‘You throw like a girl’

The human rights scandal now known as Abu Ghraib received immense media coverage back in 2006 when images of torture being perpetrated by American military personnel leaked into the public sphere.

Media reports, citing the infamous internal military investigation dubbed “The Fay Report,” described the systematic abuse of detainees that occurred in fall 2003 by the American military at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Newscast after newscast, pundit after pundit, told and talked of heinous incidents involving prisoners experiencing forced nudity, dog attacks, electrical torture, sleep deprivation, stress positioning and being forced to wear women’s underwear on their heads.

The Fay Report was very clear regarding that last part; there was “ample evidence of detainees being forced to wear women’s underwear.” One prisoner, identified only as W–, was quoted as saying, “[The] American police, the guy who wears glasses, he put red woman’s underwear on my head.” Another, called H–, said, “He took all of my clothes, and he took the female underwear and put it over my head.” The Fay Report concluded that, alongside practices such as stress positioning and forced nudity, the method of inflicting psychological distress by placing women’s underwear on detainees’ heads constituted abuse and sexual humiliation.

I am not downplaying the atrocities that happened at Abu Ghraib; clearly, they were horrible. And neither do I doubt that the prisoners did suffer abuse and sexual humiliation because they were forced to wear women’s underwear on their heads, in conjunction with other torture; I’m fairly sure they did. What struck me was that no news reporter or pundit ever asked why having red women’s underwear placed on your head against your will amounts to sexual abuse in violation of international law. This was simply assumed as a given.

Was it because the prisoners were allergic to cotton? No, of course not. Were panties simply the only material available? Somehow I doubt it. The real reason is that if you want to completely disempower, humiliate and dehumanize a man, you call him a woman.

In patriarchal societies like America and Iraq, men as a group experience privilege and oppress women as a group. Men are thought to be more valuable than women. Men are considered more important than women. Under a patriarchy, men are just plain better than women. Displaying the ideal masculinity—which includes publicly rejecting any and all things perceived as feminine or womanly—is how one reaches and stays atop the power structure based on gender.

Consequently, any attribution of femininity (like women’s underwear, for example) amounts to an attack on a man’s masculinity and therefore an attack on his social standing by comparing him to women, the lesser sex.

We see this go unquestioned in American culture all the time. Male characters on television comedies who display any meaningful emotion are regularly teased by other characters for behaving like a woman.

In everyday situations involving actual people, a man who does not conform to the masculine ideal of perpetual false bravado may be insulted by being likened to female genitalia. A typical American father might even scold his son for “acting like a girl.”

And what happens to that little boy’s sister when she witnesses such an event? What is she to make of her father declaring plain as day that being a girl is a bad thing? And what messages are sent to all women when their very identities are used as an insult?

Such language both works to preserve and is a product of the idea that women are inferior to men. Whenever being female or having feminine characteristics is used as an insult or a punchline, the message is sent to women that we are pathetic, emotional, weak and laughable. The message to women is that we deserve our status at the bottom simply by virtue of who we are.

And what is the message to men? They are told that women don’t have to be taken seriously and that they certainly don’t have to be respected. Because after all, women are so “less than” men that the very idea of being a woman is insulting! And when you consider someone so far beneath yourself, it becomes scarily easy to rationalize unethical behavior toward them. You might even think she deserved it.

The truth is that there is nothing actually wrong with being a woman. I, for one, happen to like it, and I know a lot of other women who do, too. The only thing bad about being female is experiencing societal oppression because you are female.

One way we can work toward stopping that oppression is by challenging sexist language when we hear it. Like it or not, words do have power. They have enormous influence on our perceptions, and can easily be used to either convey the idea that women are filth or that we are human beings worthy of dignity and respect.

The next time you hear a man insult another man by somehow calling him a female, feel free to ask what precisely it is he has against women. And if by some strange and tragic twist of the universe and patriarchal programming you hear a woman do it, ask her what she has against herself.