Trigger warning for mentions of rape and violence.
As Americans enjoy fireworks, flags and picnics, it is important to take a moment to remember the military currently engaged in hostilities in five countries (Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya and Yemen). The weight of military service falls equally on most demographics: the racial composition of the military is similar to that of the general population; higher-income people are actually slightly more likely to serve than lower-income people. However, there is one glaring exception.
The United States’s all-volunteer army is all too often an all-male army. As of 2010, only 15.59% of the US army is female.
There may be many reasons why the American military is primarily male. Most notably, women are not allowed in combat positions, for fear of harming a unit’s espirit de corps, romantic relationships that disrupted a unit’s combat readiness, women becoming pregnant and female POWs being sexually assaulted. (Unofficially, however, women are involved in combat in Iraq, especially since with a guerilla war everywhere is a front line.)
The lack of involvement of women in combat is unfair to both women and men. Men are forced to bear more than their share of the damages of conflict; women are (rather patronizingly) ”protected” instead of allowed to endure the same dangers and risks that men could. Surely a woman is allowed to take the same risks that a man could? Besides, gender-segregated combat units could reduce the risk of romantic relationships and other harms to espirit de corps.
However, gender parity has not even been reached in non-combat positions, for many reasons. The military may be a hostile environment for women: in particular, a female soldier is twice as likely to be raped as a civilian, often by fellow soldiers. Biologically, more men may be physically more suited for certain military jobs than women because men tend to have stronger skeletal frames, higher upper body strength, etc. Historically male jobs such as construction and manufacturing have disappeared from America’s shores, while historically female jobs like health care have grown, which may make the military a more attractive option for men.
However, one of the most important reasons is how masculinity is linked to military service. Men have, from GI Joe to the average action movie, hundreds of heroic, manly soldiers, while media aimed at women very rarely feature the military as a noble, or even a viable, career choice. Men are typically encouraged to protect women (i.e. “don’t hit a girl,” chivalry), which not only makes women less desirable soldiers since the men will be trying to protect them but also makes the military a gender-conforming choice for men (the protector) but not for women (the damsel in distress). Violence is often gendered male, with everything from FPSes (mostly played by men) to homicide (mostly committed by men): a “real men” is the one with the capability to fight.
But whatever the reason, happy Fourth of July to the men who are far more likely to sacrifice their lives, limbs or sanity for their country, and happy Fourth of July to the women who have joined them. America salutes you.
About ozyfrantz
At least you have the luxury of volunteering or not-volunteering to the service. None of the veterans I know were asked whether or not they wanted to go.
It’s hard to press exactly, why this individual piece of text brings me the shivers to come back commenting. First of all, we really shouldn’t view military service and operations as a common profession and subject it to the usual higher standards of civilian life. The military kicks in when everything else goes haywire. When the common rules and hopes do not apply. Lethal force, is pretty much by definition, the right of the strongest.
The core-competence of military is violence and killing people. Not fairness, not expression of hegemony, not being the employer-of-the-year etc. Pushing any more politics into it has usually cultivated either a junta-dicatorship (the bad guys) or fatal inefficiencies to it’s core-functionality (the world-police).
That being said, mostly the things you mention “keeping women back” in the military are irrelevant. A disciplined fighting force has pretty strong mental conditioning to consider casualties as casualties instead of men and women. Romantic relationships? Not really that big of a deal. Does some damage to the mental conditioning, but mostly irrelevant if you just assign the couple to separate posts. If someone get’s pregnant, then she’s taken off active duty. Just like if a guy get’s injured. Sometimes when handled by an undisciplined force, POWs get sexually assaulted. As always with prisoners, they are primarily men. Google for pics of Abu Gharaib. That’s still among the lesser worries of POWs in the hands of war-criminals.
…
The reason why a lot of women get discriminated in the service is to manage the crisis most efficiently. If you have significantly lower physical stamina than your squad, you put them all under risk. It’s not a personal risk a fighter is taking. It’s the responsibility for the entire squad, platoon and ultimately the nation you are defending! Some women-fighters can take the duress their male colleagues can. Those are the tiny fraction of women put in frontline-duty. Every decision given to compromise efficient risk-management ends up with unnecessarily dead people.
