THE RAPES OF THE JOCK

This rapes-in-the-military thing keeps popping up. I’m not obsessing here; some of these articles are valuable for what they reveal about the methods and objectives of their authors and of the movement, and beyond that also reveal to Us templates by which We can look around in our Advocacy-addled society for similar patterns in other areas. It pays to be able to read the wind and the waves and the sky when you are at sea. And that We are indeed.

Truthout runs something written (I’m not sure ‘article’ is correct, for reasons seen below) by one Helen Benedict, a journalism professor (and this is disturbingly relevant, for reasons seen below) at Columbia and “the author of several books concerning social justice and women”. See "Why Soldiers Rape", http://www.truthout.org/article/why-soldiers-rape.

I’m all for society and justice, and all citizens deserve a fair shake; but as the Catholic Church found out after its Second Vatican Council, some very curious alchemy results from blending – especially under field conditions – ‘society’ and ‘justice’ into the compound ‘social justice’. Although the feminists (certainly of the Second Wave) had no use for the Beyond or for the Church (except – oddly – to get themselves ordained in it), their deploying of the phrase ‘social justice’ ignited that same alchemy. And thus We are well advised to understand that the sum of that phrase is a hell of a lot more than its parts, and not necessarily in a benign sense; and that therefore when We see the phrase We cannot simply assume that If ‘society’ is good and ‘justice’ is good, then anything calling itself ‘social justice’ must be double-good. That only really works for certain types of chewing-gum; We concern Ourselves with much larger matters here.

Once again, the reader encounters those two old stand-bys of the shell-game: definitions and statistics.

She asks: Why do soldiers rape? Fair enough as a conceptual project. And rape – the unwanted and forcible penetration of one human being by another (which is how I understand it) – is never a ‘good’ and should be and is (and always has been) a crime.

But immediately these days, questions have to be asked and the article and author have to be ‘interrogated’ by the reader even before getting into the author’s chosen story. Just how is ‘rape’ defined now? How is it defined legally? How is it defined by the Advocacy speakers and writers? By this writer? And are We told? In this case, Benedict doesn’t tell Us how she defines the word. It’s neat: if the reader assumes my ‘classical’ definition, but Benedict is using a far more elastic and broad definition, then the honest and trusting reader is going to get the impression that there are a heck of a lot of actual rapes going on, while Benedict gets her stampede without leaving herself open to the charge that she purposely misled her readers. Neat. Kewt. Is that operative here?

And what is the definition of ‘sexual assault’? Again, the ‘classical’ definition is grounded in that vivid term ‘assault’: physical force and violence used against somebody for the purposes of deriving sexual gratification, but short of actual rape or the attempt at rape. But is that what Benedict refers to? Or is it something that can include much lesser (if not necessarily more mature or honorable) actions? In a crisis, you want to have the most accurate information and the least amount of cloudy miscommunication; if Benedict’s subject is a crisis as she claims, then she (and the entire Advocacy machine) should want Us to have the most accurate information they can give Us. But of course, if their objective is not to inform Us but only to stampede Us, then ‘facts don’t matter’ and all they want from Us is Our approval or – if necessary – just Our passivity, so that they can go on and on.

She quotes some ‘studies’ and that leads to statistics. Whenever you run into ‘studies’ you have to ask yourself a whole passel of questions: Who conducted the study? What was the methodology used? The definitions? What were the actual questions presented? Were the interviewers and interpreters of the answers objective? To what extent are the ‘answers’ anecdotal (the interviewee simply telling a ‘story’) and to what extent was corroboration (by confirmed facts not under the interviewees’ control) obtained?

In this case, the studies are all by women. Well, OK. You certainly can’t presume that all studies conducted by women are tainted by the revolutionary assumptions (‘facts don’t matter’ and ‘there is no objective truth’) of the feministical agenda. And you don’t need to be a female to be a feminist (although being an OTF – other-than-female – might still prevent your attending all the klatsches and aromatherapy sessions simply because your ‘energies’ are incompatible).

A 2004 study of vets from Vietnam to the present conducted by a psychotherapist (a professional term sufficiently elastic as to include Ph.D.s and somebody who talks a bit after reading the tea leaves) “found that 71% of the women said that they were sexually assaulted or raped while serving”. Those two elastic definitions, and if you’ve ‘studied’ two categories, why not then give Us the percentage for each category, rather than just the composite total?

