© Michelle Renée Matisons, Ph.D.
Photo credit: © Pure Chance Productions, 2023- .
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If you follow Israel’s high-tech fetish, like Defense News’ Barbara Opall-Rome, you know that Israel has developed military torture technology to rival Guantanamo Bay. Opall-Rome prefers these technologies over death if forced to choose:
“I’m talking about using the electromagnetic spectrum or high-powered microwaves to get people dizzy…If you’re dizzy you lose your balance. You know, I’d rather people just get an upset stomach and really just have to have diarrhea right in the middle of a demonstration or puke their guts out than to be killed.”
This comment by a veteran news reporter acknowledges the existence of Israel’s electromagnetic/microwave warfare options. That Israel has relied so much on a technological occupation of Palestine is a story waiting to be told. Instead, the mainstream media avoids the story, preferring sensationalism over diligent reporting.
One example of sensationalistic reporting is the menstrual misery making headlines on Al Jazeera and MSN. The article “No privacy, no water: Gaza women use period delaying pills amid war” is a perfect example of an ideologically flexible, pop-feminist news item that obscures the real threat to Gazan women’s health: colonization’s brutal military and policing technologies. Palestine residents (especially Gaza/ West Bank) have been subjected to invasive high-tech surveillance weapons, including psych-ops and medical-health (bio)weapons, testing. These weapons have stolen Palestinians’ privacy and attack their dignity as a rule.
It’s rare to read about privacy without a minimal nod to surveillance state technologies:
“From borders equipped with hundreds of sensors, cameras, robotic machine guns, and automated drone swarms to biometric databases and spyware, high-tech systems have helped enforce a 16-year Israeli blockade of Gaza and its 2.3 million Palestinian inhabitants. These systems have also been deployed against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, as part of a broader regime of population control.”
While Israel’s population control tech thrives, a mainstream publication, like Al Jazeera, distracts us from technology’s threat– instead offering menstruation struggles, not military and policing tech, as a major wartime health menace. The October 31, 2023 Al Jazeera article, “No privacy, no water: Gaza women use period delaying pills amid war”, provides both an example of wartime’s dystopian realities and an example of wartime journalism’s gender coverage challenges. The topic places this journalism at the awkward intersection of global feminist principles (such as self-determination/ health/ wellness) and genocidal/femicidal techno-fascist surveillance-control principles (such as dehumanize/ monopolize/ murder.) This is a learning lesson for wartime journalism trying to cover gender issues.
This journalistic foray into Palestinian women’s wartime menstrual habits implies ideological neutrality toward the colonial arena of invasive hygiene-medical tech interventions. Nefarious medical tech developers seek captive populations to test new products: never is the time for a menstrual cleanliness campaign in Gaza.
Body topics (like menstruation) open the door to predatory technological fixes: better to be accompanied by anti-tech analyses and disclaimers. Predatory contractors loom over the current Israel-Hamas conflict– prepared to strike at any opportunity. International innerware (Brain-Computer Interface/ Artificial Intelligence) companies seek internal access to people via chips/implants/ devices: women’s health needs can serve as innerware’s golden gateway.
Accounts of early CIA inner technologies development emphasize difficulties accessing human test subjects. Early MK Ultra style test subjects were largely culled from international populations of spies and defectors, according to John D. Marks in The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control (1979). Desperate for test subjects, wartime’s chaos delivers captive populations to weapons, technology and medical contractors.
Prisoners, refugees, war victims, prostitutes: all of these groups are targets for medical-tech and defense experiments historically and today. Ramzi Bin al-Shibh’s case at Guantanamo Bay exemplifies these illegal torture tech experiments. The riskiest technologies go unregulated. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists views the medical devices market as a problem warranting a database to track these companies. Some of these companies are tampering with or eliminating menstruation: how’s that for experimental eugenics?
The general word for female-focused tech is FemTech– which typically includes health and med tech but can encompass other issues. (The term was coined by a woman who founded a period tracking app.) According to a recent report, global FemTech is comprised of 1, 800 companies worth $1.6 billion– with Israel poised to lead:
“Israeli FemTech raised a cumulative $154 million in 2022, which accounted for 13% of investment in Israel’s MedTech sector. There are roughly 100 Israeli FemTech companies, including 15 new ones founded in the last two years. 27% of them are founded or co-founded by women, compared to 15% of all Israeli tech companies.”
FemTech gains global momentum addressing women’s physical stigmatization and technological marginalization. But it can also be a controversial player in wartime and postwar recovery efforts– reminding us of the intimate link between technology and capitalism.
Wartime profiteering is an age-old practice. War is fought to test-drive new weaponry, roll out new technologies, strengthen industry and bolster nationalist sentiment. Since war is an explicit act of destruction and deprivation, it is easy for journalism to find exactly this: deprivation and destitution playing out in the lives of war’s victims. “War porn” is the name for this coverage.
Ever the unwitting war porn actors, children are constantly referred to in the Israel-Hamas battle because they symbolize the Israeli settler government’s brutal collective punishment tactic. The population of Gaza is young, and nothing proves genocidal intent more than targeted attacks on places children dwell: homes, schools, hospitals and camps/ shelters.
Genocide has its infanticide, and it has it femicide (and ecocide), too.
As continual caregivers of children, wartime women are a unique focus in mainstream media. Conservative outlets evoke women’s conditions as proof of some ideological-regime failure or to dehumanize victims– the IDF’s so-called “human animals.” Liberal-Progressive media evokes women’s conditions in order to support aid/humanitarian interventions and to establish accountability. If unaware, they can fall into conservative ideological trappings: like menstruation reporting.
In the case of Al Jazeera’s reporting on Palestinian women’s use of menstruation-suppressive norethisterone tablets, the journalistic motive is to increase health/ hygiene access and fresh water/ food/ medical supplies. When agencies donate relief supplies– they are reminded to include relevant sanitary products. The motive can also be to shine light on the unhealthy access to norethisterone tablets in the first place. Why are these tablets available? What else could be available?
Microsoft (and subsidiaries/competitors) actively seeks remote control of menstrual cycles. This tech is reportedly attractive to menstruating combat soldiers. Met with great controversy, today’s menstrual microchip companies may be hiding or hard to find. Yes, an implanted microchip can remotely monitor and regulate cycles and hormonal fluctuations. This experimental tech is hackable as a medical device. How’s that for FemTech?
Due to invasive (nano)technologies tested on unwitting global subjects, public discourse on menstruating bodies is a double-edged sword. It destigmatizes women’s bodies and affirms healthcare access, but it exposes a vulnerability already exploited by Microsoft and related FemTech endeavors.
(Tech) Occupation is unhealthy for the planet and all other living things.
Less than a decade ago, the Pulitzer Center opposed Israeli army weapons testing on Palestinians: “The idea that the Israeli arms industry benefits from the occupation through having a captive population it can test new weapons on is now widely accepted.” The same applies to the Israeli/ international (Fem)Tech sector in Palestine.
An immediate ceasefire, massive relief shipments and foreign aid will return Palestinians to health, wellness and dignity with secure shelter, clean water/ food and medical/ health support– that which is needed for self-determination.
No Microsoft/ FemTech (menstrual control) needed.
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Michelle Renee Matisons, Ph.D. can be reached at michrenee@gmail.com.
Emergency Ethics 