I thought it would be especially appropriate here to include a homage to one of televisions most sex-ified warriors, Xena: Warrior Princess. We can see here that she is clearly ready for battle with her long flowing dark hair, her companion with the all-too-common bleached hair. Her breasts are also nicely protected with huge round metal plates. I suppose the television producers thought that in this way, men would still be able to ogle a beautiful heroin while at the same time enjoy some violence, leather, and weapons (you know, guy stuff.)
I think that this topic also plays in nicely with Byrnes, "Towards a Gendered Understanding of Conflict." What garnered my attention most was his argument that in times of war, gender roles are more highly revered and encouraged. Even women who join the army are exposed to a horrifying amount of sexual harassment and rape. MSNBC released a study that claimed that while 6 percent of men complained of sexual harassment, over one third of women had faced this same problem. This is likely due to the endemic that Byrne discusses. He states, "The training of men in armies involves the drilling into men of a particular notion of aggressive masculinity which is intimately related to misogyny.
The language of armies often reflects this construction of masculinity as the most common insults are those that suggest that a soldier is homosexual or feminine." In this sense, how will women ever be able to take up non-clerical positions in the armed forces when a mindset that has been used with armies for centuries is still alive and well? The same goes for issues surrounding DADT. If homosexuality is considered non-masculine and therefore feminine, how will these barriers ever be overcome? With a decreasing number of citizens choosing to become part of the armed services in America, it seems illogical to exclude a majority of all citizens.
Byrnes also points out how men also suffer from this paradigm. Women encouraged the status-quo by dispensing white feathers to men who chose not to fight, representing their cowardly nature. It is interesting to see how, though the rape of women has been continuously been focused on, as raging marauders loot as rape as a form celebration, men suffer as well. Byrnes writes, "As with women, the rape of a man can signify the ultimate expression of power, and in many cultures a man who perpetrates a rape on a man is not considered homosexual. There is, however, very little documentation on this subject, which is likely to be the result of the even greater social taboo against men talking of being raped." In this way, gender stereotypes are being carried out. While a woman who is raped can be considered helpless and defenseless against her attacker, a man, according to standards, should be able to defend himself as the naturalized power he was born with is taken away. It would be interesting to see a study focused on this issue in the future.

Brocke-Utne and the Reality of Peace

   While reading Brigit Brocke-Utne's piece, "Feminist Perspectives on Peace and Peace Education," I was a little confused as to her motives. While I can comprehend the ideas of positive and negative peace, I did not understand how she could bring in such a heavy subject such as wife-beating and condense it to such an extent. I understood that she believed that as long as men were either repressing or physically harming women, positive peace could not exist. I think the author has unrealistic standards, as she defines positive peace as the "absence of indirect violence reducing the quality of life, the absence of repressing in microstructures leading to less freedom of choice and fulfillment, and the absence of repression in a country of free speech the right to organize, etc." Although it seems like she has noble intentions here, I don't think that any society can ever have a complete absence of violence.
    While I talked in my last post about making social changes in order to decrease the amount of violence that occurs, I don't understand how a culture could be so perfect as to fulfill all of the requirements. All of her statistics are very striking, but I feel like she clumps together different forms of violence against women into one group that need to be investigated singularly. FGM and wife beating, while both horrid forms of violence against women, happen for different reasons. While they both represent control and retaining the current hierarchy, there are different solutions for each of these problems.
      Also, I felt like the article went in completely different directions that didn't seem to mesh well together. First, she discusses peace and the dichotomy between positive and negative, and then three-thirds of the way down I am reading about polls stating that women are more anti-military and how money spent on the military would be better served to feed the hungry. I felt that she glossed over some areas and used a large number of generalizations. The last line of the article reads, "We can say that patriarchy denies many women a voice, no matter under what economic system." I don't believe that it is purely the economic system that is created these inequalities. I suppose she is using a radical liberal voice and only speaking from one perspective, but it was a little frustrating for me for her to state that we can only have positive peace in any society when there is 0% direct or indirect violence. Her Thomas More view conflicts a bit with my slightly Hobbes-ian feel today. However, I have to give her props in her analysis of war time rape, and the fact that for the most part, only rape that is committed by the "other side" is ever reported. I never truly thought about this, but it makes sense given that as unemployment and hardship increase, so does violence against women. I just wish that she would be able to focus more specifically on a topic such as this, as I believe her views would be better supported.