; the socialising of housework, restaurants and laundries; 24-hour childcare, free at point-of-service contraception, abortion and healthcare; and so on. In short, only the destruction of the iniquitous system itself by the overthrow of capitalism can provide this material basis for the liberation of women. And that’s something that feminism won’t touch with a 10ft barge pole, despite the ‘socialist’ pretensions of some its more ‘leftwing’, ‘radical’ proponents.
Female war profiteers, fighter pilots, CEOs and commanders-in-chief certainly are steps forward for feminism because that is what feminism is ALL about. No amount of mental gymnastics can get around that.
Lyudmila Pavlichenko was a noted Soviet sniper during WWII. So, once again, Western Powers are decades behind. Though Pavlichenko helped to defeat the Nazi menace in national self-defense rather than for unprovoked, hegemonial imperialism purposes.
Always decades behind. Since 1939. Again in 1990-2020.
China has had the most number of self-made female millionaire entrepreneurs since more than 20 years ago.
In the richest females worldwide, 2/3 to 8/10 are from China, while China is only 2nd in GDP.
https://qz.com/529508/china-is-home-to-two-thirds-of-the-worlds-self-made-female-billionaires/
https://www.barrons.com/articles/china-leads-list-of-self-made-female-billionaires-1520538727
“In total, China had 64 self-made women billionaires, representing 63% of the total 102 named in the list.”
“About 30% of the most successful male entrepreneurs in the world are Chinese… Chinese women entrepreneurs are twice as ‘successful’ as their male counterparts,”
Muh oppression. Where? In China? Really? Hahaha.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_female_billionaires&diff=969213697&oldid=969092229
https://archive.today/m8f97
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_female_billionaires&diff=968883090&oldid=968796932
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_female_billionaires
https://archive.today/KQvOO
Excellent analysis. It had to be finally said: just because you should have equal right to something doesn’t make that something right.
Contrast that corporate and government media drivel with this:
An Entire Pro Softball Team Quit After Their GM Tried to Use Them as Racist, Pro-Trump Propaganda
https://www.themarysue.com/softball-team-quits-over-tweet-to-trump/?fbclid=IwAR0pWbyyfmq84iK-wHMuNvJkph6Znh3BRbCvkj2j1UnXs9RCeGKpW0dNPd0
WE the Death Bringers of the united states, in order to form a more extinct planet and even create even more horror upon humanity —–do ordain that all future taxpayer money go directly to the death squads , like the ones in the Collateral Murder video——and seeing that all crime against life is always someone else’s fault——–it is time for the world to sanction US!
Wow. What mansplaining.
Your reply is ugly, dismissive, and philosophically speaking, without foundation. If the advances to one’s cause are at the expense of other victims, it’s unjust. You could refer to Kant’s categorical imperative. You could refer to feminists who stood against racism.
Good article! Too often the MSM lazily (or intentionally so, as in the case of right-wing conservative coverage) conflates females in high-profile, historically male-dominated roles as being a victory for feminism, entirely ignoring the fact that it may well be an unethical role which humanistic feminism didn’t condone. History has a number of examples of nasty, ruthless woman rulers throughout the ages (though far-less numbers than males), and there have even been a few female serial killers, but these were never considered ‘victories for women’s equality’, no matter how conservatives want to spin it that way…
Women can be just as blood-thirsty as men.
And this is why the DNC have been trying and WILL install E Warren as their candidate. No matter how poorly she does with American voters, even in her home state.
Voters ought to be looking at her voting record, not the pink pom poms.
Yet you will demonize the various female “suicide bombers” in the middle east.
Yet you demonize the female “suicide bombers”..