Content warning: The following story contains mentions of sexual violence. Please proceed with caution and care. If you require support, there are resources available.
It is well documented that in times of war, civilian women and children are the most at risk of loss of life. According to a fact sheet from the United Nations Department of Public Information, however, the issue goes deeper than that.
While “entire communities suffer the consequences of armed conflict, women and girls are particularly affected because of their status in society and their sex. Parties in conflict situations often rape women, sometimes using systematic rape as a tactic of war.”
To put it another way, in a time of war, women become more vulnerable to sexual violence. An apt case in which wartime sexual violence is widespread can be found in South Sudan.
Turmoil and civil tensions has been prevalent in South Sudan since its independence in 2011. The various militia, armed groups, and government actors involved in the civil wars perpetrate violence against South Sudanese women as a tactic of terror. Shedding a stark light on how deep-rooted cultural problems contribute to the dehumanisation of female bodies.
The root of the issue, and what enables women to be disproportionately targeted by sexual violence in war, is the conception that women are somehow lesser than men.
It is thus crucial that we move beyond the patriarchally enforced traditional ideals of masculinity and femininity in order to combat rape culture in any given society in which sexual violence is disproportionately perpetrated by one gender group against another.
Rape culture refers to a society in which most acts of sexual violences are permissible. Wartime sexual violence is a sign of pre-existing rape culture.
A study focused on South Sudan’s first civil war (2013-2020) states that in order for sexual violence against women to be leveraged as a weapon of war, it has to exist in peacetime as well. It pinpoints the nation’s ‘bride-wealth culture’ as a crucial contributor to the commodification of women’s bodies and thus rape culture. The crux of bride-wealth culture is the economic value placed on women due to the dowry. With testimonies from various South Sudanese women, the study described how women are made akin to cattle to be traded between families in exchange for wealth – effectively rendering the woman a commodity.
But the commodification of women’s bodies is evident almost everywhere across the globe: in films, shows, ads, songs and more. The leveraging of the female body for profit, often through hypersexualisation, results in the objectification and subsequent commodification. This fuels harmful ideas of women’s bodies existing to serve the desires of men, as merely bodies and not an entire human.
The same study cited the word of an army man who stated that, “Soldiers are separated from [their] families for so long … so when fighting is happening they see a woman they feel like they can have sex with … they do whatever they like … you see her face is good so therefore you want it.”
The testimony from the soldier depicted quite aptly what the study highlighted as an “ideology of hyper-masculinity,” that was prevalent during the nation’s first civil war. Markers of hyper-masculinity are virility, violence, and offensive behaviour toward women. An exaggeration of traditionally masculine traits such as having a high libido, aggressiveness, and dominance.
Such traits in men, while being socialised traits for the most part, are so heavily normalised that they are regarded as biological. This becomes detrimental when it is used to suggest the absence of choice in men’s sexual pursuits, no matter how vile, because a desire for sex is a ‘part of their biological nature.’ Feminist writer Jill Filipovic posits that the feminist challenge to this narrative is that women and men are not merely animals, but more than capable of rational decision making.
Contrastingly, the “traditional” feminine is sweet, nurturing and passive. This feminine “ideal” is the perfect counterweight to the masculine “ideal”, as she submits to his aggression and virility because it is her biological nature to do so. This ideal stereotype of femininity bleeds into conversations about sex as well as rape, in which women are passive receivers.
Both traditional gender norms create and uphold the ideal symbiosis of the impuissant woman and the rightfully powerful man.
Espousing a more materialist feminist perspective might allow one to move beyond the idea that masculinity and femininity are bio-essential, and that men and women are, rather animalistically, slaves to their biological nature. Therefore allowing us to create a culture in which male perpetrators of sexual violence are given an adequate amount of blame for their actions, and female victims are not seen as passive victims with which men may do as they please.
As conversations about sexual violence are becoming less taboo, we must progress past surface-level conversations and coverage on sexual violence in order to facilitate a movement which works toward de-commodifying the heavily commodified female body. This entails rethinking what we view as masculinity, femininity, and sex –- as this can be the difference between a world where rape culture is prevalent and one where it isn’t.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