The next study quoted is from 2003 by a psychologist “and her colleagues”, and is actually a “survey”. What does that mean? Did the psychologist simply solicit ‘stories’ and ‘anecdotal evidence’ (a more scientific-sounding term for ‘story by the individual involved’)? Ach. Anyhoo, this survey “found that 30% said they were raped in the military”. Well, if a respondent knew that no corroboration would be required, how reliable are the survey responses? But presuming that all the responses are true (and that is indeed a stretch for any ‘survey’ in any field) then might We infer that 41% of the 2004 study’s 71% are not rapes but only sexual-assaults (however defined)? It’s verrrry hard to say and the prudent reader in search of objective information is advised to tread carefully.

The next study is from 1995, which targeted “female veterans of the Gulf and earlier wars” conducted by that same “psychotherapist” who conducted (in some way) the 2004 study. This 1995 study “reported” (a very strong verb to use without verification) that “90% had been sexually harassed”. Another term: ‘sexually harassed’; although Benedict does immediately go on to note that this term “means anything from being pressured for sex to being relentlessly teased and stared at”. OK. But if We are being asked to invest great time and energy and military resource to deal with the level of school-yard dopery, then the question has to be asked: Is this trip necessary? If military women find this (admittedly immature) behavior unbearable then why not simply separate the genders into gender-specific units? And if they find this foolishness unbearable, are they going to have a better time handling the experiences of killing, being under fire, the experience of sudden and violent death all around you, and the incessant demand to possess oneself and keep one’s rational control under the most awefull demands of a 4GW frakfest?

Of course, one might then proceed to ask that if Nature endows life forms with certain gifts suitable to their tasks (as Evolution saith), and women appear as best We can tell to be assigned by Nature to bear and nurture children (as at least some of the feminists admitteth), then will the gifts and strengths of nurturance serve a woman well in the setting where violence must be deployed precisely not to nurture others but to kill them? Or is this thinking too much?

Or is it possible that the very tendency to violence and aggressiveness that provides the pretext for the constitutionally monstrous domestic-violence and sex-offense manias is somehow a reverse-side of the male ‘gift’ of being relatively more attuned to the deployment of violence? Or is that thinking too much? Because it would then lead to the question as to why women would ever want to get into this sort of ‘war’ situation in the first place, and whether it is at all wise or responsible to subject one’s nurturing-attuned gifts to such anti-nurturing as combat (let alone 4GW combat), and whether it is at all a sound government policy even to permit persons to take such risks. (I mean, if you can’t ride a motorcycle without a helmet on, or drive a car without a seatbelt on, is the government saying it can’t really place any limits on who can expose themselves to frakfesty combat?)

And if the female of the species is relatively less attuned to physical violence, then why on earth load the military organization with them? It adds an entire layer of ‘training’ whereby the females have to super-exert (and even contra-exert) themselves to reliably equal the level of violence-toleration that the males are naturally endowed with. Or alternatively, the females (those steroidy sensible-shoes to some extent possibly excepted) are kept away from combat either out of an awareness of the nature of their gender-gifts or in order not to burden male troops and unit commanders with yet another random and unpredictable variable in the field and in the face of the enemy: i.e., that the less-violent females will not be up to the effective deployment of the required violence and the emotional suppression (or – worse – repression) that combat requires. Not that the military requires that emotional suppression the way it requires a green rather than an ochre uniform, but rather that the military requires that emotional suppression of combat forces precisely because such violence and emotional self-manipulation is what the Combat itself imposes upon any who venture to participate in it, or who find themselves in it.

And a final “survey”, done by the VA in 2007, that found “homelessness” among female veterans “rapidly increasing”. And immediately, so as to keep that urgent and hardly surprising development ‘on her side’, Benedict then writes that “Forty percent of these homeless female veterans say they were sexually abused while in the service.” And We are back to “say” and “sexual abuse” again. Around and around We go. Around and around the Advocates lead Us.

The gist of this and other pieces I’m coming across is that the military is ‘dragging its feet’ in meeting the agenda demanded by the feminist Advocacy. Of course, the Advocacy presumes that We will simply accept its ‘facts’, its ‘story’, its ‘narrative’ at face value and thus be ‘led’ to accept its preferred ‘solution’.

