“Is the mother of all bombs sexist?” That’s what the reporter who called me wanted to know. I couldn’t take that call, so I missed his deadline, and anyway, I didn’t have a sound bite, which is what reporters always want. But here’s my answer: “Yes. But sexism’s not its biggest problem.”
When the United States dropped its largest-ever non-nuclear device (that is, a very big bomb) on an ISIS hideout in Afghanistan, the Pentagon called the GBU-43 Massive Ordnance Air Blast, or MOAB, “the mother of all bombs,” which is its nickname. Try saying Massive Ordnance Air Blast a few times quickly and you’ll see why they needed a nickname.
Twitter, which has become our go-to gauge of public opinion despite the fact that only 24% of Americans use it, lit up with concerns that “mother of all bombs” is sexist. Here are three of the posts:
And Twitter being the refuge of all angry people representing both sides of any issue, the “let’s trash liberals” camp weighed in as well, in 140 characters or less:
To be fair, lots of weapons have nicknames, and many of these refer to women. Men after all, cause most of the wars and do most of the shooting, so it’s only natural they get to name most of the weapons. But what these names say about the male psyche, if such a thing even exists, isn’t so simple. Davy Crockett, hero of the Alamo celebrated by Walt Disney, called his flintlock “Ol’ Betsy.” Allied troops called the World War I German howitzer “big Bertha.” And there was a World War II German rocket called “screaming Mimi.” But some of our most-destructive weapons were actually "boy bombs." The first American nuclear device was “thin man” (like Nick Charles, played by William Powell in the "Thin Man" movies, the thin man bomb didn’t work). The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima went by “little boy.” And the Nagasaki A-bomb was “fat man,” perhaps evoking the ever-sinister Sydney Greenstreet’s role as Kasper Gutman in “The Maltese Falcon.”
Giving weapons nicknames can be a sign of affection—Davy Crockett named Ol’ Betsy after his sister. It can also be dark humor to make enemy weapons less scary. Or in the case of “mother of all bombs,” it’s designed to make them more scary. I mean, if someone yelled, “There’s a GBU-43 coming,” would you take cover or try to look it up in your Funk & Wagnalls? In either case, you’d be too late.
The phrase “mother of all” has been around for a long time. Initially, it referred to the source of something (there was a “father of all” as well). Its new sense, “biggest, scariest, most spectacular,” was popularized by Saddam Hussein when he warned that an invasion of Iraq would result in the “mother of all battles.” He was wrong, though. The Iraq War was closer to the mother of all screw ups—both the most spectacular and the source of ones to come, since neither Saddam nor George W. Bush had an exit strategy, or any kind of strategy for that matter—because, not to put too sexist a spin on it, men start all sorts of things that don't end well, and they never ask directions.
Since the 1970s, there’s been a strong push to make our language gender neutral, or at least more equitable, and to some extent that’s worked. We’ve largely done away with generic he. The Help Wanteds are no longer segregated by gender (and the whole want-ad genre’s been replaced by online forums). Occupation titles are largely neutral: server, firefighter, bomb designer. For a long time, hurricanes only had women’s names: Carol, Betsy, Camille. But by the 1980s, a growing awareness of unfairly-gendered language led to male hurricanes as well, hence Hugo, Andrew, even Dennis. And someone invented smart phones so men don’t need to ask directions. Unfortunately, society remains sexist (take a look at the top management at Fortune 500 companies or the president’s cabinet), and our language continues to reflect that bias.
Mother of all bombs is sexist, to be sure, but it’s not Tailhook or marines posting porn. We shouldn’t let a nickname distract us from the bigger questions, like, “Is it worth $170,000 to kill 90 ISIS fighters?” (the Air Force said one mother of all bombs costs that much, not including development costs; and it claims that’s how many ISIS fighters died, which equals $1900 per death, excluding fuel and taxes) or “Why are we still in Afghanistan?” So forget about men giving weapons sexist names. Ask instead, why are they starting all these wars? These are complex questions that can’t be answered in 140 characters or with a sound bite.
