Feminista Naomi Wolf has, through reciting some Department of Defense estimates, uncovered a sweeping rape epidemic in the United States military. Unfortunately, it is hidden from the world because the government itself is dominated by a pernicious “Culture of coverup[sic],” as it concerns the sexual assault of the young women who now serve on the fringes of direct combat.
According to the DoD numbers, or Wolf’s interpretation of them, fully 9 percent of active duty military females, 19,000 in all, are raped every year. For this, the military manages to receive only 3,192 sexual assault reports with only 1,518 of those leading to referrals for disciplinary consideration. The final insult is a paltry 191 servicemen who were convicted at courts martial.
There are, it appears, rapes everywhere the uniform is worn. 19,000 rapes a year is 52 rapes a day! They must start raping them at the recruiter’ s office to keep up those kinds of numbers. If Wolf is correct there is indeed a huge problem.
And if she is right about that, she may also be correct about a cover-up. To my knowledge the military has not been placed on special rape alert and women have not been warned against joining the armed forces.
Still, action has been taken. Emergency “non-profit” rape advocacy groups for military women are springing up like milkweeds, hanging shingles and gearing up operations. Grant requests are being written. The Pentagon has taken the matter under advisement. Perhaps Oprah and Dr. Phil have been notified (or will come sniffing).
Of course, whether any of this hoopla is worth it is contingent on Wolf’s interpretation of the numbers being correct. But who am I to question 19,000 estimated, perhaps possible, but unreported sexual assaults when the estimate is provided by the same DoD that provided us with the Gulf of Tonkin, WMD, Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman?
I won’t even get picky with Wolf for complaining that, “The Department of Defense…does not keep any kind of military sex offender registry that could potentially alert soldiers and commanders, let alone law enforcement, to the presence of military sexual predators.”
I do, though, wonder if she is saying the military should just put known sexual predators on a list and let them stay in uniform. Kinda hard to say with Wolf.
Seriously though, there are several almost obligatory things to do here. First would be to dismantle everything Wolf has claimed, which amounts to just another reaching, histrionic episode based on recklessly filtered data, spun by a gender ideologue.
Another would be to bring up and explore the real and actually ignored incidence of male rape in war zones, something military brass is loathe to even think about. But in this case to do these things would just be following a distraction. Let me explain.
Let’s suspend common sense and fair analysis for a moment and assume that Wolf is correct, at least about the severity of the rape problem. I still can’t make myself don a tin foil hat and imagine there are shifty patriarchs in The Pentagon, lording over a culture of rape cover-up, but I will stipulate the “epidemic,” for the sake of argument.
My explanation for it is simple. Who but an incomprehensible moron would put women in a war zone and not expect rapes to happen?
I know, in the minds of people like Wolf, especially from her station in life, what is happening in the Middle East is not a war zone, but a field experiment in social engineering. I can’t fault her too much for that as the Pentagon sees it the same way.
If Ms. Wolf wants answers to the problems, though, she would be well advised to seek understanding of what a war zone really is. She should at least try to imagine places that words like chaotic and insane don’t begin to describe; places where all kinds of really bad things happen, and keep on happening, even after the war is over.
War is hell, as they say, and 97+% of American war dead are men. That is not offered up as a trade-off for women being raped, but a statement of relevant fact in that the unquestioned majority of the service members actually fighting the war are young men who have been trained and psychologically conditioned to do extreme violence without hesitation.
It’s the only fucking reason they’re there.
They are not only following through with their training, they are witnessing things routinely that would scar most of us inside.
These are young men, usually those with severely dumbed-down high school educations and few life options, from poor socioeconomic backgrounds, who have been prepared to step over body parts of (mostly) men, women and children, even the body parts of their friends, in order to pursue and kill people they don’t even know.
They have been conditioned to dissociate from their humanity, first by a society that trains them for disposability; that values their willingness to engage in atrocities for a few hundred bucks a week. That preparation is capped off and sealed by military training and real world combat exposure. Their experience on the battlefield has proven that the training is necessary to keep them moving and killing during the conflict. They can fall apart after it’s “over.”
And fall apart they do. PTSD is rampant in modern combat vets. Right now, for the first time in history, the suicide deaths of male soldiers exceeds the number of those killed on the battlefield.
Consider that. This war zone is so very bad that more soldiers kill themselves after the experience than those who die at the hands of the enemy.
This is what happens when we strip away a man’s humanity and turn him into a killing/dying machine; when we fill his young mind with propaganda and manipulate his aggressive capabilities for use by the government on behalf of its corporate protectorates.
When we do this; when we create a dispenser and absorber of horrendous, chronic violence, we get all kinds of bad results, even if we “win” our war. We get a suicide epidemic. We get PTSD, divorce, child abuse, alcoholism, violence and other forms of criminality. And that is just what happens after the war.