I hold no brief for the Pentagoons nor any of their pomps nor any of their works. But I'm wondering if what the Advocacy is ‘reporting’ as foot-dragging is to some extent the military realizing either that A) there are other explanations for the experiences of military females or B) there are inescapable demands of combat that are not susceptible to the demands of the Advocacy and that the demands, if implemented, would actually degrade military capability (even more than Bush and the hairless neocons have already done) or C) there are a lot simpler and less costly and more probably effective solutions to this set of complaints.

I’m not saying I know just what the Pentagoons are thinking here; but I am saying that there are plenty of other reasonable possibilities to explain the military foot-dragging besides the single explanation insisted upon by the Advocacy: that female troops are being raped or otherwise made to feel uncomfortable by male troops in huge numbers and that the solution can only be to beat down the male troops into more acceptable behavior because the military is simply enabling the male troops – training them even – to be brutes.

The article then goes on to finger (so to speak) a “culture of misogyny” and a “rape culture”, incorporated into the very basics of military training, as one of the causes of this whole thing. Military training will certainly spark the Viking exertions and the attitudinal ethos of young males in large groups; if you’re going to train large numbers of young males to reliably function as a team, to identify as a member of a team, then that’s how it works with young males. These are the actual complexities un-noted by the screenwriters for Captain Picard’s starship “Enterprise”, whose oeuvre seems to have been the only professional resource for several decades of Beltway advisers and commentators on things military. The military is not training troops by whim; its training is structured to the realities it knows they will face in the field and the frakfest.

And therefore too, forcing the military to impose a kindler, gentler training regimen is not going to yield ‘kindler, gentler’ combat. Because, contrary to civilian assumptions, the military does not ‘own’ or ‘make’ the field of battle and war; that awefull Ground belongs to Ares Ferox et Atrox, and mortals, even in their millions, must obey his blood-iron laws.

And this brute fact – as objective as a round right between the eyes - runs precisely counter to the Advocacy-friendly philosophy that i) ‘there is no objective reality’, and ii) it’s all a matter of the ‘story’ you tell yourself and others, and iii) sufficient political pressure and agitprop will change anything that a determined cadre wants to change. In this present matter, it’s not the military that’s thumbing its nose at the monstrous realities of human struggle, it’s the Advocacies. They might as well demand that ships be constructed without compartmented hulls so that ‘women’ won’t be forced into any dark corners. It is utterly impossible for a modern warship to survive without compartmentation and it is a sentence of death on any crew required to take such a vessel into harm’s way.

Militarily reliable violence does not come with natural ease to humans, males especially. Chimpish bar brawls, abhorrent rape – yes. (And thus males need to grow up with mature male guidance … but that’s another matter.) But militarily reliable organized and coherent violence, and the ability thus to restrain oneself when violence is not tactically advisable and to exercise stunning violence when it is tactically demanded … this kind of violence does not come easily.

To tap into the largest common denominator of energy (and potential violence), so as to both stimulate it and harness it, is what the military has to do; this is imposed on the military by the nature of war and combat itself (the screenwriters of Picard’s ‘military’ avoided mass-training altogether; hence the Beltway and Advocacy ignorance of this point). Sex is a primal conduit of vital human and male energy, and to keep the psychic ‘juice’ (no pun intended) flowing both to endure long exertions and to form an identity with other males … in that way, and aiming for efficiency’s sake at that least common denominator, you wind up with those unlovely ditties the instructors bawl out while on a five or ten mile run or the fifteen or twenty-five mile hike with a pack and rifle (if such distances are still allowed in the kindler gentler military of today).

This bodes a lot of dangers for the young military males themselves, even before one gets around to the Advocacy’s focus on the female troops with whom the males will soon be mixed. To reinforce the Inner Chimp in a teen is going to necessitate repairs after the buckaroo leaves the military. If his service should include actual combat, then to require the soldier to activate and deactivate on-demand his Inner Baboon in the face of serious episodes of combat is going to lead to even more serious damage and require even more serious repairs (and isn’t it strange: if the Second Wave was right, all the males should frakking deliriously thrive on sustained violence, and yet they don’t). And in the utterly rule-less and boundary-less setting of 4GW, unremitting and continuous, some and not a few males are going to either retreat to or be forced back to the Inner Baboon and be fused to it, with only modest chances of ever resuming an upward maturational trajectory again. And these are the most unacknowledged casualties of all. Upon them be peace, but We cannot leave it at that.

