12
Carol Cohn
Donald Trump almost makes the job of a feminist political analyst too easy.1 When the North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un alluded to the “nuclear button” on his office desk in his 2018 New Year’s speech (Jong-un 2018), Trump’s tweeted response on January 2 could not have been much more transparent: “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!” (Trump on Twitter, January 2, 2018). That there is no nuclear button, that “nuclear button” is already a metaphor, only sharpens the point. Even for people not inclined to see the world through the lens of gender analysis, something seemed to click when Trump reduced the discussion of a nuclear war that would kill millions of people and leave millions more in horrific suffering down to the size of his and the North Korean president’s buttons. The President of the United States’ nuclear saber-rattling sounded a lot like, well, penis-measuring.
Sad. But significant? From most commentators, the response was an eye-rolling dismissal of Trump’s tweet as “juvenile” and as yet one more impulsive, impolitic, dangerous, and unpresidential act by a president like no other. But those who dismissed his words may have missed their broader significance. The way we use language to frame things matters. I argue in this chapter that the metaphors we use and the gender discourse embedded in the ways we talk about war and weapons of mass destruction powerfully influence our understanding of them, or lack thereof. When I say “gender discourse,” I mean not just language, but a system of meanings, ways of thinking, images, and words that first shape how we experience, shape, and represent our gender identities – but also do more than that; they shape many other aspects of our lives and culture. The ideas about masculinity and femininity that underpin Trump’s tweets matter, not only in his understandings of the world, but also in international politics, in national security, and in nuclear strategic thinking more broadly.
While Donald Trump may in some ways appear exceptional – in the fragility of his ego; in his obsessive concern with his reputation for manliness (exemplified in everything from the Billy Bush braggadocio to his defensiveness about the size of his digits); and in his apparent inability to do anything other than “let it all hang out,” as it were, unscreened by a fig leaf of intelligence or prudence – it would be a grievous mistake to think that other political leaders and national security elites were not just as deeply affected by ideas about gender, albeit perhaps not always in such crude or lurid ways. Unspoken, unexamined ideas about gender are embedded in, and shaping of, the language used in national security paradigms, at the deepest levels. Trump’s lack of diplomatic restraint and linguistic finesse may have brought these discursive gender dynamics to the surface, but they have been there all along.
12.1Abstractions and Sexual Metaphors in Weapons Talk
These dynamics first became apparent to me over three decades ago, when I was working among civilian nuclear strategists, war planners, weapons scientists, and arms controllers. As I attended lectures, conversed with defense analysts, and interviewed graduate students in training, what first struck me was how removed they were from the human realities behind the use of the weapons they discussed. Nuclear weapons and nuclear warfare were discussed in abstract analytic tones, as games of strategy, without any graphic sense of the human suffering or environmental devastation they would wreak. Although my first reaction was to wonder, “How can they think this way?”, my own experience of learning to speak in the language of the nuclear experts soon began to make it clear; their distancing from the human realities of nuclear war occurred in part through the professional discourse into which they (and I) were quickly enculturated. It was filled with bland, abstract phrases such as “first strikes,” “counterforce exchanges,” and “limited nuclear war,” which in no way hinted at the concrete horrors of a nuclear holocaust. Suffering and devastating loss are erased through euphemism. When some (largely fusion) nuclear weapons are deemed “clean bombs” because they produce relatively less radioactive fallout than other (largely fission) nuclear weapons of the same yield, the impact on human bodies of the massive blast pressures and firestorms those “clean bombs” would unleash are sanitized away. Or, to choose another example, the women, men, and children who are killed by bombs targeting buildings, bases, ports, airports and weapons systems are completely invisible to the mind’s eye when they are referred to in the now-familiar phrase “collateral damage” (Cohn 1987). The only way this erasure of humans from discussion of nuclear war does not seem completely incomprehensible is when you realize that the discourse used by nuclear experts is one that has as its subject the weapons themselves, abstractions of the weapons’ relations to each other, and the geopolitical effects of those abstractions. Their language, then, has no words for the potential suffering of people in the targeted societies, and certainly none for grappling with the moral implications of possessing or using such weapons of massive, total destruction (Cohn and Ruddick 2004).
