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While searching for something completely unrelated I ran across the following post from last April by Jender of Feminist Philosophers.

Lt Colonel Diane Beaver was a staff judge advocate at Guantanamo Bay. She describes discussions about what “interrogation techniques” to use, in which colleagues took ideas from the TV show 24:

The younger men would get particularly agitated, excited even: “You could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas.” A wan smile crossed Beaver’s face. “And I said to myself, you know what, I don’t have a dick to get hard. I can stay detached.”

Then she gave her approval to waterboarding.

Standpoint theorists have argued for the claim that women or members of other marginalised groups may be able to attain superior positions for acquiring knowledge, at least of particular subject matters. But none of them would ever have endorsed the claim that female anatomy makes one automatically superior in judgments about torture techniques. The privileged standpoint(s) are not meant to be due simply to anatomy, and— most importantly, but most commonly overlooked by critics— they’re meant to be the product of a lot of hard intellectual work, rather than automatic. For more on standpoint theory, go here.

I nicked the whole post from here.

Seems like another failure to incorporate Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s concept of kyriarchy into ethical decision making. In the context of the Guantanamo decision-making process having a penis (at least as represented in Lt. Colonel Beaver’s testimony) provided no advantage, but not having a penis provided no advantage either… while creating the (mistaken) impression it did.