SAVING PRIVATE LYNCH. V. Postrel (link found via that awful man) makes the point that it is inappropriate for newsreaders to refer to Pvt. Jessica Lynch as "Jessica," as she is a U.S. soldier, not "the little girl who fell down the well." Well said. I had the same thought today while watching Katie Couric talk about "Jessica" to the rescued soldier's (understandably dazed) father.

I can imagine, though, where this media infantilism is coming from. Pvt. Lynch is a very young woman of the sort for whom the adjective "fresh-faced" was invented. In her official picture, shown frequently on the news of late, she flashes a bright, can-do smile. She hails from the charmingly named Palestine, West Virginia, and wants to be a schoolteacher.

For many, her perils, and those of any such female, will always be as those of Pauline. She is the very model of an All-American girl -- but she is also a soldier. A lot of people probably may have trouble processing that last part of ther resume.

But not because, as some warbloggers would have it, she's a "bellicose woman" and poster child for the NRA Chick Auxiliary (Pvt. Lynch doesn't particularly seem like someone who would take pride in being called bellicose, even if she were draped in a dozen armaments). Her military service in a foreign land is new and unusual because, unlike being a schoolteacher and having a can-do smile (as glorious as those things really are), it implies a level of responsibility that transcends the little red schoolhouse and even the town meeting. Pvt. Lynch, like her comrades, deals with the world -- in the current situation, on the level of confrontation. Her decision to join the service turned out to be, whether she knew it or not (though I like to imagine she did -- she does want to be a teacher), a decision to engage the world, not as a spectator or a tourist, but as part of a force that shapes its destiny.

To me that's more of a leap into the future of intergender relations than the fact that she was issued a gun.

Now, as to how she and others are shaping the world, that's another issue entirely...