But the language I heard nuclear defense intellectuals using to discuss nuclear weapons wasn’t only characterized by abstraction and euphemism. It was also saturated by a lively and troubling set of domestic and sexual metaphors, and it is in this gendered, sexualized discourse – evidently still very much alive – that Trump has found his comfort zone for talking about weaponry. The gendered metaphors I encountered evoked sexualized bodies through conversations about “vertical erector launchers,” “thrust-to-weight ratios,” “soft lay downs,” “deep penetration,” and the comparative advantages of “protracted” versus “spasm” attacks – or what one military advisor to the National Security Council called “releasing seventy to eighty percent of our megatonnage in one orgasmic whump.” A former Pentagon target analyst once explained nuclear war to me in these terms: “You gotta understand that it’s a pissing contest – you gotta expect them to use everything they’ve got.” An academic referred to India’s explosion of a nuclear bomb as “losing her virginity,” while the question of how the United States should react was posed as whether or not we should “throw her away” (Cohn 1987: 693, 696).
While most of the men I met who used these metaphors would no doubt dismiss them as utterly trivial and insignificant, some linguists argue that metaphors like these are not just verbal window-dressing; they fundamentally shape our sense of reality. This basic claim has been elaborated over the decades by George Lakoff (1991; see also Lakoff and Johnson 1980), who argues that while metaphors are linguistic constructions on the surface, they are simultaneously conceptual constructions central to human thought. In a metaphor, one applies a domain of knowledge (A) to another (B), giving shape to one’s perception and understanding of B. Often, domain A is more concrete and less abstract or conceptually elusive than B; the metaphor at hand thus makes domain B easier to think about, though the metaphor’s simplifications may be terribly misleading or problematic.
Lakoff’s claims about metaphor and thought have found support in cognitive science. A substantial body of empirical work has found that linguistic framing steers human reasoning, and that metaphors can give shape to the way people reason about abstract and complex ideas ranging from time to electricity to social dynamics. In a 2011 article, for instance, Paul Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky examine whether metaphor can influence the way US Americans reason about the best social policy to address crime. They gave participants one of two paragraphs to read. Both paragraphs reported identical facts and figures about crime, but they diverged in their opening line: One described crime as “a wild beast preying on the city,” the other as “a virus infecting the city” (ibid.: e16782). Then they asked subjects open-ended questions about the best way to address the crime problem. The subjects shown the “virus” metaphor were more likely to suggest social reforms that might help address the problem at its root and inoculate society against recurrences. Those shown the “beast” metaphor were significantly more likely to propose that law enforcement capture and punish criminals. Participants thus seem to build their mental representations of a phenomenon, and their reasoning about it, based on the metaphor used to frame it.
Needless to say, the stakes of metaphor are particularly high in discourse about politics and military conflict. Lakoff has written of metaphor’s political implications, contending, for instance, that conservative American speech tends to work with a metaphor of the state as a “strict father” (2002), with many conservative political preferences springing from this conceptual model. In a related vein, I found that in discussions about international politics, defense intellectuals often framed the United States as a mature and powerful father figure who needed to set firm limits for immature countries who could not be trusted to know what was good for them (Cohn 1987: 697).
