The Privileged Sex by Martin van Creveld

Author:Martin van Creveld [van Creveld, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2013-08-30T21:00:00+00:00

3. The Protected Sex

If women have very seldom fought in war, then probably the most important reason for this is not because they are discriminated against. Rather, it is because one of the reasons why men fight — some would say, the most important reason — is precisely to protect women. To have women participate in war while at the same time protecting them is folly, the more so because it is not only the women who have to be protected, but their children as well.

As previously mentioned, the male imperative to protect women by fighting on their behalf may have some kind of biological basis. Often it is inspired by love, and often it is reinforced by women’s own behavior. After all, if men cannot protect their women, then whatever else they may do is of questionable value. Men’s need to protect women explains why, in the Iliad, the Trojan leader Hector preferred “going to hell and being covered by soil and ashes” rather than witness his wife, Andromache, “being led away, crying, by one of the copper-armored Achaeans.”[791] Some of the reliefs of the Athenian Parthenon show Lapiths defending their women against Centaur attacks. About 500 years after those reliefs were made, Elazar ben Yair, commander of the Jewish Zealots at Masada, tried to persuade his men to commit mass suicide in the face of inevitable defeat. First he spoke about the delights of freedom, but did not carry conviction. Next he described their wives’ and daughters’ “shame” if they should fall into the hands of the Romans, “while they themselves were tied up and helpless.” This time his words had the intended effect. The Zealots cast lots, selected five among their number, lay down at their families’ side, and died to the last man.[792]

The annals of the American West bristle with accounts of lascivious redskins lusting for white ladies’ flesh.[793] On the other side, one of the main reasons why the settlers fought was allegedly to protect their women. Throughout World War I, troops of all nations saw an urgent need to protect their womenfolk against rape.[794]At various times during the Arab-Israeli conflict, Israeli determination to fight was fueled by what people saw as the threat that sex-starved hordes of Arab savages presented to their women. At these and many other points in history, there is always a ferocious enemy positively slavering after one’s own women. Those women, depending on the fashion of the society at hand, are portrayed as exceptionally thin, exceptionally thick, exceptionally modest, exceptionally forthcoming in short, exceptionally beautiful and exceptionally desirable. One of the objectives of war is always to save them from being raped, even at the cost of one’s own life, and even if, as occasionally happens, the women themselves do not want to be saved.

Whereas male prisoners were routinely killed, often after having suffered the most horrible forms of torture, women, valued both for their sexuality and for their labor, were normally spared. In California, the Pomo and the Nisenan

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