President Trump makes the work of a feminist security analyst very simple. With this type, it is not necessary to subtly disentangle the subtexts.
The first week of January something seemed to resonate among people across the political spectrum, even among those who do not usually see the world through the lens of the genre: when Trump tweeted "I also have a nuclear button, but it's much bigger and more powerful than his, and mine does work! ", the boast of nuclear might directed at Kim Jong-un of North Korea sounded a lot like, in effect, a comparison of the size of the penises.
It's sad. But significant? Among the majority of the commentators, the response was an exasperated rejection of Trump's tweet as "a youthful act", although only another one of the impulsive, reckless, dangerous and unpresidential of a president as there is no other. However, it seems to me that the president not only boasts too much about his "nuclear button", but that many commentators are still unaware of the point. It is not just an unimportant show, besides embarrassing.
Ideas about masculinity and femininity are important in international politics, in national security and in strategic thinking about nuclear weapons. Trump - with his fragile ego and his particular obsessive concern with the reputation of his manhood - may have brought these dynamics to the surface, but they have always been present, though in less vulgar and strident ways.
I started thinking about this issue more than three decades ago, when I was working among civilian nuclear strategists, war planners, weapons scientists and weapons controllers. What struck me was how far they were from human realities behind the weapons they were discussing. This distancing occurred partly through a professional discourse, which was characterized by a surprisingly abstract and euphemistic language and, in part, by means of a series of bustling sexual metaphors.
The human bodies they evoked were not those of the victims; Instead, they were conversations about vertical erector launchers, push-to-weight relationships, soft bedding, deep penetration, and the comparative advantage of prolonged attacks versus spasm attacks-or what a military adviser to the National Security Council called "freeing 70s." to 80 percent of our megatonaje in an orgasmic attack "-.
However, it quickly became clear that the role of gender in national security discourse was deeper than not so subtle metaphors. It was even more disturbing how it shaped what could be said, or even thought, within the confines of these spaces dominated by men. "What are you, a weakling?" Was an insult that was hurled at anyone who urged to avoid a response to a provocation or attack. The discussion about whether political leaders "had the guts to go to war" suggested that the desire to resolve a conflict through nonmilitary measures could imply that you were not totally male. During the missile crisis with Cuba, when Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze underestimated some of the more cautious decisions made by President John F. Kennedy calling him "effeminate", he made it clear that anyone who allowed himself to be governed by the fear of unleashing a nuclear war was a coward.
The open questioning of masculinity remains only the most superficial level in which ideas about gender in strategic thinking are developed. They also work in deeper and more subtle ways. The culturally generalized associations are rooted in professional discourse. Those of masculinity with equanimity, distance, abstraction, hardness and risk taking; those of femininity with emotions, empathy, bodily vulnerability, fear and caution.
In addition, there work so that some types of ideas seem obviously "realistic," hard and rational, and others are patently inadmissible, obviously inappropriate (a physicist told me that he and his colleagues were once modeling a limited nuclear attack when suddenly expressed their consternation that they were talking so casually about "only 30 million" immediate deaths. "It was terrible, I felt like a woman," he said.
In other words, integrated ideas about gender in nuclear strategic discourse go beyond the questions related to the button being more than just a button. They act as a brake on a more holistic, and therefore truly realistic, thinking about nuclear weapons and the holocaust that would result from their use.
Read also: The Despair of Diplomats in the Trump Era
Traditional national security analysts have been reluctant to think seriously-or in the slightest-about the ways in which ideas about gender shape national security. So, if Trump's disparagement of Kim's manhood somehow does not end up bringing us closer to a war with North Korea, then maybe in a way he's done us a favor. There is no doubt that, although the literal button or the size of Trump's or Kim's penis does not matter at all, his need for the world to believe that they are masculine men does matter.
What we must remember is that in this aspect Trump is no exception. Yes, the fear of being perceived as unmanly may be closer to the surface in Trump. And perhaps that is why their statements and actions are not helped by cognitive ability and the period of concentration or empathy and the ability to imagine the impact of actions on others or intelligence or prudence.
However, it is not about individual men or women. Ideas about masculinity and femininity already distort the way we think about international politics and national security. And they matter. They had it before Trump, they have it now and they will have it after Trump, if the president is controlled in some way and that "after" exists. Most analysts of national security, from the academy and even the executive, to the mass media, have ignored this reality for too long, to the danger of all of us.
* Carol Cohn is the director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.
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