Lakoff has also argued that metaphors shape military decisions. In the run-up to the first Gulf War, he notes, American officials represented Kuwait as an “innocent ingénue” that had been “raped” by Iraq’s occupation – one among several metaphors that justified the United States military coming to “rescue” it (1991: 25, 29). As Lakoff summarizes it, “Metaphors can kill” (1991: 32). When Trump’s ego investment in always having the biggest and the best plays out in verbal assertions about the size, power, and efficacy of his “nuclear button,” he taps into a broader set of gendered metaphors about masculine pride, power, and sexual prowess. This is probably useful for him politically, stirring the support of those who wish to feel identified with that version of manliness. But if Lakoff is right, it also has consequences in shaping Trump’s own thinking about nuclear weapons. If “domain A” is contests over manliness, it is certainly more concrete and less abstract or conceptually elusive – as well as more familiar and more emotionally invested in – than “domain B,” the specialized science and technology of nuclear weaponry and the arcane complexities of nuclear strategic theorizing. The danger, again, is that the metaphor at hand will not only make “domain B” easier to think about, but will also be terribly misleading or problematic. This may be especially so for Trump, who repeatedly shows his need to publicly portray himself as a manly, sexually powerful individual, while simultaneously, according to multiple sources from inside his administration, having absolutely no interest in or capacity to focus on reading or being briefed about topics about which he knows and understands little. Indeed, Trump has made statements which appear astonishingly ignorant about nuclear weapons; during his presidential campaign, he reportedly asked upon multiple occasions why if we have them we can’t use them (Belvedere 2016). (Since becoming President he has taken actions to lower the threshold for their use, and also issued multiple, often self-contradictory, statements about them.)
12.2Ideas about Gender as a Preemptive Deterrent
The role of gender in national security discourse, including Trump’s talk, goes deeper than the role of not-so-subtle metaphors. Even more disturbing than what is said is what cannot be said, or even thought, within the confines of those male-dominated, professional spaces – the conversations that can’t be had, the concerns seen as illegitimate or unprofessional to raise, the ideas which are never given serious consideration, the thinking that gets short-circuited. My argument is that ideas about gender have an ever-present role in national security and nuclear discourse, shaping and limiting the inputs which are considered valid, and the way actions and ideas are interpreted and valued. It happens in multiple ways: Some are overt, as in the name-calling that impugns the masculinity of men (or women) who don’t conform, while some are much more subtle, as certain ways of speaking and topics of conversation are already, in a professional discourse, pre-marked as masculine/legitimate or feminine/illegitimate.
The gendered name-calling is startlingly rife. “What are you, some kind of wimp?” was an insult I frequently heard lobbed at anyone who urged restraint in responding to a provocation or attack. And I know from my own experience how effective it can be. I participated once in a war game sponsored by the RAND corporation. The players, nearly all of whom were men, were divided into opposing teams and then the teams were isolated from each other, so we could never be in dialogue with our opponents. We were given a “scenario,” a situation of escalating tensions and military conflicts, starting in the Middle East and spreading to Eastern Europe. We were to make judgments about what military actions to take, and the game organizers would periodically ratchet up the tension by tweaking the scenario. Our team strategized with troop movements, attacking ground forces and at certain stages withdrawing troops from various sites such as Afghanistan, but the scenario gradually escalated until the other team decided to use tactical nuclear weapons against our troops. Our team decided against a hair-trigger use of nuclear weapons in retaliation.
In the debriefing after the game, a member of the opposing team described their impressions. Characterizing our team as a single, male individual (a common tic in discourse about the enemy in war, with profound implications beyond the scope of this chapter), he said: “When he took his troops out of Afghanistan, I knew he was weak and I could push him around. And then, when we nuked him and he didn’t nuke us back, I knew he was just such a wimp, I could take him for everything he’s got and I nuked him again. He just wimped out.”
And it stung. Even as a woman, being called a wimp felt deeply cutting. It also functioned as a kind of catch-22 insult; we couldn’t start explaining that our actions were not the result of wimpy-ness, but rather taken for other reasons, because the explaining and protesting itself would be taken as proof we were wimpy! In short, deploying the word “wimp” acts like a bath of sulfuric acid; it erases all other considerations. (For comparison, see McIntosh, “Crybabies and Snowflakes,” this volume.) And the message for us, and for the others in the room who were watching this play out, was that the only way to avoid being seen as a wimp was to avoid advocating for anything other than military responses that are perceived as maximally aggressive and powerful (Cohn 1993: 234). The charge of being a “wimp,” in other words, stops the processes of deliberation. Once an idea is gender-coded as insufficiently masculine, no one else in the room wants to give it serious consideration, because doing so means that they, too, would be considered wimpish.
