Pre-Raphaelite Beauties with Machine Guns

[sharplittleteeth]

Boing Boing linked to this amazing photo essay:

Rachel Papo's Serial No. 3817131

It documents the everyday lives of young women in the Isreali Defence Force.

The photos are beautiful. But there's something sad and disturbing about seeing a young women standing on her bed beneath a poster for The Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind wearing full battle fatigues, or another talking sadly on her mobile phone with an assault rifle beside her.

It's not that I think women don't belong in the armed forces, or anything like that. It's that they have to be there - because military service is compulsory in Isreal, and because young people need to be forced into being soldiers because the political situation is so fucked up.

"My service had been a period of utter loneliness," writes Papo in her Artist's Statement, "mixed with apathy and pensiveness, and at the time I was too young to understand it all."


And yes - some of these women have faces that would make Dante Gabriel Rossetti weep. But those Boing Boing commenters frothing over the pictures like they were soft porn? Epic fail, dudes. Epic fail.

Comments

[greylock.livejournal.com]

I can't get that website to work (I think it's been slashdotted) but there have been any number of websites dedicated to Hot Chicks of the IDF, probably more faux Lesbian shots than "serious photojournalism".

[trayce.livejournal.com]

Take the slash (hur! sorry) off the first link. Then it works.

[greylock.livejournal.com]

Worked for a few shots (without removing the slash (hurrrr) then 503 happened.

There are some girls there who could occupy my West Bank and dominate my Gaza Strip.

(Two-fer sale on entendres - today only)

[sharplittlteeth.livejournal.com]

Please. We're trying to run a sophisticated LJ here.

Okay. Except for the dick joke the other day.

[greylock.livejournal.com]

Oh? Sophisticated?

My hebrew is horrible, but how about "Oy vey, I'd like to get meshugga with one of those girls", or something about a bris, possibly a moyle...

/

[sharplittlteeth.livejournal.com]

Fixed.

[trayce.livejournal.com]

That first girl looks so... *young*, and lost. :/

[morgan303.livejournal.com]

I can't see the site, thanks to Boing Boing and the squillions of nerds who want to see if all the chicks in the Israeli armed forces look like Ziva from NCIS.

But I would like to say that it's no more tragic than the fact that men are forced into service. Sure, it's less romantic and we don't feel all squishily protective over the "stronger sex", but I'm sure a bunch of them also like soppy romance films, and want to be writers and artists and musos rather than soldiers. Sorry to be difficult but this sort of "positive" sexism rubs me up the wrong way.

People shouldn't be forced into the armed forces. It doesn't matter what their gender is, people shouldn't be forced to be soldiers. End of story.

[sharplittlteeth.livejournal.com]

Agreed, totally.

I think that's what icked me out so much about the Boing Boing comments. These are people here, they're in a weird and fucked up situation, and yet the most human empathy some people can come up with is "I'd hit it".

As for the "positive sexism" thing... I don't think that's what the artist was trying to convey. She served in the IDF, fifteen years later she went back to document the lives of other women in the IDF as a way of understanding what she herself went through. It's very hard to think of these people as delicate little flowers that need protecting when they're slouching casually and confidently with assault rifles slung over their backs.

I once knew a woman who was in the IDF. She loved it so much she joined the Australian Defence Force when she returned home.

[morgan303.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing it wasn't the artist's intention. It was more this sentence that prompted my response:

But there's something sad and disturbing about seeing a young women standing on her bed beneath a poster for The Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind wearing full battle fatigues, or another talking sadly on her mobile phone with an assault rifle beside her.

It struck me that you were particularly moved by the fact that they're girls, and that the juxtaposition of 'normal' femininity and weapons seemed particularly poignant. Seeing a guy talking on his phone next to an assault rifle might not have produced the same reaction. Given your reply though I'm guessing I misread it. Sorry!:)

[sharplittlteeth.livejournal.com]

No, don't apologise. You have a point.

I mean, this is explicitly a photo essay about women. Some of them are very, very beautiful.

So yes, there's a certain amount of sexual attraction that colours my reaction to these photos that I wouldn't feel if they were photos of young men.

But I hope that's only a small part of it. I've felt similar sadness and disquiet looking through photo essays on young American GIs in Iraq.

[morgan303.livejournal.com]

Now we're getting to it, some of them are (to use Mr Rossetti's favourite phrase) stunners. With really lovely hair. I found myself oddly glad they didn't make them shave it all off like GIs have to.

Conscription's a freaking horrible thing. When it looked like Bush was going to introduce it I agreed to marry an old internet mate of mine so he could move down here. War's fucking awful full stop. But then I'm not saying anything new, there.

[damien-wise.livejournal.com]

Bah, you can keep your NCIS Ziva -- but Abby's all mine, bwahaha! :->

Haven't seen the pics myself for the same reason, other than one photo that was with the BoingBoing article.

At a guess, it's a photojournalistic series on people wrenched from normal life and pressed into compulsory military service. A lot of countries do it. I've even heard of students living in Australia long enough to be considered an "Aussie", only to get nabbed at the airport and sent straight to boot-camp while returning to the home country to visit relatives.
Just cos it happens, that doesn't make it right.
Here's the first two reasons that pop into my head why it's horribly wrong:
(1) Those who don't want to join the armed forces will be scarred by the experience;
(2) Willing participants make effective soldiers but conscripts bring-down the whole side.
So whether you look at it from a humanitarian/sociological point of view or that of optimising your military resources, it's so counterproductive it's nuts. Then-again Israel is a country that chooses to be in a state of perpetual war and, AFAICT, war never makes sense.

My take on why it focus on women -- partly because the photographer is a woman who's been through the same experience as her subjects so there's a deeply personal connection for the artist, and partly because it goes against the stereotype of soldiers / fighting people being men.

It's curious that I've formed such a strong opinion on the photos after seeing only one, though it's fair to say most of that comes from my opinion of the surrounding issues. From that sample of one, I'm not terribly interested in seeing the others. It's not the style of photography I'm into (a billion technicalities would bug me) and if I want titillation (which seems to be what most commenters are taking from it) then there's plenty elsewhere on the web. But I'd be interested to read the Artist's Statement some time to see where she's coming from and give her a chance to make me re-evaluate things.

[morgan303.livejournal.com]

I actually think it's a really cool idea, and, having finally been able to access the images, I think it's a fairly powerful photographic essay. Not only does it depict a bunch of fairly normal-looking young women juxtaposed against the artificial lifestyle of the barracks, but it gives a human face to the war in a different way than we're used to. I agree with you absolutely about the photographer's decision to focus on young women.

My response was more directed at David's post than the work itself.

The artist's statement is here: http://www.serialno3817131.com/statement.html
It's worth reading, although pretty much what you have already summed up.:)

[damien-wise.livejournal.com]

Hmm, managed to make myself sound really quite dismissive and arrogant there (beside lumping-in a response to your post with a response to David's post).
It's worth saying that, since reading the artist's statement, I've now seen most of the photos there. The set ties-together and the themes go a lot deeper than "Like school camp only with more guns," which is the sorta of thing I heard elsewhere.

[morgan303.livejournal.com]

S'okay, I didn't get "dismissive and arrogant" at all from that.:)