No Girls Allowed: The Problem of Rape in the Military
This is an old article but sadly, in light of recent events, a topic that has again become a matter of current attention in the national spotlight.
It’s no secret the military has a problem with women. Not only is there a long documented history of misogynistic commentary from military elites, but the problem of rape has become too large to ignore. What then is to be done? Nothing. What can be done about an institution that is by its nature misogynistic, and whose purpose is purely to turn men into killers? Once you have opened such a door on human nature you may never close it again like a Pandora’s Box to be put away on a shelf when the neighbors come to dinner.
My intent, of course, is not to defend such behavior, but not pretend it will be ameliorated either with special “sensitivity” training or weekend conferences on how to interact with female soldiers; things any sensible person is aware of and painlessly competent at doing in any other setting but this one. Unlike any other profession the profession of killing, and let us be honest for this is what it is, cannot afford failure for failure means death either for you or your comrades or both. But it’s this seriousness that makes compromise and half-measures as regards female participation criminally reckless if not impossible to carry out without grave consequences.
The effects of military combat are appalling. It has become increasingly well known that the number of suicides due to PTSD or, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, has escalated in recent years. This becomes understandable when you examine more deeply the effects of military training, the byproducts of which leave lasting scars even if a soldier never sees actual combat. To create a soldier, to take someone who has never killed and make killing second nature to them is to strip a person of their identity and then, through training, rebuild them to see that same lack of identity in turn in others.
In addition, the stressors of combat are ones that lead to a bonding between individuals that is unlike any other relationship. To depend upon the person next to you for your life creates a sense of solidarity that can only exist between men in the chaos of the war. As war by its nature has always been a masculine endeavor, one of conquest and dispassionate slaughter, it can only lead to an ethos that is rigidly masculine and antithetic to the feminine.
Such a bond between men can be classified as erotic in its intensity. It was not for nothing that in antiquity The Sacred Band of Thebes was viewed with the highest distinction. The Band was a legendary elite fighting force of 300 pairs of male lovers feared, because it was believed that in the thick of battle they fought even harder than the standard soldier, both to defend their lover’s, but also in that they would refuse to retreat and shame themselves in that same lover’s eyes.
Those who kill in battle perceive other men as inferior if they are not one of the proud few. Either they conceal a sense of divine hubris and superiority in which they are more deserving due to the enormity of the perceived service they provided, or they become emotionally disconnected from former friends and relations who have not shared the experience. These qualities of male bonding, godlike disdain, and emotional disconnection are at the heart of what it means to kill as a profession; besides which, the problem of rape in the military should appear not only as a non-mystery but should be understood as inevitable.
The problem of women in combat will never be resolved until the dark nature of this institution is accepted for what it truly is, a factory for the manufacture of killers. As this topic is unlikely to be discussed honestly in the near future it may be best to add a final word of warning. It should always be kept in mind by those women who decide to serve their country by doing violence to others, that there is always the tacit risk that that same violence may, in turn, redound upon themselves. Just as sudden death and brutal maiming have by tradition always been accepted risks that came with the job, now can be added to that bleak register the possibility of rape.
