Bitches’ brew The emasculation of Iraqi prisoners shows how far American women still have to go BY GLORIA-JEAN MASCIAROTTE

Private First Class Lynndie England proved Longfellow right: "There was a little girl who had a little curl . . . when she was good she was very, very good indeed, but when she was bad she was horrid." Deemed by the New York Times as a "symbol of abuse," and by other media as "the scandal’s most visible soldier," England’s sometimes cocky and regularly cute tomboy face now epitomizes this war’s "horror." Unlike Jessica Lynch, whose media hagiography kept her on that feminine pedestal with her straddling heroine and victim roles, England’s story puts her squarely in the usual role of an aggressive woman in a man’s world — "a bitch." As such, her image lays waste to war’s sentimental raison d’êtres: saving women and children, and fighting for the girls back home.

The collateral damage of England’s perverse image extends beyond simply knocking women off their wartime pedestal. It also equalizes the woman soldier, making her one of the boys. Now one must ask whether this supposed Iraqi war of liberation will be the winning campaign of the women’s liberation movement in the USA. Is our war against terrorism a fight to liberate women from fundamentalist patriarchal oppression, even here at home? If so, shouldn’t the president stride from an F-16 in Seneca Falls, New York, the site of the first Women’s Rights Convention in America, swagger across the tarmac, and plant a "Mission Accomplished" banner?

Let’s think these questions through with a little women’s history. Once upon a time, a group of good little girls decided to become not-so-good women. They founded the women’s liberation movement. In those fairy tale’d days of raised red-fisted power, those girls thought they could change the world. They worked away on the cold, hard facts of patriarchal oppression — unequal pay for equal work, sexual harassment, a lack of reproductive choice, and an absence of equality in work, school, and elsewhere.

Some of these women worked to change the very words we use to radicalize reality, transforming it from the ground up. Although these linguistically minded women thought quotas were necessary to yield gains in gender equity, they also sought to radically revamp the underlying social architecture to secure real freedom to be you and me for him and her. These gals realized that the patriarchal world needed an extreme makeover, not simply a cosmetic one.

Their storied strategies included reclaiming words used to demean women. One of the most prevalent gender slurs they played with was "bitch," a derogatory term for woman dating to the 15th century. The women with curls in the middle of their foreheads wanted to change the content while keeping the strength of the word’s negative affect. Heady with promise of a brave new world, women libbers boomeranged the word’s angry emotional energy in the ’60s and ’70s, creating the consciousness-raising groups known as bitch sessions.

In these gatherings, women came together for unique female-only "structured interactions," raising their voices for the first time. The lingua feminista, so to speak, was used to teach themselves about, to name for themselves, and to ameliorate by themselves what Betty Friedan called "the problem that has no name." In addition to calling the sessions and each other "bitch," they extended the newly accented vocabulary, calling each other witches and girlfriends. These women believed that the ironic echo of the expletives and diminutives would eventually shatter the consequence of those negative terms — fear and loathing of articulate, opinionated women.

Following this pie-in-the-sky feminist work, in the ’80s Oprah dedicated an entire uplifting show to women who considered themselves bitches, who played bitches on TV, and who wanted to be bitches. As late as 1996, Lisa Jervis and friends founded Bitch Magazine, a counter-cultural Ms., and feminist response to pop culture. The rags-to-riches linguistic fairy tale was still strong.

However, a few weeks ago, in an undergraduate writing class at the Rhode Island College, a female character in a male student’s story derisively called a male character, "Bitch." As a slang-impaired professor, I suggested an off-handed correction: "A girl would call a boy, ‘bastard.’ " In unison, the class said, "No way, she’d use ‘bitch.’ We use ‘bitch’ for anyone who’s a weakling, a fuck-up, a hopeless douche bag." "What?!" the hopelessly square professor cried. "Both women AND men can be bitches — slimy losers?!" "Yeah, like in prison, you know," the class imperiously scoffed as one.

At that moment, I realized that the feminist fairy tale was fractured. The literalists who had looked with arched-eyebrows and obvious smirks on this attempt to translate language, and so, the a priori experience of gender, had won. In a culture where frat boy power mobilizes military grunt mentality, where presidential nicknaming obfuscates real relations, the face of Private First Class England illustrates the familiar horror of boys and girl games in the old U.S. of A. The familiar initiation rites of college fraternities, and, even, high school sports team executed in the US shadow the scenes at Abu Ghraib prison.

Following the good old school games of shaming, traumatizing, and defiling the identities of others by perversely sexualizing them — making them our bitches — our military executed ideological torture, turning prisoners into the lowest common human denominator: a bitch; a lewd, sensual, sexually begging creature; an unctuous bottom; a woman. True, this Oxford English Dictionary spectrum traverses the homosexual man, but we all know that his ideological perversity is that he is a she.

Wait. Some say words run away with the truth, especially in instances where you have two very different, almost untranslatable, cultural populations interacting. However, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, "A girl is a girl is girl." Al-Schweiri, an Abu Ghraib prisoner, offered this explanation of US abuse on CBS’ 60 Minutes II: "They were trying to humiliate us . . . They wanted us to feel as though we were women, the way women feel and this is the worst insult, to feel like a woman."

Our soldiers made bitches out of our enemy. They showed our national superiority, our victorious control, by making bitches out of Iraqi people as if they were pledges rushing the frat house of Bushwhacked democracy, as if they were recalcitrant roomies in the prison house of Preemptive Strike. This is why Private First Class England’s image gives face to the very down-home horror of this war. It provides a vertiginous looking glass in which men turn women into bitches, and women then turn "othered" men into even worse bitches.

This feminist take points out the histrionic sleight of hand behind high-level apologies that offer such phrases as "not the nature of the American people"; "Not standard operating procedures"; and "Poorly trained and overwhelmed soldiers." These statesmanlike words imply that there is a place in the USA where a bitch is not a bitch, or, that Bitch is not an alternative culture voice. Lynndie England’s face contradicts the truth of those phrases.

Her image clearly mirrors our gender culture in 2004, a time when a survey by the Defense Department’s inspector general found that nearly 12 percent female graduates of the United States Air Force Academy were victims of rape or attempted rape during their four years at the academy. It might also explain why, according to the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, part of the federal veterans department, "the stress of war may be associated with increases in rates of sexual harassment and assault."

Indeed, when strutted by the unchanged force of patriarchal privilege, the logic of US military power, even at its poorest, easily overtakes the effort of a few not-so-good women who insisted that changing the world required changing the way we thought. Like the slant rhyme at the end of Longfellow’s sexist doggerel, playing around with sexuality and gender – when it’s done just with cosmetic changes — turns us all "horrid."

Gloria-Jean Masciarotte bakes a hell of a cake. She can be reached at gjmas@aol.com.