Do women make war less than men?

By Jonathan Power

OSLO (JP): In a most interesting juxtaposition of the many facets of humankind's sexual nature, the French are testing nuclear weapons and women are protesting at the Beijing women's conference that war is "a man's game". In a video-taped address "that seemed to radiate across Asia," reported the New York Times, "the Myanmarese Nobel laureate, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, ridiculed military spending as 'the war toys of grown men'" and added that "to the best of my knowledge, no war was ever started by women."

It would be nice to think she is right, and that no French female president would be out in the Mururoa atoll testing her potency. Women may not be genetically endowed with the macho chromosome but just in my own neck of the woods, Margaret Thatcher, Queen Elizabeth I and Boadicoa had few inhibitions about making war. And elsewhere in the world, Indira Gandhi (war with Pakistan), Golda Meir (war with Egypt), Tanau Ciller (on- going war with the Kurds) and Benazir Bhutto (nuclear saber rattling with India) do not seem to have had many qualms about ordering up a stack of war toys and flaunting them.

Women are different, but not those who decide to climb to the top of a man's world. They have, it appears, to shed too much of their femininity to get there. They do keep some feminine touches, of course.

Thatcher blatantly used her sexual charm on her male colleagues to get her way, many of them have since reported. Bhutto, with no great success, has tried to roll back the prejudice dispensed to women by Pakistani courts, particularly in rape cases. Gro Harlem Brundtland, prime minister of Norway, with her crusade for sustainable development has started to inject into the heads of economic planners a woman's sense of the need not just to think "we inherit the earth from our fathers" but a longer term view that "we are merely borrowing it from our children."

Nevertheless, I would say that all these women have compromised large portions of their femininity. At the end of the day it is not, I believe, in a woman's character to make war or to prepare for war, as all these women do. (Norway spends per capita more on weapons than any other western country.) These women have been simply subverted by the male culture they attempted to do in.

But it would be another story if, across the board, women were truly equal and could call the shots without deference to male attitudes. The urge to resolve disputes through military action or military preparedness would sharply diminish.

The women's primal instinct is to nurture, to care and to mediate -- even to compromise.

Not all women possess these attributes to the full. Many women, confused by the pressures of life and perhaps misled by some of the dictates of the women's movement, feel pushed to repress them, but these virtues are, I am of no doubt, women's contribution to the makings of civilized human behavior.

There are many men who take their cue, consciously or unconsciously, from women who seek to control and limit the macho-oriented culture in which they are compelled to live --whether it be the single-minded, self-absorbed, competition in the work place or the thematic and realistic sex and violence in films and television or the influence of the military- industrial complex.

There are many men who work to grace the world with beauty and compassion, and who seek to put a premium on softening the edges of competition, on going the extra mile and formulating alternatives to confrontation. Michelangelo and Mozart were two of these. So were Henri Dunant, Dag Hammarskjold and Andrei Sakharov. Today I would suggest so are Georgio Armani and Yehudi Menuhin, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mahbub ul Maq and Pierre Sane.

The "woman" in these men, which all of us males have in some proportion, is not suppressed but allowed to surface and become part of their everyday character with an extraordinarily benign effect. (Homosexuality is perhaps the extreme of this but, to my mind, detracts from it. It is a pity that too many "sensitive" men get confused by it, but that, after all, is an inevitable response to the problem we are talking about).

Women, the world over, as the Beijing conference is making clear, have a long way to go before they gain an easy and relaxed equality. Even in Norway, with a woman prime minister and over a third of the cabinet and 40 percent of parliament women, one only has to stroll through the business district to see it is still very much a man's world.

But one day, if progress continues at its present pace and if, meanwhile, male-dominated society hasn't blown us to smithereens, I believe women who take power will be able to be truly female, without looking over their shoulder at the men who put them there. I only wish I could live long enough to see if my hunch is right.