According to Monica Potts of TAPPED possibly the first political/terror suicide bomber was a young Palestinian woman back in 1985. I’d add that back in 1991 a Tamal woman, Thenmozhi Rajaratnam, blew up herself along with Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. And since the year 2000 Chechen women have participated in suicide bombings in Russia.
All of which leads Potts to wonder why a quarter century later the New York Times still seems surprised that women could do such a thing. (I really like her concluding sentences, which I’ve italicized.)
[N]ote the inherent sexist tone in many of these stories in the way the women are assumed to have special motivations compared to male bombers, who aren’t any less troubled for wanting to blow themselves up than women are.
Look at this paragraph from the Times story:
While there is no single reason that women decide to give up their lives, experts said they have usually suffered a traumatic event that makes them burn with revenge or question whether they want to live. In the case of the attacks in Russia, this could be the death of a child, husband or other family member at the hands of Russian forces, or a rape. Russian authorities have said the women are sometimes drugged.
You know what? I bet there’s no single reason men become suicide bombers either. When writers discuss the motivations of male suicide bombers, the explanations, rightly, tend to be macro — ideology, objection to the ongoing American wars or a result of the relative poverty and instability of the countries they hale from. The explained motivations of the women always tend to be some personal trauma or the result of sway held over them by men in their lives. The implication is that violence is unnatural to women, so something must be broken within them to explain it. The really dangerous implication is the converse: that violence comes naturally to men and is merely one of the ways they react to the material conditions in which they find themselves.
Note: As usual neither Potts nor I are playing the “no matter how destructive, self-destructive, or stupid, if a woman does it must be progress” card. More like the opposite, as in wow, it takes some pretty heavy-duty gender narratives to ignore 25 years of history.
And, like Potts, I’m really disturbed by the assumptions not just about what women shouldn’t “naturally” be capable of but also the assumptions about what men “naturally” are.
Finally, once again, it’s feminists like Potts rather than anti-feminists standing up against stereotypes of women and men.