During combat we get people who murder, or “frag” each other in the field. We get torture, places like Abu Ghraib and Mai Lai. We get countless terrible acts that the public will never hear about. The field is like Vegas, what happens there, stays there. And a lot happens there.
Oh, and we get rape. I am not excusing it or condoning it, just acknowledging the unavoidable fact of it. If President Obama does not want servicewomen to get raped, even at the numbers it is actually happening, he should keep them out of war zones. The fact that they aren’t actually fighting in the war should make that choice a little easier. The fact that it appears they can’t even defend themselves from an alleged groper, much less defend a perimeter from armed and motivated combatants , should pretty much seal the deal.
If our society doesn’t want a once decent young man from Nebraska or Arizona or Ypsilanti, Michigan to end up a threat to commit most any form of violence against anyone, then it might also behoove us as a society to quit standing by silently while the government trains young men to dominate and kill and then uses them as assets without consulting a moral compass.
It’s just a thought.
What we can’t do, mustn’t do, is take young men, mold them into stone cold killers, and then feign shock and disappointment when the monsters we create act monstrously.
Of course, that is precisely what we are doing.
I understand the nature of the social experiment, or at least I get the basics. We need to see if we can somehow create men who will fight and die, employing all manner of deadly tactics, right down to killing the enemy with their bare hands, but won’t practice any of that violence or aggression except as instructed. We need obedient, focused killers who can shut off the violence and still their tortured minds on command.
We want demons who will mow down strangers or go get the stranded kitty out of the tree, depending on which way we point when we snap our fingers.
Fat chance.
Ms. Wolf should remember that these are not the men she set out to undermine years ago. They are the sons and grandsons of those men; men that are a product of feminism’s “success.”
Many of these young men grew up without fathers; without the stabilizing influence of men, whose job it once was to lead young men from bravado to maturity, but who were not there because they were demonized and cast out of their homes. It already inflicts many young men with an atrophy of character; a tendency to being somewhat feral. Think gangs, Gamers and pick up artists. Think potential rapists, too.
If these men are more prone to suicide and other forms of violence than generations before them, it does not seem too much of a stretch to imagine they may be more capable of rape.
But in the end, we are still dealing with distraction. We still have not gotten to the real point of Wolf’s piece, which is not really about rape.It’s about feminist doctrine and it is about control.
The tell here is the alleged rape victim trotted out by Wolf for her article. Kori Cioca, of the Coast Guard, claims she was raped by a commanding officer. Wolf calls it a “rape” in her article, though the officer was not charged with or convicted of raping her.
He apparently broke Cioca’s jaw during an altercation, something that happens in the military from time to time, but he denies it was a sexual assault and he was never officially even accused of it. Back to the tell, though, it comes out in a quote from Cioca in the article.
He didn’t rape me because I was pretty or because he wanted to have sex with me; he raped me because he hated me.
Of course, there’s the rub. Rape is about power, in this case driven by hate, not sex. Straight out of women’s studies, 101. I am not even saying she wasn’t raped. Fact is, no one but Cioca and the accused knows for sure, but the gender-political flavor of her statement is clear; suitable for framing and picture perfect in the realm of pro-feminist media sound bites.
Possible translation: The assault was not a rape, and I lied. Now I want money (the “victim” is suing the DoD).
In the midst of Wolf’s smokescreen of estimated ersatz rapes, which unlike the Cioca case, never even reached accusation; in the midst of fair damsels wailing for help, calls for military sexual predator registries and stacks of grant applications, there is an unfortunate but clear reminder of modern realities.
Rape is about power…for the sexual grievance industry, and for gender ideologues whose bread and butter is convoys of victims. And it is about control, which is why we see feminists now headed for the modern battlefield, not to take arms and fight alongside the men as equals, but to ensure women’s marginal efforts in war zones, compared to men, are accomplished without the horrors of war ever falling in their laps.
The battlefield for men will remain largely the same; bullets, blood, torture, rape, terror; crash and burn when it is over. The military, as it has always done, will pursue rapists, real and imagined, and punish them harshly.
For women, their already privileged status in the military will improve. It will be chaperones and attorneys; battalion level babysitters and lots of time “in the rear with the gear” to complain about the conditions and not get shot at.
So we can sit back here and wait with Naomi as she hopes her ideas of military priority gain traction, and they probably will.
How long before we have a Dear Colleague Letter for the armed services issued from the President or from the Joint Chiefs? How long before the military recognizes, if they have not already, that they can exert even more power over their pawns with a special policy to deal with supposed rapes? How long before alleging rape gets added to the list with pregnancy and other factors that equate to a ticket home and special benefits for the accusers? How long before they teach the male troops to not only hate, but fear the women in uniform who cross their paths from time to time, even as they are bearing the brunt of hostilities for those same, specially coddled “soldiers”?
Not so long, I am thinking. Take Back the Combat Zone Rally, anyone?