Yeah, gender-segregated fighting-force could reduce the miniscule problem of romances affecting few individuals judgement, but that’s not what a military wants to minimize. The objective is to minimize casualties. Ultimately you do it best by keeping as much people off the lines as possible and ensuring the others do their job as well as possible. Affirmative action on the battlefield kills people. There’s no womens league.
Although I do agree the composition of the force should be more 50/50. Even though the individual posts are often not suitable by biological constraints, you still need people to run the field hospitals, logistics, civil protection and other less physical (and dangerous) functions. And do all the jobs allowing the strongest fighters possible to do their jobs effectively. A war is won by logistics. It is not fair. It is not equal and it’s bad as hell, but in the end it is where actual skills and suitability are a matter of life and death.
To be honest to get that list of possible objections to women in combat I just skimmed Wikipedia.
I did mention biological constraints as one of the reasons women were less likely to be in the service– although a physically fit woman should be allowed in combat under the same rules that a physically fit man is, if women are less likely to be physically fit for combat then of course there will be fewer women in combat. Ideally, that would be made up for by having the majority of logistics functions filled by women (which are not, iirc, that much less dangerous, especially given the decentralized nature of war nowadays).
Of course, all of the “physical” arguments hinge on the imagined soldier being on the ground. What about the Navy? What about the Air Force? I can’t imagine physical strength mattering much in “push-button warfare.”
not only on the ground, but on foot. a smaller tank because the girls are 5’3″ is a better, more fuel-efficient tank. keep a goon or two (guys who can pick up two girls at once) on “yank people out of tank” duty, and you’ve just made a better, more resilient tank.
Okay, fair enough, but there is no reason that if they can keep the same extreme standard they use for men in combat situations, that as long as a woman can keep up with these standards that they shouldn’t be able to fight in the same combat positions as men. Now I don’t know much about this situation in America, but I know in Australia they recently decided to allow women in front line combat if they could pass the same tests they put the men through, and I don’t see any reason why other countries shouldn’t employ this strategy in their military.
Not nearly all or most men in service are put to the most dangerous front-lines. It’s faulty to just speak about “male-standards”. Scouting, ranger-duties etc. hold different requirements than say, first-aid. If you specifically don’t want to employ cannon-fodder tactics, male physiology gives a significant advantage on developing itself to be the tip of the spear.
Isn’t it also the case, though, that the physical standard tests are slightly lower for women than men in the military?
what about the civilians abroad who are getting maimed, raped, killed? no mention here of imperialism and first-world privilege? really?
I left it out for two reasons: one, this is a post specifically about the disproportionate number of men in the military and imperialism is rather off topic (in a post that is quite long enough already); two, I’m a white American woman with only the most basic knowledge of anti-racist activism and am sure to fuck something up if I write about imperialism, first world privilege and the maiming of civilians (well, beyond the basic “that is fucked up, don’t do that” level). You’re right, though, that our blog doesn’t pay enough attention to anti-racism and anti-imperialism. Could you by any chance recommend someone who might be interested in contributing about the topic?
Thank you for mentioning the increased risk of sexual assault for women soldiers, but there are other issues, including the great number of jobs she is officially barred from holding, even though, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, she may be doing them anyway, just not getting the money and the benefits for it (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/us/16women.html) and conservative lawmakers are trying to make it impossible for a military woman to get a safe, easy abortion on base (so she could, you know, return to her job…), and women are still routinely told they “don’t belong” in the military. Personally, I have no trouble with the *concept* of personally serving in the armed forces, but with the current climate of misogyny and sexual violence? No fucking way.
However, I do think you’re right, that gender expectations are a huge obstacle to women joining the military in larger numbers – which might, if we accounted for a larger percentage of the forces, be able to mitigate the culture of misogyny and assault…
Thank you for adding some more information! With a topic as complicated as the gender ratio in the military, there’s probably going to be all sorts of reasons for the disparity.
