Women As Weapons of War

      Kelly Oliver believes that our cultural associations between women, birth, death, sex, and violence contribute to our use of women as weapons of war. Our stereotypes of sex and gender simultaneously allow for shameful use of violence by women and also direct our understanding of women’s “natural” state of motherhood and nurturing. “Indeed, the association between sex and violence trades on stereotypical images and myths of dangerous or threatening women upon which our culture was, and continues to be, built.” (3) Oliver notes that women are seen as both life-giving and life-taking; they are givers of life as mothers, but are dangerous and have the propensity to kill the life she can also give. “Women are serving and dying, but, in the words of retired Navy captain Lory Manning, ‘A lot of social conservatives have powerful feelings about training mothers to kill.’” (1) She notes that even though it may appear that women are gaining equality or feminist-driven power by joining the ranks, “the rhetoric surrounding their involvement betrays the lingering association between women, sexuality, and death.” (19)

     Oliver explicitly discusses the fact that women’s sexuality is seen as dangerous, something that must be kept under wraps, so to speak. “Akin to a natural toxin or intoxicant, women’s sex makes a powerful weapon because, within our cultural imaginary, it is by nature dangerous. Yet becomes more threatening because we imagine that it can be wielded by women to manipulate men; it can become the art of seduction through which women beguile and intoxicate to control and even destroy men…” (31-2) She discusses the fact that female suicide bombers are especially dangerous because their dangerous sexuality appears to be cloaked and covered (socially and physically) within the patriarchal society, yet at the same time, they can be seen as the femme fatale, allowing for them to move across security checkpoints as “innocent” women, while simultaneously hiding their dangerous bombs.