[Text ID: Simply place the levers and triggers of military power and statecraft in women's hands, the twenty-first-century liberal news media suggests, and good things are practically guaranteed to follow. Listen, what kind of person would scoff at this? A person who has some kind of problem with women in power, that's who. Why be persnickety and demand to know: Of what, exactly, does Sparkle's for that matter Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson's different perspective consist? Only a jerk would notice that there is nothing in the Politico article that concretely explains what it is that makes this "takeover" indeed a takeover (a word that implies people acting in concert towards a specific end) rather than, say, a reshuffle. Why not focus on the cute distractions? There are, above all, extensive quotations from Karen Panetta, an engineering professor at Tufts. One of Panetta's favorite talking points is an anecdote about "soldiers in the desert using pantyhose to keep sand out of sensitive equipment." This is triumphantly followed up with the rhetorical question "Do you think a guy thought of that?" (We are meant to say, no, a guy would never think of that, men don't know about pantyhose.)
Panetta is the author of a feminist empowerment manual, Count Girls In: Empowering Girls to Combine Any Interests with STEM to Open Up a World of Opportunity (2018). In it, Panetta argued - in a probably conscious paraphrase of Anne-Marie Slaughter - that "girls don't have to change who they are" to become arms dealers and military officers. Rather, the war machine must change for us. And which female "us" is that? The writer and journalist Rania Khalek once sardonically declared that, in American geopolitics, "all that actually matters is breaking glass ceilings, even if that means breaking the actual ceilings of women in Yemen." Real events bore out Khalek's observation with spine-tingling crudeness when, in 2019, the weapons manufacturer Raytheon (responsible for many lethal drone bombings of Yemenis) wrote a check to the Girl Scouts of the USA, after which the two organizations cosponsored a series of "Cyber Challenges" themed around juvenile females' career advancement. Smiling cadettes learned code and received "mentorship," all courtesy of the "defense" megalith that ongoingly profits from selling bombs to Saudi Arabia, which end up obliterating Yemeni school buses.
Raytheon's feminist Cyber Challenge events were intended to encourage Girl Scouts to grow up to become "women in STEM," based on the insight that "Raytheon's vision about making the world a safer place and the Girl Scouts vision of making the world a better place couldn't be more well suited as partners." It is unpleasant to reflect (especially for a former Girl Guide like myself) that this hilarious assertion isn't entirely wrong in light of the history of feminist youth clubs - such as the junior partners of Mary Allen's militias - enrolling in patriotic militarism. Today, Girl Guides and Brownies don't, as far as I'm aware, sew navy uniforms or go around shaming conscientious objectors by handing them white feathers. But a story about girls possessing special powers to uplift, heal, soothe, and generally morally edify the nation and, by extension, the economy, lives on. Today, instead of leading "auxiliary" volunteer services on the home front, Girl Scouts are encouraged to use their special girlpowers as Pentagon commanders, which is a perfectly feminist goal if you believe that, to quote erstwhile National Organization for Women president Eleanor Smeal, "peace is not a feminist issue."
