Viggo Mortensen's "Master Chief" slaps around Demi Moore as "GI Jane" pretty badly at one point in the movie. They're doing SERE training, and he starts getting carried away with it because he doesn't want to actually see her pass the course and go into live combat situations.
So he pops her a good one in front of the rest of the trainees, who are frothing at the mouth seeing this guy beat up on a woman, and he's explaining to her that this is what the bad guys are gonna do for real and yadda yadda yadda like that, and she replies: "SUCK! MY! DICK!"
This totally destroys the whole scenario. All the guys crack up laughing, and it totally busts the Master Chief's balloon, and SERE training is over for the day, thank you, time to go home now.
Today I went to see Lioness, a movie about some of the women who are being thrust into combat situations for real.
I was sitting in the audience with some of the women from CodePink NYC and no small number of veterans. You could tell the vets. Some had patches and gear on, some had "the watch" and "the hat", some had the thousand yard stare, some had the wiseass comments. For a change I didn't wear my chocolate chips today so I guess people who didn't know me wouldn't have known or cared that I was ex military unless they knew what else to look for.
So I was sitting in the audience before the movie and the woman next to me started asking me about stuff and I found myself telling the story of my own personal "suck my dick" moment.
Because before they send you anywhere near that shit, there's always at least one sexist asshole who thinks that you're not going to be able to handle it because you're a woman, and so you find yourself in the infuriating and anguished position of having to turn on someone who is supposed to be on your side, and having to tell them to "suck your dick".
So I told the story to the lady next to me about how I had a couple of full birds fighting over whether I'd stay in Germany or deploy to Ankara, Turkey as part of HQ USAFE's Operation Proven Force. I was sent to be trained on the intelligence system I'd be administering and maintaining and after a couple of days, the Sterling software contractor said that I spec'd out on the system just fine, but he was going to recommend that I not be sent... because I "should be home baking cookies for my man".
The next several seconds were spent evaluating the choice between breaking his jaw or blackening his eye. I decided a black eye would be flashier and certainly would be something he'd have trouble explaining, but a broken jaw would be more satisfying to me personally. The cost for assaulting this contractor would probably have been about 30 days in correctional custody, temporary loss of my clearance, and possibly a stripe. I did not even consider that the cretin would have been able to fight back. That didn't even enter the equation. He was a skinny, geeky, pompous little richboy wimp, and I was quite confident that I could have broken his jaw before he even knew what was coming. It probably wouldn't have mattered if he was somebody who might have given me trouble, as a matter of fact that probably would have increased my chances of doing it, but I had contemptuously evaluated this prick's ability to respond within the first 30 milliseconds of his statement and moved on to other aspects of the problem.
I think the worst part was I was so enraged and hurt, thinking of the reasons why I'd volunteered for combat in the first place, that I could not even form the words to tell him why. I had offered to go because I wanted to honor the memory of my command sponsor who died over Lockerbie Scotland on Pan Am flight 103.
I held that my combat service would vindicate his death for me on a personal level because he WAS part of my team. And here was this guy SUPPOSEDLY also on my team taking that chance away for reasons of prejudice and stupidity.
The reasons for this are discussed at length in the book "Hardball for Women", which is designed to help women succeed in the equally sexist business world, but it all boils down to this: women are wired to cooperate, and men are wired to compete. Women take the concept of "team" more seriously because it ends up serving as a surrogate for family, and when it comes to protecting and defending family, Kipling said it best: the female of the species is more deadly than the male. For that very reason, marginalizing a woman's contribution by making decisions not based on their competence but on their plumbing is seen as the ultimate betrayal, and it is not a betrayal any woman would care to respond to with their own. It's emotionally painful. It's cruel. It's harassment in and of itself. It's team breaking behavior.
I know Iraq is a long way from Lybia and I am not so stupid or racist that I am going to paint all the people of the Middle East with the same brush, but at the same time I truly felt that the first Gulf War was justified because Hussein stepped on his own dick by invading Kuwait, and that by serving in combat I could contribute to righting the wrongs done to Sergeant Ed Eggleston and his family - his terminally ill mother, his unborn child, the fiancee who had to be carted away to a stateside mental hospital after learning of his death.
Ed's face swam before my red hazed eyes as I considered showing this sexist neanderthal that I was indeed ready for combat... but I've also spent a lifetime controlling that beserker temper and ensuring that it is not hastily acted upon. It went against everything I joined the military for to have to fight someone supposed to be on my side. So in the end I said nothing, stood down, and I was not sent to Ankara. Despite knowing that they wouldn't have sent me anyway and it only would have gotten me punished to stand up for myself in that situation, to this day I regret not breaking that animal's jaw.
So I was telling this story in the theater and when I got to the part about wanting to break his jaw, all the vets sitting around me laughed and all the CodePink ladies around me recoiled. It's to be expected - everyone in the room was anti-war, but for different reasons.
Then we watched the movie.
You know that deadeye country sniper girl in the Eric Flint 1632/3/4 series? She's real, and she's in that movie. Her name is Shannon and no squirrel in Arkansas is safe from her. That ended up saving her life when she was left standing alone in the middle of a Ramadi street holding a SAW during a firefight. She was part of the Lioness team, and she kept drawing combat missions because she was the best shot in her platoon. At one point the (Army) Lioness teams were being sent out with Marines to draw out insurgents. They put Shannon in the rear with the SAW. Apparently Marine combat language and tactics are very different from Army. They do this thing called "touch back" in the Army that the Marines don't bother with. So all the Marines went their merry way and left Shannon holding the SAW in the middle of the fucking street during a live firefight.
Well she said that she found the Marine squad leader after she got back from that (alive and unwounded, at least physically) and kicked him right in the nuts, and when that part of the movie played everyone in the audience laughed and some of them turned around and grinned at me. I couldn't help but notice that even the CodePink ladies laughed and applauded when Shannon related her attack upon her teammate's testicles. I guess the repetition of the message was starting to allow them to "get it" - discrimination is something that SHOULD and MUST be fought, and fought hard, if any true peace is to be achieved.
The "suck my dick" moment usually happens when you're the only woman in a place. I wasn't used to hearing that other women had these moments. I figured the stuff I saw in GI Jane was just something that made good movie. Today I learned something. Sooner or later, every single woman who goes into combat for real has a "suck my dick" moment. Every. Single. One.
Because war as Americans practice it is sexist by nature. If it wasn't, more women would be involved from the get go, and there would be none of this nonsense about preventing women from being in combat. Furthermore, there wouldn't be all this sexual violence, harassment and rape happening to our own forces BY our own forces. Frankly, if more women were involved in combat, there'd be a hell of a lot less combat. Because when a woman fights, it's not for fun and profit and it's not to look better than the person next to her. It's for team, it's for family, and it's for KEEPS.
I got triggered today from this movie, but it wasn't from the combat scenes (twitchy as they were - yes, you do see them killing people and breaking things). It was from the blatant sexual harassment these women endured from their own people. They were sent untrained into a combat zone where they were expected to perform combat duty. They were deployed with Joint Force teams that had different tactics, training and language. On what PLANET do Marines leave a member of their team, their country, and A WOMAN behind during a firefight? Welcome to Planet Sexist.
And they received absolutely no credit for what they did, because technically according to official United States military policy, they weren't even supposed to be there at all.
Lioness is showing at the Tribeca film festival now through May 4th.