“However, I do think you’re right, that gender expectations are a huge obstacle to women joining the military in larger numbers – which might, if we accounted for a larger percentage of the forces, be able to mitigate the culture of misogyny and assault…”
I’m curious why you think more women in the armed forces is going to change the rate of sexual assault.
I think it’s the general purpose of the army–getting people to override their instincts against destroying stuff and killing also tends to make their sexual behavior problematic–that makes sexual violence so prevalent, not the gender of the soldiers.
Also, the more honest answer is that we don’t really know the rate of sexual assault of male soldiers due to the even greater stigma against male soldiers reporting sexual abuse.
I think you make a really important point about the stigma against male soldiers reporting. All the factors that make a woman not want to report– unit cohesion, the harm it does to one’s career, being taken as a wimp– apply just as much, if not more, to men, in addition to all the stigma that currently exists against men reporting their rapes.
This might fit in here (http://hamptonroads.com.nyud.net/2009/10/military-men-are-silent-victims-sexual-assault)
There is a widespread presumption that most victims of sexual assault in the military services are women. That presumption, however, is false.
In a 2006 survey of active-duty troops, 6.8 percent of women and 1.8 percent of men said they had experienced unwanted sexual contact in the previous 12 months. Since there are far more men than women in the services, that translates into roughly 22,000 men and 14,000 women.
Among women, the number of victims who report their assaults is small. Among men, it is infinitesimal. Last year the services received 2,530 reports of sexual assault involving female victims – and 220 involving male victims.
According to a 2007 study by a team of VA researchers, a nationwide screening of veterans seeking VA services turned up more than 60,000 with sexual trauma. More than half of those – nearly 32,000 – were men.
That is a really great point about the unknowns concerning male rape in the army, however I think that if women accounted for a larger number of the armed forces, particularly a higher number of high-ranking women, there would be better and more-enforced policies concerning sexual assault and rape (at least of women, but I would hope that they would cover men as well). Also, I think any space that is close to 50-50 in gender ratio tends to be more egalitarian and less misandrist or misogynist than a space dominated by one gender – particularly if both genders are performing the same tasks and equitably held to the same standards (by which I don’t mean, regarding the army, ability to lift the same number of pounds, but to do one’s job efficiently and effectively, even if by different methods).
The military is supposed to be a place where discipline and procedure and honor prevent abuses like this – against men as well as against women, but people get away with it because the hierarchy covers their asses. And again, a big part of the stigma from reporting rape (perpetrated against a man) is the backlash *from other men*. Men get punished for reporting rapes because they “fail to live up” to some bullshit masculinity, while women in the army are punished for reporting rapes because they fail to *break* the stereotypes and become “exceptional” women that prove women can be effective in the military – which in turn feeds into the idea that women *shouldn’t* be in the military. I would imagine as well that some women come under pressure from other women not to report because reporting might set back the integration of women into the armed forces…It’s complicated as hell and all pretty disgusting.
Here are two articles that I think are pretty horrifying and pretty thought-provoking about these issues. The first is about male survivors, recently written by Newsweek’s Jesse Ellison: The Military’s Secret Shame. The second is about the suspicious deaths of a number of American servicewomen in Iraq and Afghanistan by Col. Ann Wright, Is There an Army Cover Up of Rape and Murder of Women Soldiers?>, which is admittedly 2 years old. Strong Trigger Warnings for both.
Interestingly, if the stigma regarding the sexual abuse of male soldiers was broken down and they felt free to come forward, it’s likely female soldiers would not face the same stigma of ‘women don’t belong in the army’. You can’t tell women they don’t belong in the army because they’ll get raped if similar proportions of men are also getting raped in the army.
Then its no longer a problem solved by getting rid of female soldiers. It’s something that has to be addressed as a systemic problem.
