PC Twitter erupted in rage yesterday after the United States dropped the biggest non-nuclear bomb in its arsenal on an Islamic State-affiliated tunnel system in Eastern Afghanistan. Their complaint: The weapon’s nickname, “the mother of all bombs,” is sexist.
Seth Mandel of the New York Post editorial board predicted this development in a prescient tweet, sent at 12:15 p.m. on Thursday. He wrote that a “take we will probably hear at some point today” was that “MOAB is both sexist and normative/exclusionary. Time to call it something else.”
In rolled the hot takes, just as predicted.
Eric Stoller, a writer for Inside HigherEd, tweeted that it was “grotesque to call a killing device, the ‘Mother of All Bombs.’ The #MOAB is the epitome of lethal patriarchy.”
Another Twitter user said the bomb was “a patriarchal oppressive devise [sic] used by white men, and should not have the word ‘mother’ attached to it’s [sic] sexist nature.”
And in a Tweet to the BBC, several viewers asked them to stop using the nickname. “BBC, ‘mother of all bombs’ is sexist language,” one man wrote. “Why is sex/gender relevant to size of a bomb?”
Another Twitter user, who uses the handle “Resist in LA,” wrote: “In the military #MotherofAllBomb? Really? How about Misogynists Openly Activate Bombs #misogynistsOpenlyActivateBombs.”
Then again, MOAB bomb was always supposed to have a “devastating psychological impact,” as one military expert put it…
