Books, Arts & Manners - Killing Me Softly. - Review - book review

National Review, April 17, 2000 by Cathy Young

The Kinder, Gentler Military: Can America's Gender-Neutral Fighting Force Still Win Wars?, by Stephanie Gutmann (Scribner, 300 pp., $25)

ON an obstacle course in Navy basic training, several female recruits dangle from the steel bars, unable to do the pull-ups. Some men help out by grabbing their legs and pumping them up and down: This is considered "teamwork." To amused eyewitness Steph anie Gutmann, this surreal scene exemplifies something gone terribly wrong with our armed forces.

In The Kinder, Gentler Military, Gut mann, a journalist and first-time author, takes a skeptical look at the recent push for gender integration in the U.S. military-an effort that, she believes, runs up against the intractable realities of biological difference, with devastating effects on morale and readiness.

In the mainstream media, the ad vancement of women in the military is generally treated as a success story marred only by the resistance of Neanderthal males. Can Gutmann's passionate polemic, based on research and observation, make a dent in this orthodoxy? Gutmann doesn't really help her case by making it clear that she's not too sympathetic to the goal of equality, at least if understood as the blurring of male and female roles. This, to her, implies a dull and even "chilling" androgyny. She seems rather nostalgic for the idea of the military as an arena that allows men to take pride in doing something women can't. She believes that "queasiness . . . at the thought of an organized, government-sanctioned use of women to kill and be killed comes out of hardwired instinct," and that we must cherish this instinct.

It's quite possible that one reason this argument strikes me as injudicious is that I don't agree with it. It seems to me that under the most gender-neutral public policies, both our individual diversity and our indelible sexual identity will save us from "bland sameness." I admit to a certain "queasiness" at the notion of special protections for women -whether of the feminist or conservative variety-and of treating men's lives as less precious. (I also suspect Gut mann overstates male eagerness to charge into battle; surely most of the men who have fought in most of humanity's wars have not done so willingly.)

But leaving that aside, Gutmann's appeal to traditional ideals of manhood and womanhood seems most likely to impress those who already oppose the new role of women in the military, while alienating many of the unconverted. That's a pity, because Gutmann makes a strong case, on practical rather than philosophical grounds, against the pres ent approach to gender integration-and offers recommendations that most reasonable people can endorse.

Psychological sex differences can be endlessly debated, but the male- female disparity in size and strength is a clear and inconvenient fact for champions of gender integration. The official denial of it means that many women hold military jobs that sometimes require lifting 80- 100 pounds, a task that only about 15 percent of women soldiers can actually perform. Thought physical norms are diluted, female soldiers suffer dramatically higher rates of injury. Gut mann also worries that efforts to accommodate women lead to an unmanly coddling of recruits: This not only leaves recruits ill prepared for field conditions, but fails to provide the rigors and challenges that many of them, especially men, crave.

And then there's sex. As Gutmann caustically observes, we are meant to believe that men and women, properly trained and sensitized, "can eat, sleep, tent, march, and haul load together like a merry band of brothers without the fireworks and histrionics that have characterized sexual . . . er, gender . . . relations throughout human history." Sometimes, sex in the "New Military" -along with the resulting pregnancies-seems to be accepted as inevitable; at other times, the party line is that all sexual dynamics can and must be eliminated as a threat to unit cohesion.

No less schizophrenically, the dogma that women and men are essentially alike coexists with the assumption that sexuality is something imposed by brutish males on innocent females. This attitude, Gutmann shows, dominated the response to the Tailhook scandal, and later to liaisons between female Army trainees and male sergeants-resulting in shocking injustices toward some men. The zeal to protect women from anything that could be construed as harassment makes a mockery of equal treatment and seems far more paternalistic than the exclusion of women from combat.

Thus it turns out that the "gender-neutral" military is not gender- neutral at all. Says one exasperated former service woman, "There was this doublethink with women being both excellent warriors, ready to kill the enemy, and delicate wallflowers who will fall apart at a joke and had to have gender-normed grading and different [physical] tests with less push-ups."

Still, the situation may not be quite as dire as Gutmann claims; nor are all the woes of the "New Military" necessarily gender-related. Softened-up basic training may be simply a misguided attempt to accommodate a generation with less respect for authority and more self- indulgent habits. The drop in Navy pilot-retention rates in the late 1990s may have been due to better opportunities in the civilian economy, not just feminist witch-hunts (Gutmann's own statistics suggest that attrition was comparable a decade earlier, before Tailhook). Nevertheless, Gutmann marshals plenty of evidence that concerns about the effectiveness of our coed fighting force are justified.