But overt impugning of masculinity is still only the most surface level at which ideas about gender play out in strategic thinking. They work in deeper, more subtle ways, as well, to shape security discourse and habits of thought. This is because associations of masculinity with dispassionate distance, abstraction, toughness, and risk-taking, and of femininity with empathetic attention to others, bodily vulnerability, fear, and caution are culturally pervasive, and as such, they are already embedded within nuclear and national security discourse. And there they function to make some kinds of ideas seem self-evidently “realistic,” hard-nosed and rational, and to make other ideas, inputs, thoughts, and feelings appear patently inadmissible, self-evidently inappropriate.
To offer an illustration: A national security analyst was walking me through the modeling he did of a hypothetical Soviet nuclear cruise missile attack in Western Europe and different scales of US responses. After listening to his account of what would be likely to happen in each scenario, I asked, “And what did it show would happen when the US did not respond militarily, at least initially?” He looked startled by the question, and replied, “We didn’t model that – you just wouldn’t model anything so passive.” That is, even the thought-experiment was foreclosed, owing to its feminine-coded “passivity.” How often does that form of cognitive self-censorship, whether conscious or not, result in both national security professionals and politicians not thinking through the full range of options when contemplating optimal policy responses?
Or perhaps even more seriously, how does it distort thinking about nuclear weapons altogether? A white male physicist at a nuclear strategic think tank described to me an experience that had disturbed him. When he and some colleagues were modeling a limited “counterforce” nuclear attack (i.e. an attack targeting the opponent’s nuclear weapons systems, not purposefully targeting their civilian population), they found that by using slightly different assumptions, their projection showed that instead of thirty-six million immediate fatalities, there would “only be thirty million.” He went on: “All of a sudden, I heard what we were saying. And I blurted out, ‘Wait, I’ve just heard how we’re talking – Only thirty million! Only thirty million human beings killed instantly?’ Silence fell upon the room. Nobody said a word. They didn’t even look at me. It was awful. I felt like a woman.” He added that henceforth he was careful never to say anything like that again (Cohn 1993: 227).
What did the physicist mean when he said that he “felt like a woman”? One way to understand it is that communities have gendered linguistic behavior rules, and that he transgressed those of his community. That is, there are distinctive ideas about what is considered “normal” linguistic behavior for men and women. While in practice, there’s tremendous flexibility in the linguistic behaviors people can adopt, and men and women violate prescriptive norms all the time, those violations do little to weaken what Talbot (2003: 475, 478) calls the “exaggerated dualism” of the “hegemonic construct of preferred speech patterns.” In the United States, this dualism typically locates qualities such as sympathy, support, listening, and pro-social emotion on the feminine side, and reporting or lecturing about facts, confrontational and confident stances, and status-consciousness on the masculine. The physicist, then, in his blurting, evinced emotion and a lack of the control and distance which are central to the “just the facts, ma’am” masculine behavioral linguistic style. That doing so was “awful” should not be surprising; no matter the cultural variation in what is considered linguistically normal for men and for women, it’s common for whatever is deemed “men’s speech” to be considered more statusful (Hall and Bucholtz 1995), just as being a man carries higher status than being a woman. That he was careful to never say anything like that again should also not be surprising, as there are powerful incentives for men to avoid verbally gendering themselves as female – which, in turn, creates incentives to keep some ways of talking and thinking about nuclear weapons out of the room.
