feminish

The U.S. Army is, it seems, issuing families of soldiers serving overseas with life-size cardboard cut-outs of their loved ones.

I was struck by the words of Kay Judkins (quoted in the Boston Globe) whose husband, Jim, is a minesweeper mechanic in Afghanistan, talking about the place the cut-out has in her family:

“He sits at the head of the table. Yes, he does.”

I immediately had visions of comparable female-soldier households, with the 2-D Flat Mommy serving the real-life-daddy his dinner as he continued to sit patiently at the head of the table… while in reality the soldier wife was out shooting bullets and ducking grenades in Iraq.

And I noticed the NY Times’ revealing choice of title for their article When Soldiers Go to War, Flat Daddies Hold Their Place at Home, and wondered precisely why the headline wouldn’t quite work as “Flat Mommies Hold Their Place at Home”.

But I immediately realised that it’s not funny at all, and I felt quite sad. On the one hand there are men and women risking life and limb so they can suppress, kill, maim or capture other people (or whatever it is they do); on the other there’s a life-size cardboard photo that a child puts next to him on a swing. It seems very odd.

Admittedly, the whole business did begin fairly simply: a wife wanted a real-size photo of her husband so her young infant could more easily make the connection between the two-dimensional photo and the nice man called ‘Daddy’ who, every now and again, showed up and stayed for a while. But for those like Kay Judkins who are putting him at the head of the table, the practice seems to have been taken to a whole other level. It’s no longer just about teaching a child to recognise an image; it’s quite a deep denial of the costs and losses and pains of War.

The U.S. Army is, it seems, issuing families of soldiers serving overseas with life-size cardboard cut-outs of their loved ones.

I was struck by the words of Kay Judkins (quoted in the Boston Globe) whose husband, Jim, is a minesweeper mechanic in Afghanistan, talking about the place the cut-out has in her family:

“He sits at the head of the table. Yes, he does.”

I immediately had visions of comparable female-soldier households, with the 2-D Flat Mommy serving the real-life-daddy his dinner as he continued to sit patiently at the head of the table… while in reality the soldier wife was out shooting bullets and ducking grenades in Iraq.

And I noticed the NY Times’ revealing choice of title for their article When Soldiers Go to War, Flat Daddies Hold Their Place at Home, and wondered precisely why the headline wouldn’t quite work as “Flat Mommies Hold Their Place at Home”.

But I immediately realised that it’s not funny at all, and I felt quite sad. On the one hand there are men and women risking life and limb so they can suppress, kill, maim or capture other people (or whatever it is they do); on the other there’s a life-size cardboard photo that a child puts next to him on a swing. It seems very odd.

Admittedly, the whole business did begin fairly simply: a wife wanted a real-size photo of her husband so her young infant could more easily make the connection between the two-dimensional photo and the nice man called ‘Daddy’ who, every now and again, showed up and stayed for a while. But for those like Kay Judkins who are putting him at the head of the table, the practice seems to have been taken to a whole other level. It’s no longer just about teaching a child to recognise an image; it’s quite a deep denial of the costs and losses and pains of War.