I don’t think anyone has ever told women “you don’t belong in the army” because they’ll get raped – I think rape is a reason many women choose not to consider a career in the army, and rape is one thing that can happen in conjunction with the above statement or to reinforce that point. The sentiment that women don’t belong in the army doesn’t result from rape, it results from aggression to the idea that women can be equal in combat situations, it results from the desire (from both men and women) to “protect” women by keeping them out of combat situations, it results from the idea that women are inherently weaker and therefore incapable of standing up to the rigors of military service.
I totally agree that it must be addressed as a systemic problem which affects both sexes – although the “women don’t belong” sentiment wouldn’t be addressed by improving rates of rape reporting and conviction, the army could become a safer place for both men and women. And addressing the “women don’t belong” sentiment could, potentially, reduce rates of rape against women in the army (same with “gays don’t belong” sentiments, “[people of x race] don’t belong” etc.)
This is a bit of an overanalysis and still gets it wrong. You do not belong to the army if you are afraid of getting raped and the long-term consequences of it for your mental health. You are fucking going to be an expert on killing people and withstanding a fucking bloodbath around you. You are not only expected recover to full combat-readiness when bad things happen such as rapes or bullets in your chest. And you have to live with the idea of a very possible death on the job.
If you get afraid of your brothers in arms for a miniscule possibility of sexual violation, guess what happens when you climb the ladder and try to convince first dozens, then hundreds of armed killers to risk their lives in some god-forsaken hellhole for some stupid abstract strategic advancement or recon -mission? There is no friendly fire.
Fucking bad things happen in the military. If there’s one good thing about the institution, it’s that it might help one develop ones character just enough to cope with severe setbacks.
There are risks. If they can be mitigated, good. But then again, diverting resources and competence from the core easily ends up with problems far, far worse than a few PSTDs. When in the greens, it’s all about rationalizing every decision. If a competent general considers having females around him/her distracting, that IS good enough of a reason to remove them from vicinity. To save some lives.
Fin: I’m not sure that a one in three chance of being raped is really a “miniscule” chance. And it is certainly possible for a woman to be okay with the idea of dying or being wounded for her country but leery of being raped for no particular strategic purpose.
Which is to say, I guess, that while bullets in your chest are something that you need to be prepared for if you’re in the military, if one in three women were getting shot in the chest, usually by their fellow soldiers, that would be a bit of a problem, and women not wanting to join the army because of it would be quite understandable.
One in three is quite alarming indeed. And that kind of ratio surely affects the overall performance of “the machine”. I don’t know if US military is just the only one noticing and keeping voice of the issue, but personally I have not heard of evidence of sexual violence that common in any other internationally operating polygender fighting-force. I.e. I still find that hard to believe. But I have no better numbers.
But that is to say, I would not question a general coming to a conclusion, that the most effective way to get rid of the negative effect on troop performance would be to remove females from the ground-zero. In war, you live and cope with present realities. Not with theoretical desired states of affairs.
All: I think the more interesting question is if rape can truly be separated from the military’s other forms of violence, or if breeding the latter inevitably gives rise to the former.
“I’m curious why you think more women in the armed forces is going to change the rate of sexual assault. ”
Considering that, anecdotally at least, women report far more fear of assaults/attempts/approaches from other women than from men, it seems unlikely that bringing more woemn in is going to help matters much.
“I think it’s the general purpose of the army–getting people to override their instincts against destroying stuff…”
Ha ha – No. You don’t have to train people to kill, you have to train them not to kill. That’s the way the instinct runs. Anyone who has spent ten minutes in a schollyard around young children knows that. I rememeber when the commanding general of the 7th Infantry Division made bayonet drill mandatory; he was afraid this younger genration was all soft and whatever – at a time when street gangs and general gun violence were at an all time high in society. Talk about out of touch.
“…and killing also tends to make their sexual behavior problematic…”
No, that’s not it. What makes the sexual behavior diffenrent – “problematic” if you want – is the preciousness of the moment once you relaize death can happen at any moment. It’s a very Zen insight. Do it now – a cup of tea, arrange flowers, get laid, blow job in the alley – right NOW, because this may be your very last chance. This is the basis of “poignancy” – mono no aware – that is foundational to all esthetic awareness.
