By Military Woman
Question: Why is the Military Women column anonymous?
Answer: We publish this column anonymously for several reasons. One simple reason is to allow serving and released/retired women and men to input into the column without any worries of first needing workplace permissions before voicing their opinions on what could be viewed as government-related policy matters.
Anonymity also removes all concerns around how to best recognize and order multiple inputter’s names into the column’s byline.
Another reason for anonymity relates to the original purpose behind this column—to spark thoughtful reflections and open honest conversations around topics that can be considered by some as politically sensitive and/or controversial. Keeping the column’s readers blind to the authors’ identities (including their rank, age, gender, race, trade, military experiences) helps to keep the focus on the issues, and not the authors.
A final reason for anonymity is for our own piece of mind. Throughout society, including the defence community, it largely still remains a position of privilege to be able to challenge the status quo without concurrent concerns that doing so may negatively impact the security and safety of one’s work and personal life. Most women, and some men, do not (yet) hold this privileged position, and must still choose between full participation in public life and compromising their sense of safety for themselves and their family.
Talking about women and women specific issues in any public forum can, unfortunately, result in unwanted attention. The fact remains that women who publicly challenge the status quo are still being met with gender-based aggression. One has only to look at the Amnesty International report titled “Toxic Twitter – A Toxic Place for Women” to see the validity of such safety concerns. This report lists numerous online abusive behaviours aimed specifically at women, including name calling, body shaming, racism, sexism, homophobia, misogyny, doxing, stalking, rape threats, death threats, and threats against women’s
families.
Furthermore, a disturbing trend of late is the increasing prevalence of online threats crossing over to real life threats. Sometimes the perpetrators are unknown to their targets as was the case for then Environment Minister Catherine McKenna, MP for Ottawa Centre, and for Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Other times the perpetrators are well known to their targets, often previous intimate partners, as was the case for Private First Class Vanessa Guillen. It should be of no surprise, then, that women’s voices remain underrepresented in many areas of public discourse—including the defence community.
Many military women’s issues, including the benefits of online anonymity, have been eloquently explored in the “Wavell Room”, a British contemporary military thought website. In one such article, “Second Order Sexism”, the anonymous author acknowledges that men can also find themselves open to receiving online backlash, but “when a man gets into an argument on Twitter, the worst that tends to happen is he gets called a few names. The game for women is entirely different. Putting our real names to our accounts opens us up to doxing, stalking, trolling, revenge porn and worse.”
The article goes on to assert that an anonymous author’s arguments and ideas are no less worthy of consideration, and that “we should be looking at the quality of the argument/debate/discussion that an individual provides rather than getting caught up in the name they use. Engage with the argument, not the individual.”
These are especially wise words when applied to defence-related discussions where it is still possible to find regimental “tribal” loyalties, combined with ingrained gender and rank hierarchies, that serve to dismiss, intimidate, and silence dissenting voices and opinions. “If we really want to be a diverse, inclusive and female-friendly organisation”, concludes the author, “let’s come away from the outdated idea that only troublemakers choose to be anonymous and accept that for some of us, personal security is far more than just a phrase, it’s embedded in everything we do.”
For all these reasons and more, that’s why this column is anonymous, for now.
