The Third Front - Sexual Assault in the U. S. Military (16% increase)

http://counterpunch.com/rosen03192010.html



Earlier this week the Defense Department issued its report on sexual assault in the military during 2009. It detailed that in 2009, compared to 2008, reports of military sexual assault witnessed an 11 percent increase and, most disturbing, a 16 percent increase in reported assaults in combat territories like Iraq and Afghanistan.

American female soldiers are paying dearly for America’s imperialist misadventures. When these young and committed women enlist in the military they are unlikely told that they will be fighting a two-front war: One fight involves foreign combatants, the other their fellow male soldiers. Many male soldiers, like their brethren on the football field and into extreme fighting, likely see the military as the last bastion of traditional virility. For them, the battlefield remains a sacred terrain of orgiastic violence. And for some of them, the eroticism represented by the female soldier is more disconcerting then the threat posed by the “terrorist” enemy. These women, postmodern warriors, are all too often the victims of premodern masculine rage. The past dies slowly.

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White Christian heterosexual patriarchy continues its sputtering crisis. It has maintained a tyrannical reign over Western civilization for two centuries. The slow emergence of a secular, hedonistic and globalized culture, an alternative value system freed from gender- and race-based religious superstition (but nonetheless mired in capitalist exploitation) may finally undermine patriarchy.

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Most telling, Harman observed: "We have an epidemic here. … Women serving in the U.S. military today are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire in Iraq."
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I'm pointing a finger at the pentagon BRASS. they could stop this! and we all know it.

by one of my fellow LT's. It completely shocked me and confused me. I could not understand how a fellow soldier could do that to me. We were supposed to be willing to die for each other, to be part of a team.

Apparently he (and many other male soldiers) did not/do not see it that way. Instead, many macho men serving in the military view women as inferior sluts to be punished and put in their place for daring to also serve their nation.

I will never forgive the male soldiers who do this to our female soldiers.

nt

The military (at least the Army) is the most misogynistic organization I have ever encountered. It was an every day thing to have male soldiers telling me I had no business being in the Army, that I ought to be home having babies instead and that all women were weak and worthless.

The leaders would give lip service to the wives and children but would look the other way when wife-beating and child molestation happened (I know this from personal experience - grew up as an Army brat and that happened in my family - no help at all from the MP's.) They talk about honor and family but almost actively encourage cheating on the spouses and a friend of ours who was stationed in Afghanistan a few years back and worked on IT issues said he spent most of his time erasing child porn from the Army computers there before shipping them back home.

The biggest insult you can use against a male soldier is to accuse him of being a "pussy" or otherwise feminine in any way.

Rape of enemy women is a longtime practice (and kept mostly secret, not talked about) - it's just all part of the culture of misogyny and worship of raw cruel masculinity that is in the Army.

In such a misogynistic organization, of course there are lots of rapes of women. The brass can't do that much until the general atmosphere and culture of the Army (and our society in general) changes so that women are not as hated as they currently are.