Women soldiers raped? murdered? Aw, who cares?

Our women GIs are being raped by their male comrades-in-arms. The graphic accompanying this article shows that 9 out of 10 women marines experienced unwwanted sexual touching. NINE OUT OF TEN!! That’s an obscenity beyond words, but you’ll find very little outrage on DU. Responses ranged from

Nothing new here (ho hum):

Hasn’t this been known for years?

to Nothing new here and whadya expect? This is war and rape is part of war, and women are expendable, whether ours, theirs, official or unofficial and even forced, no matter. Boys will be boys, especially when they’re horny:

This is no surprise at all. Rape has always been a part of war. When you have thousands of testosterone driven, young warriors facing death every day they need that sexual outlet. The camp follower or comfort woman has been around since the beginning of warfare itself. And if there were none, the conquered were the victims. The problem over there I think, is the lack of prostitutes in the Muslim culture. These guys have nowhere to go to release that tension and they prey on their own. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the so-called leaders set it up this way.

Fortunately, a couple of women happened along to counter the myth and patriarchal lie that rape is necessary and therefore understandable — if not downright encouraged — when men can’t seem to find willing sexual partners. Blech. That’s some powerful sense of entitlement there, isn’t it?

Raping us isn’t enough, though. Never is. They’ve got to kill us too. One of my heros, that wonderful former military man, Stan Goff, bemoans the several very recent murders of women soldiers by their husbands and helps explain it:

Here in North Carolina, female soldiers are being murdered… some by their military spouses.

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There is, of course, a pattern afoot here. It’s called patriarchy; and it’s a long standing system of threatened and-or actual violence against women in order to subjugate them culturally, economically, and sexually to men. Since warfare is at one extreme end of a peace-violence continuum, it is not at all surprising that military men become more openly violent after they’ve been involved in a vicious war of occupation, where the acceptance of the death of non-combatants is a psychological necessity in order to operate. Military men are trained to be more intensely and systematically violent than their baseline male socialization; and actual warfare — especially a war for domination, as opposed to self-defense — moves men from psychological preparation into the actual practice of violence.

snip

They have to dehumanize the “enemy” in order to make it okay to abuse, humiliate, maim, and kill people… and the model for this dehumanization is already there. It’s the way they’ve been trained almost from birth to deny the essential humanity of women.

This is so profound. Please read that last paragraph again. Commit it to memory if you can because in my opinion it underlies almost everything else in our culture relative to women and our place in it.

That truth is at the heart of why feminists work against belittling and dehumanizing sexist language and gender slurs, and at the heart of why we fight dehumanizing images of ourselves as props for commerce, or in pornography. I have become convinced that women will never — CAN never – have anything approaching equality until pornography is a thing of the past and our half-naked bodies no longer adorn ads of “stuff” for sale, or as window dressing to capture male interest.

But I digress (somewhat).

I’m so glad Goff pointed out the connection between dehumanization as THE prerequisite for killing the enemy during war and the dehumanizing treatment of women. There’s actually more to that: Remember, the military — that ultra-macho, he-man organization — is famous for using the threat of being seen as feminized or womanly as a weapon with which to beat new recruits into submission and ultimately into something much better, far superior: a real man. Every single movie you’ve ever seen about the military shows drill sergeants treating recruits in exactly that way, calling them pussies, girls, little girls, and worse.

This is first-class woman-hating and it IS the dehumanization of half the species and it can only, inevitably lead to further physical, spiritual and emotional dehumanization of that half of the species at the hands of the other half, the half that sees itself the dominant half. That very same dehumanization, the making women “less important than” men, also accounts for the “oh, that again? Yawn” reaction among progressive men like those at DU. If it happens to a woman, it’s not that important. No big deal. Shrug. Yawn.

But make no bones about it: The inevitable physical dehumanization that occurs must inevitably (almost by definition) include violence — whether it be domestic violence, rape or other sexual assault, stalking, murder.

THIS MUST STOP.

We women will probably have to be the ones who make it stop. I don’t know how, offhand, but our young women are suffering and dying at the hands of the men who should be their brothers, while in service to our country. We women civilians must insist that our military stop dehumanizing women in the process of making “men” of its new soldiers and sailors and marines. Our military must stop putting its women members at risk in this way, and we have to insist on that.

(Why can’t they find some other model than the one that goes “Being a real man = not being a woman because everything women = bad?”) Grrr.

What our military daughters and sisters are suffering is a horrible, horrible betrayal, absolutely unforgivable in my book. And surely it is self-evident that women in a war zone should NOT have to worry about two sets of enemies, one of them their own countrymen!

How bad is it? Real bad:

According to the Department of Defense, one in three women who join the US military will be sexually assaulted or raped by men in the military. I doubt that statistic is hanging on the wall in recruitment offices, or even mentioned to the young women who bravely volunteer to serve their country. This statistic is double the US national numbers for rape. It is unconscionable.

The military is engaging in cover-ups of the overall problem, and individual cases as well.

One case that fortunately has not gone away after two years since her death thanks to the efforts of her family, and a precious few articles in the blogosphere, is that of LaVena Johnson. Beautiful young woman, no doubt full of hope, and life. The circumstances of her death are absolutely chilling:

When LaVena’s body came home, her family became suspicious of the Army’s investigation and conclusion of suicide. Her father, Dr. John Johnson was concerned about the bruising on her face, and the fact that the Army claimed his daughter had shot herself with her M-16. The exit wound in her head was too small, and appeared to be from a pistol. He wondered why the exit hole was on the left side of her head when she was right handed. White military gloves had been glued on to her hands to hide burns. That did it. Dr. Johnson and his wife began calling for an investigation into what really happened to LaVena. For the next few years they used the Freedom of Information Act and Congressional offices to request information from the Army.

After 2 years, the Johnson’s were able to get a copy of a CD that showed photographs taken of LaVena’s body at the scene, and other pictures of her naked body taken during the investigation. There were bruises, scratches, and bite marks on the upper part of her body. The right side of her back, and her right hand were burned. Her genital area was bruised and lacerated, and lye (a corrosive liquid) had been poured into her vagina, presumably to destroy DNA evidence of rape.

And yet the Army still, to this day, insists she committed suicide. The level of contempt shown for LaVena in this lie (and all cover-ups), for all women serving in the military in general, not to mention for her suffering family, is beyond comprehension to me.

If you feel as I do, and would like to keep up with news about this case, bookmark this site: The Pfc. LaVena Johnson Petition. Or, hey — I’ll add it on the right to Other Sites of Interest to make it easy.