A feminist decries pacifists' 'rubbish'

As the scrappy Ivy League-educated voice behind the blog site www.asparagirl.com, Brooke Schreier lays out her views on subjects ranging from the momentous to the mundane. In one posting she'll muse on her upcoming marriage to her fiance in L.A. In another she'll free-associate about hearing emergency sirens outside her window in jittery Manhattan. "I do have my magic talisman handy, though, to ward off any problems: chocolate ice cream," she wrote the other day. "Solves almost everything."

But it is Schreier's recent postings on what she regards as the myopic attitude of mainstream feminists toward the U.S.-Iraq war that have made her a minor overnight sensation in the small but expanding world of those who keep online journals, or Web logs ("blogs" for short). Criticizing such groups as Code Pink and Women Against War, as well as the international antiwar protest campaign called the Lysistrata Project, Schreier says that "so many women are being told that because of their gender they should support the antiwar movement."

Au contraire, argues Schreier, 23, speaking by phone from New York, where she works as a Web producer and designer for IBM. One of the most compelling reasons for backing the war, she thinks, is that it may help liberate Iraqi women from a tyrannically sexist society. And although a Code Pink organizer has said that "testosterone-poisoned rhetoric" is behind the push for war, Schreier thinks such attitudes smack of a monolithic and "retro" view of femininity.

"What also galls me is that these women are claiming not only sex but femininity itself as a uniformly passive, gentle, loving, pacifist attribute. What rubbish," she writes on her blog in a critique of the Lysistrata Project and related issues. "I shouldn't support waging war on a mass-killing dictator because as a woman my place is to elevate discourse and consensus and eschew 'manly,' messy action? They're even implying that if I am not a peaceful, good-mannered, right-thinking woman like them, a woman for peace, then perhaps I am not really a woman at all?"

Schreier also takes on the National Organization for Women's assertion that American women will be "disproportionately affected" by the war as funds are diverted from education, health, welfare and other social service programs. An odd view, she says, given that American men are far likelier than American women to be doing the actual fighting and dying.