Another way to understand why the physicist “felt like a woman” takes us beyond the level of linguistic behavior, to look into the ways in which gender is encoded within national security discourse itself. What is unusual in this story is only that the physicist used the phrase, “I felt like a woman.” But what he is describing – that the professional discourse of nuclear experts excludes conscious attention to human bodies, their vulnerability and their suffering, and precludes space for articulating or even having feelings about the scale of human death and suffering one is planning – is entirely standard. That is, the discourse valorizes, and marks as “expert” and “professional,” a series of characteristics and approaches that our culture symbolically codes as “masculine,” including dispassion, abstraction, a calculative form of rationality, and scientific and technical knowledge. At the same time, it marks as illegitimate, as inadmissible, other kinds of inputs and other modes of attention and intelligence – and it does so through their association with the “feminine.” In other words, the discourse has gender-coded positions within it, and if you dare try to bring in concerns which are coded as being on the feminine side, as the physicist did, you not only violate a code of professional conduct, but you also place yourself in the lower status, subordinate, female position in the discourse (Cohn 1993: 231).
What is the impact of this valorizing of the symbolically coded “masculine” dispassion, abstraction, and technical calculation over the “feminine”-coded attention to human bodies and feelings, which is so fundamental to nuclear strategic discourse? At a bare minimum, it is an understatement to say that the “experts’” discourse allows only an extremely partial set of considerations around the use of nuclear weapons. In the many discussions of nuclear weaponry and warfare I witnessed, I often experienced the feeling that something terribly important was being left out and must be spoken; and yet, it felt almost physically impossible to utter the words, almost as though they could not be pushed out into the smooth, cool, opaque air of the room. There is no room to invoke a seven-year-old boy with his flesh melting away from his bones or a toddler with her skin hanging down in strips. Voicing concerns about the number of casualties in the enemy nation, imagining the suffering of their killed and wounded, is out of bounds. Psychological effects – whether on forces fighting a war or on the citizens who are injured, bereaved, or helplessly watching their babies die from diarrhea due to lack of clean water – none of these are to be talked about, all foreclosed by the way gender is encoded in the discourse (Cohn 1993: 231–32). To borrow a term from defense intellectuals, you might say that the embeddedness of ideas about gender in nuclear strategic discourse, and in national security discourse more broadly, acts as a “preventive deterrent” to holistic, and therefore truly realistic, thinking about nuclear weapons and the holocaust that would result from their use.
12.3Presidents and the Gendered Discourse of National Security
Unfortunately, defense intellectuals who theorize about nuclear weapons are not the only ones whose thinking about national security is limited and distorted by embedded ideas about gender. The same gendered discourse around weapons of mass destruction has surrounded generations of American presidents. When Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze reportedly disparaged some of President John F. Kennedy’s more cautious decisions during the Cuban Missile Crisis by calling him a “pantywaist” (Powaski 2017: 33), he made it clear that anyone who let himself be governed by fear of triggering a nuclear war was a sissy. In the mid-1980s, during my participant observation among national security elites who move in and out of positions as advisors to presidents, I heard several discussions about whether then-President George H. W. Bush “had the stones for war.” At the risk of stating the obvious, the stones referred to were not the type that David used as a weapon to defeat Goliath; this was a discussion about genitals, suggesting that a man is not a truly manly man unless he is willing to go to war (or, more accurately, willing to send others to war). By extension, attempting to solve a conflict through nonmilitary measures would mean you were less than fully manly, a point driven home by the multiple media commentators who described Bush as finally “beating the wimp factor” – his prudence, one might say in a different language – by initiating the first Iraq War in 1990. And Trump has gained popularity among his base in part by framing himself as someone who “has the balls” (an oft-repeated phrase about him; e.g. Hackman 2016, McCarthy 2018, Reeves 2019, etc.) that Obama supposedly lacked when it comes to handling North Korea, Iran, and other potential security threats.
