Military Perversions

I was ambivalent about this story, reported by Pam's House Blend, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, and others (including ABC, CBS, Mother Jones, Gawker and who knows where else?), but I think that Digby came close to the core issue:

What's with all the homoerotic hazing rituals?

If this is the way men bond in these all male environments, I guess I understand why so many of them are against lifting Don't Ask Don't Tell in the military. Once you remove the taboo a whole lot of them will have to deal with their own urges without the cover of coercion and humiliation. I can see why they'd be afraid, but really, these men should just admit that they like this sort of thing and leave those who don't alone. They'd feel a lot better and so would the men who are forced to participate in order to be accepted into the pack.

Once again we see projection at work. Many of these men obviously have gay feelings and act upon them in this predatory, coercive manner. So they assume that out gay men are doing the same thing. Of course they're not because they can be with people who consent and wouldn't need or want to force anyone, as do most sexually healthy people.

Before I get into the meat, one point: projection almost certainly is at play here, as it is in this story at Box Turtle Bulletin, also reported by Towleroad.

Digby's point is well taken: if they didn't have to worry about the social stigma attached to same-sex attraction, this sort of thing probably wouldn't be happening, although given the exaggerated and highly unrealistic version of "masculinity" prevalent in the military and quasi-military environment, the possible alternatives are scary -- and there would be alternatives. As Digby also points out, this is to some extent an initiation rite, and that's going to happen. It's a fundamental means of establishing a place in the group.

But I think that Digby is not quite on point about DADT here. DADT is just a symptom of a much deeper problem regarding homosexuality and its perception in America, itself an outgrowth of a partriarchal system that is even more pronounced in America than it is in Europe. It also seems to go hand-in-hand with a world view that persists in describing the universe as a place of diametrically opposed absolutes, which we're beginning to understand is a highly unrealistic way of looking at it.

Add in the exaggerated and pernicious idea of "masculinity" that seems endemic to military and quasi-military orgranizations, and you've got a real mess. Aaron Belkin of the Palm Center has a must-read post on this at HuffPo:

First, in no way do these incidents represent "bad apples" or isolated cases. One of my doctoral students just completed her dissertation on military training, a project for which she actually went through boot camp as a part of her research. I begged her not to go to boot camp to do her research because i believed she could get assaulted. Sure enough, every single woman in her training was sexually harassed, including one woman who was raped. The reason behind the pattern is that in order to train our troops for combat, we train them to brutalize one another.

Second, these cases are not hazing, they are torture. By referring to torture as "hazing," or "homosocial behavior" we make the violence seem like it is okay, just boys being boys. Hog-tying someone to a chair and then shoving him into a dog kennel full of feces, as was done to the gay sailor, is not boys being boys. In fact, the victims of such treatment often develop PTSD. One of the sailors implicated in the Bahrain scandal died from suicide, while another told me that he developed suicidal ideation as a result.

Third, the pattern of violence is not an accident, but reflects official policy, including the "don't ask, don't tell" law which makes it almost impossible for gay victims to report abuse. And even though the military does have policies in place to deter violence against women, these policies often produce contradictory results. For example, I am aware of a rape case that was not reported because the base commander had announced a "zero-tolerance" policy for assault, which the troops took to mean (accurately according to people I interviewed) that he did not want to hear about incidents.

Belkin's post (which I found after I had written most of this) hits some of my points, but there's an underlying problem. If you look at the work of Alfred Kinsey, which I take as valuable because it is based on actual behavior, it seems that most men are, or have been at some point in their lives, open to sex with other men. I shouldn't need to point this out: is there a man alive in this country who didn't suffer through a schoolboy crush on a classmate, teacher, or older boy? We like to call it a "phase" and are secure in the (unfounded) assumption that boys will grow out of it -- but I begin to suspect more and more that boys "grow out of it" mostly because of the social disapproval inherent in not growing out of it. What they grow out of is expressing it, which in most cases seems to go hand in hand with a certain amount of self-deception. This is where that view of the universe as composed of dichotomies comes in: a man is either gay or straight, in most people's minds. I don't see any evidence that this is intrinsic. In fact, I see more and more evidence that it's not, starting with something as simple as the fact that we are forced to recognize the existence of bisexuals. (I've dated a couple, actually, and known others; they all had varying approaches to dealing with their needs, but they were all quite functional human beings.)

The bottom line is that you wind up with men who want to interact with other men in ways that are not permitted, and like any frustrated need, it can, and often does, turn poisonous. The response of society, as exemplified in the military as noted in the second story cited and in Belkin's post, is to ignore it all.

I would hope that this is something that's going to fall by the wayside, although without a fundamental shift in our way of looking at the world, it's going to be sketchy. I take heart from the apparent existence of a real "post-gay" mentality among younger people. Some younger people. In some places. Repeal of DADT is only a small start.

(Yes, there are pictures of the carryings on in Kabul -- any of the sites linked to above will provide them, or links to them, although Digby seems to have a bad link. This story at HuffPo has video. (Which itself is instructive -- look at Joe Scarborough's reaction to the story -- he spends most of the video trying to justify it. What an ass -- he really doesn't get it. But that's only indicative of the "conservative" reaction to things like this -- "boys will be boys." The lesson he draws from this? Don't get caught.)