What Abu Ghraib Taught Me
by Barbara Ehrenreich

What we have learned from Abu Ghraib, once and for all, is that a uterus is not a substitute for a conscience. A certain kind of feminism, or perhaps I should say a certain kind of feminist naiveté, died in Abu Ghraib. It was a feminism that saw men as the perpetual perpetrators, women as the perpetual victims and male sexual violence against women as the root of all injustice. Rape has repeatedly been an instrument of war and, to some feminists, it was beginning to look as if war was an extension of rape. There seemed to be at least some evidence that male sexual sadism was connected to our species' tragic propensity for violence. That was before we had seen female sexual sadism in action. Even those people we might have thought were impervious to shame, like the secretary of Defense, admit that the photos of abuse in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison turned their stomachs. The photos did something else to me, as a feminist: They broke my heart. I had no illusions about the U.S. mission in Iraq – whatever exactly it is – but it turns out that I did have some illusions about women.

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