PTSD Cheesecake: The New York Times on women, war, sexual assault and… Glamorshots?
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Posted by Guest Blogger March 19th, 2007 |
By Guest Blogger Lindsay Beyerstein
The New York Times Magazinethis Sunday ran quite a good article about female vets with PTSD, headlined, “The Women’s War.” A cover tease for the piece includes this quote:
“More than 160,000 women have been deployed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan . They have experienced more lethal attacks than American women did in Vietnam. Many have reported being sexually assaulted, harassed and raped by fellow soldiers and officers. They are in no small number traumatized and unable to find their way to their former lives.”
Important stuff… but I don’t know what to make of the accompanying photographs by Katy Grannan. One photograph (see top of page), the largest and most prominent of the images accompanying the PTSD story, shows 21-year-old Army specialist Suzanne Swift reclining on a black, rocky beach with her hand on her inner thigh. The article explains that Swift went AWOL rather than return for a second tour of duty in Iraq.
If there’s a message here, I don’t get it. What is Grannan trying to say? Why would you get a woman in jeans and a t-shirt to pose like a swimsuit model on a beach in order to illustrate a story about how she got PTSD in Iraq and went AWOL? I’m not saying it’s a bad photograph. Actually, I think it’s very good technically and aesthetically. It just doesn’t make any sense.
Here’s another portrait from the same series. The subject is a naval construction worker whose war-related PTSD in Iraq was exacerbated by the fact that she was also raped by fellow Americans. There’s something weirdly sexualized about this image. Look at the angle of the shot. She’s wearing a knee-length skirt, but she’s positioned so that her bare legs and daintily flexed ankle command as much attention as her face. Like Suzanne Swift, the construction worker is reclining on one arm, this time on a white couch rather than a beach. Her other hand is on her thigh, like Swift’s.
Here’s another subtle variant on the lounging pose, in which the barefoot Keri Christensen leans back into a corner with one leg slightly bent at the knee and flexed ballerina-like at the ankle.
If you watch the full multimedia presentation you’ll find a relatively traditional portrait of the same Navy vet sitting up and looking at the camera. The difference in effect is striking. I can’t find a way to link to the individual stills within the Flash presentation. So, I’ll just explain where to find the relevant shots: The traditional portrait is image #3 in the series. Image #4 is a beautiful picture of Army Sgt. Jane Bulson in the door of her camper, but again with the thigh-clutching.
Grannan is well-known for fine art photos influenced by pinups and other vintage erotica–her website is probably not safe for work, but definitely worth a visit. She is internationally famous for applying fashion and commercial photography methods and aesthetics to intricately composed informal-looking posed portraits of non-models.
Maybe in her assignment for the NYT PTSD story Grannan is parodying pinup photos to make a point how these women soldiers were regarded by their male colleagues. After all, it doesn’t seem like Grannan intended to make her subjects appear to happy or comfortable in the positions she chose for them.
Would the New York Times run a picture of conscientious objector Ehren Watada awaiting his court martial like a faun in repose? I’m guessing they wouldn’t, even if Lt. Watada was willing to indulge the photographer.
[Hat tip to zuzu]
Guest Blogger Lindsay Beyerstein is a New York journalist blogging at Majikthise.
March 21st, 2007 06:39
Thank you for writing this. I, too, was irritated and confused by the photos of the women. I wonder what Sara Corbett, the author of the article, thinks of the pictures.
March 21st, 2007 15:33
Just speculating, but I wonder if it has anything to do with trying to show that women can be feminine and military? Like, hey, they’re not some butch chicks with double-dyke haircuts who will make men feel girly? These are still WOMEN, man!
Regardless, it’s pretty fucking annoying. It does seem that male military is generally shown in more military settings, whereas even in uniform the women are put into more fem settings, as if to emphasize they are different from their male counterparts. It would be interesting to do a survey of multiple articles on men and women to see how they’re treated.
I seem to recall one about a female USAF drill sergeant which showed her out of uni–maybe that’s arguably apt since it was about her being disciplined for posing nude? Ahem.
March 21st, 2007 15:36
WIMN In Uniform
Lindsay Beyerstein is guesting over at WIMN’s Voices and notices something peculiar about an article on PTSD and female troops. ntodd
March 22nd, 2007 18:45
Aaah. Left/right convergence on the bogus-ness of the NY Times. I’m an ex-Army right wing guy and think the Times (and Salon’s) articles about the pwight of poow hewpwess wimmin in the military are disgusting. I served with a fair number of good female soldiers, and found them to be just like male troops, except they were women. Each was individual, had her strengths and weaknesses, and was part of the team. You just deal, y’know?
Now Times and Salon come along and it’s all about the poor helpless women. Well shit. Either y’all are good enough to serve alongside us on equal terms, or not. I happen to think you are; the Times implies you aren’t.
I think if the Times and Salon seriously gave a tinker’s damn about the military or the men and women in it, or the actual humanity and dignity of all individual men and women generally, they wouldn’t try so hard to turn them into cheesecake or helpless victims - this is the feminine counterpart to the Times’ patented ‘The Mill Shut Down in Dumbass Cletus’ Home Town So Now He’s a Terrified Soldier” story.
You aren’t the only people to notice this. Check out Jason van Steenwyk at Countercolumn and his take on these articles, and particularly how he feels about sexual harassment & assault in the ranks. (He’s a conservative and a company commander in the reserves who has done a stint in Iraq). I think you’ll find a lot of common ground on the issue, at least with a lot of the .mil folks. And check out this story if you want to see one of our Women Warrior heroes - not portrayed as a victim like some of the other prominent women, but shown truthfully as a warrior:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/16/AR2005061601551.html
March 22nd, 2007 19:10
[…] What our friends on the left have noticed, is that the Times have to treat female soldiers as victims, or as cheesecake. […]
March 23rd, 2007 12:31
“I wonder what the author, Sarah Corbett, thinks of the photos?”
After listening to a bit of the multimedia presentation, narrated by Corbett, I don’t find a stark contrast between the view proffered by the photos and that presented by the author.
She starts off by saying, “I started to wonder how women might be affected differently [in emotional terms] by the war than men.” [Paraphrasing.]
For god’s sake. As has been said before in other contexts (but hardly ever seems to gain any traction) the differences AMONG men’s responses, or women’s responses, is much greater than the differences BETWEEN them. War is hell. It’s hard on women, AND it’s hard on men. To emphasize the difference in their reactions along gender lines does two things:
One, it downplays the trauma men experience.
And it’s bad enough that lots of men don’t get the help they need because mental illness is even more stigamatized for them than for women.
Two, it reminds me rather unpleasantly of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century discourse about women and men in the marketplace: the cold, cruel “real” world of dog-eat-dog and individualism. Men could hack it, because they had their families waiting at home, their “havens in a heartless world.” Women, on the other hand, were delicate flowers (much better suited to wife/motherhood) who had to be protected from the market, hence special restrictions on their employment (which, not incidentally, put them at a competitive disadvantage).
Anyway, to make a long story short, this strikes me as yet another piece with an underlying message about women’s infirmities. Vomit.