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.