Just Looking ...

I agree that it was offensive to the Canadian Military, and wouldn't downplay that. But what I fail to see is any sort of reaction to the nature of the attack - they chose to insult Canada by feminizing our military, and that strikes me as extremely insulting....to us women ovah' here (are we really a bunch of weaklings? Does this idea of feminization really render them so useless?). I'm bringing this up also because I hear all to often that "feminism is dead", there's really no need for it, equality has been achieved, now they're just going to far...and so on (Infact, this argument was made in the National Post just last week). And yet, big strong man America is saying that silly lady-boy Canada isn't as good at fighting (or that he fights like a girl) and I'm not supposed to be offended by this sexist characterization? 

It's the all to familiar appeal to the idea of nation as a feminine entity. It must be protected by military might, a specifically male endeavor, because a real country of real men knows how to fight. Their attack drew on familiar stereotypes or images of idle female leisure (capri pants on the beach, landscape painting and horse back riding). 

Of course, it was all a joke. I guess. 

But if you go beyond it simply being an attack on Canada's military, it reeks of gendered nationalistic ways of understanding how we relate to each other globally. They point out that they could "invade" us at any point with their military. This harkens back to the relationship of colonized to colonizer, a highly sexualized relationship where the defeated country is emasculated by their invaders, and their women taken (dominated sexually). I've read accounts of American Soldiers in South Korea (during the Korean War) calling out from their vehicles indiscriminately for young Korean women, to indicated their power to strike directly at the symbol of "traditional purity" (women)....because Korean men have proven themselves not man enough to protect their women. It's a humiliation tactic in which women are made the hapless symbolic representations. 

I could care less if they think they're better than us as a nation...what bugs me is when they use language that goes back a hundred years as though underneath it all, we haven't moved forward an inch.