War Wimps And Women Analysis

Carol Cohn’s writing “War, Wimps and Women” discusses the impact of gender discourse on warfare through analyzing personal experience, observing defense intellectuals and analyzing an experience of a male physicist. Cohn’s main goal is “to understand something about how defense intellectuals think, and why they think that way”(Cohn, 228), and how gender discourse impacts their thoughts and decisions. Gender discourse has a large impact in how the defense intellectuals think, and therefore gender discourse has a large impact on the decisions and outcomes of war. Gender discourse is words, the way language is used and most importantly a system of meanings and ways of thinking (228). Cohn starts out her writing by discussing what gender discourse is, why she decided to analyze it and the way in which she is analyzing it. She goes into how gender discourse is a “symbolic system” which means that no woman or man perfectly fits the roles they are given, nevertheless people’s …show more content…
One of the other groups dropped two nuclear bombs on her territory and their reasoning for that, as she learned at the end of the game, was because the other group thought she was a “wimp.” She was called a wimp because her decisions were not masculine enough and therefore the reasons behind her decisions were not important. Again we see that gender discourse eliminates the full picture.
Cohn ends the article with a brief discussion on the use of linguistics in gender discourse. The example she uses is how Saddam Hussein and the Iraq war were talked about among American soldiers, politicians, and the media. Iraq as a whole was referred to as ‘he’ and became interchangeable with Saddam Hussein. This turned Iraq into a singular person rather than a country with people living in it. Turning Iraq into a singular person mainly gave troops a single opponent and it created a diversion from the mass destruction and