Should we be especially worried about the intersection of gendered national security discourses with the gendered insecurities of this one president? Certainly, Trump seems to live in fear of being feminized. Long before running for president he was known for his leering involvement with beauty pageants, and for bragging on the Howard Stern Show, among other venues, about his sexual conquests. A particular point of pride was that he had never changed a diaper, as though this proved he was a real man. Once on the campaign trail, Trump’s discourse was laced with “verbal swagger” (Kiesling 2018), including a stream of insults about the physical size of his male competitors – “little Marco Rubio” (Trump on Twitter, February 28, 2016), for instance, and “liddle Bob Corker” (Trump on Twitter, October 24, 2017b). Size seems to loom as an issue for him. When jokesters drew attention to his hand size, invoking the folkloric American notion that hand size corresponds to penis size and, in turn, to virility, Trump defended himself in the eleventh GOP debate by holding his hands up to the cameras and saying, “Look at those hands, are they small hands? … I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee” (Gass 2016). And in what might be seen as a similar guarantee, when Trump announced (via tweet) that he had decided to call off a military strike on Iran, he prefaced his decision with the assurance that “we were cocked & loaded” (Trump on Twitter, June 21, 2019).2
Not surprisingly, in speaking about Kim Jong-un, Trump has done far more to invoke his own masculinity than just alluding to button size. Trump has taunted Jong-un several times with the appellation “Little Rocket Man” (Trump on Twitter, September 23, 2017a), putting him down on the basis of stature while indirectly impugning the size of Jung-un’s “rocket,” which could be read as yet another phallic stand-in. (Perhaps the indirect reference to the song “Rocket Man” by openly gay pop singer Elton John added an additional layer of emasculation, given the common stereotype of gay men as feminine.) And he has blustered about the nuclear Armageddon he could unleash, with a little too much alliterative pleasure. Trump stated to reporters on August 8, 2017 that Jong-un’s continued threats against the US would be “met with fire and fury like the world has never seen” (Shugerman 2017).
Mainstream national security analysts have been reluctant to think seriously – or at all – about the ways that ideas about gender shape national security discourses and practices. So perhaps Trump’s disparagements of Kim Jong-un’s manhood in one sense did us a favor. Trump has made it glaringly evident that while the literal button or penis size of Trump or Kim Jong-un matters not at all, their need for the world to believe that they are manly men does. Although Trump’s attitude toward Jong-un later changed as he apparently came to admire Jong-un’s manly authoritarian powerfulness (e.g. “Well he is very talented. Anybody who takes over a situation like he did at twenty-six years of age and is able to run it, and run it tough”),1 what stays the same is that his perception of Jong-un’s masculinity remains central to his approach to foreign policy.
What we now need to remember is that Trump is, in this respect, not the exception we might wish. We need to beware of thinking that once his presidency is over, we can all relax into a world of more conventional politicians who will be guided by some combination of rationality and political self-interest, instead of driven by gendered insecurities. Yes, the fear of being perceived as unmanly may be closer to the surface in Trump. And it may drive his statements and actions in ways less leavened by cognitive capacity and attention span, or by empathy and the ability to imagine the impact of one’s actions on others, or by a vision of political leadership as involving responsibility to the citizens of the country or planet as a whole, rather than as a vehicle for self-aggrandizement.
But this is not about individual leaders, individual men or women. Attention to security discourse shows us that independent of the personalities of our political leaders, ideas about masculinity and femininity already distort the ways we speak and think about international politics and national security. And they matter. They mattered before Trump, they matter now, and they will matter after Trump. Most national security analysts, from the academy to the mass media to the executive branch, have ignored this reality for too long, to all of our peril.
Notes
1.A much shorter version of this chapter was published as an op-ed in the New York Times (Cohn 2018), and longer versions of portions of it were published in Cohn 1987, Cohn 1993, and Cohn and Ruddick 2004. Many of the examples of quotations and observations included throughout this chapter are pulled from these select previously published works.
2.A Reuters article referred to this as a “linguistic misfire involving the phrase ‘locked and loaded’” (Trott 2019).
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