And “military culture demands that all soldiers keep their pain and distress to themselves”, accuses Benedict. Yes, it does. Because of the awful places and experiences where a soldier has to go and still be capable of controlling his emotions in order to accomplish the task at hand, he must be taught to ‘possess himself’, as scripture would put it. To go all kablooey and give vent to one’s emotional reactions to aspects of one’s surround that – however gruesome or distressing – are not immediately relevant to the mission … that’s not going to get the job done or protect the hearthfires or however you want to put it. What good is a fireman or a cop or a paramedic who in the midst of an emergency cannot suppress immediate emotions in order to focus on how to help? Is it really socially useful to have a bunch of them crying or screaming in a huddle around the engine as flames roar or bullets fly or – hey – ‘the children’ remain horribly trapped on the third floor? Not gonna be a ‘hero’ that way. Nobody’s gonna tell a nice ‘story’ about that. Nobody is going to get helped, either.

Of course, this requirement runs completely counter to the Advocacy modus operandi: decalre yourself a victim, get in touch with those feelings, and bawl them in front of the nearest useful recording device. And it also - according to some feministical theory, at least - runs counter to the operating dynamics of the female psyche, which is emotional and relational and expressive. But while the Advocacy might - thanks to the Dems - manage to get one up on the Pentagoons, the Adovcacy and its votaries will have absolutely no effect nor gain any leverage on Ares Ferox. In this way - and they say there isn't a God and that He has no sense of irony - the Second Wave cadres are sending young women into combat the way Miss Jean Brodie sent her unwitting students into the maw of war, though she herself was in her prime. The hell-hot ironies.

I think the military has never really faced up to its responsibilities in de-Chimping troops once they are finishing up their service. I think that We are going to have huge amounts of psychological casualties, and spiritual casualties, and moral casualties, from this Long War (even SecDef Gates is getting onto the bandwagon now). I cannot even begin to imagine how the female psyche is going to handle all of this, nor am I at all reassured by an Advocacy that insists that a) female troops are every bit as capable of combat as male troops and b) female troops are desperately in need of much, extra military organizational protection and services and c) that there is no difference between the female and the male psyche and d) that there is a world of difference between the female and the male psyche.

Nor on the basis of such representations – no matter how loudly and vividly made – can I take the military organization to task (although it does, all things considered, have a lot to answer for, as God knoweth).

But I do think this: the Advocacy stuff being churned out as ‘science’ and ‘reporting’ in this military-women brouhaha is a scam. And the manner of it is on this wise: from its vantage point the Advocacy sees, the awefull figure of Ares looming beyond the military’s perimeter, and knows that the military cannot but shape itself in response to the laws Atrocious and Ferocious thus imposed. At the same time, the Advocacy knows that the average reader and citizen cannot from his/her vantage point see that awefull figure, and would thus presume that the military is pretty much its own boss in shaping itself and that if it refuses to change its shapes in response to the Advocacy’s demands, well then it must be because of pure mule-headed, ornery, sex-driven male stubbornness.

And they are playing on that, these members of the Advocacy are.

Not all of them. More than a couple of them actually know nothing of the monstrous nature of combat.

Either way – through cynicism or ignorance – they keep the military and Us distracted by the still-thumping demands of their agenda.

I’d say that there are far more urgent emergencies just now. Separate the units by gender, and take an honest and objective look at the whole matter, thoroughly and soberly.

But I don’t think anybody wants that now. Not anybody who’s a ‘player’. The Dems want to keep the feminists happy; the military bosses want to get promoted so they have to keep the Dems happy; the neocons and Republicans have made enough enemies without needing to take on ‘the feminists’. And the beat will go on.

If you happen to be leading a life that does not include prayer to a just and benevolent deity, I think now would be the time to revisit that approach.

And not for yourself, but for the troops. Their genuine welfare, male or female, is not on any player’s agenda in that hell-mouth called the Beltway, be it Democrat or Republican, 'liberal' or 'conservative'. They are in the hands of terrible gods. And goddesses.