Hey, are you the same Jim who posts at feministcritics?
“Ha ha – No. You don’t have to train people to kill, you have to train them not to kill.”
Then why is there such a strong visceral reaction to killing in most people?
“No, that’s not it. What makes the sexual behavior diffenrent – “problematic” if you want”
I’m not talking about quickies in alleyways. I’m talking about rape and sexual torture.
Are you saying that a soldier’s desire to make every moment count is why he or she rapes or sexually tortures other people?
In general society, yes, we do try to breed a sense of horrific wrongness at the thought of taking a life. However, even though it may still mentally being taxing, people in stressful, frightening situations must be taught not to kill – they must control their emotional reactions to logically think through who is really the “enemy” and who is not, whether this person or that person truly poses a threat, etc. The fear and pressure is why some people go totally xenophobic and kill anyone or anything not like them…
do you have any reading materially, anecdotal or otherwise, that women report more fear of other women than of men?
Of course this is a post about men in the military, so…
Let’s not forget the widows and widowers of our military persons.
I laid my grandmother to rest on July 4th (yesterday for Australia), and she was a Vietnam war widow at 34.
She was not alone in her heartache, it affected our whole family, even those of us who never knew my grandfather.
They are both greatly missed.
Ah, like Hilary Clinton, who thinks the “real victims of war have always been women” because they are the one’s left (alive).
No real man: “We should remember widows and widowers too” =/= “women are the real victims of war.” For one thing, the first statement is gender-neutral; for another, it doesn’t say that widows and widowers have it worse, merely that they have made a sacrifice which is rightly commended.
Unfortunately, Hillary Clinton made a misstep, however, I don’t think it’s *inherently* wrong to say that as of situation like, oh the crisis in Darfur? Sure the women were alive…but they were being raped and forced to have children of the men who were slaughtering their kinspeople…Or the Congo? Just because women might be technical noncombatants, in situations like they are certainly victims (both dead and alive) of war.
I hate the unfairness of it but we must face reality. Having men do the hard fighting and keeping women safe from it is the most effective arrangement for a culture. The only reason many people don’t think so, is because they’re lucky enough to live in a time and place where combat doesn’t affect their daily lives. Those cultures who let men fight and keep women safe will always prevail over those who don’t. I hate it but it’s the way it is. This is why we are still alive and safe enough to dream up Utopian visions of equality and fairness in the military.
If you really care about fairness, then apply it by being grateful to your male ancestors for taking on such an unfair burden without ever mentioning that it was unfair that women didn’t have to do the same.
I am very grateful to my male ancestors and angry at the men and sometimes women who wasted their lives in useless battles.
Also, [citation needed].
I disagree. The winner is the one who can utilize the given resources and capabilities most efficiently to achieve desired outcome. In war, that means women must do their part as well.
Our historians are pretty unanimous that one of the primary reasons why my nation was able to keep her independence was that we did not succumb to the romantic ideal of war as mens work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotta_Sv%C3%A4rd Via Lotta Svärd alone, at least third of the people contributing to our Continuation War were female.
Seriously, what?
Please back this up with evidence.
Sorry, but I’m not going to be grateful for all the men who died fighting each other (let alone men who have nothing but genitals in common with the soldiers of the past).
I don’t know if it’s an American thing to always view themselves and their own army as the good guys, or a Danish thing to not do, but the majority of those of my male ancestor who died in battle didn’t do it because it was necessary, they did so in an attempt to conquer Swedish territories. Or British territories if we go back even longer.
And I don’t think they did it for the sake of my female ancestors, let alone me. In fact, if any of them had an ideological reason besides “I hate Swedes” it was probably to benefit their male descendants. Not to mention that most of the time, the king just drafted the part of the population that wasn’t pregnant or needed for childrearing, and no voluntary sacrifice played any part of it.
As for the issue of rape, I don’t know what the real numbers are. I do know that a (male) solider once told me he didn’t think women belonged in battle, because they’d just get raped. His theory was that during battle, people became so stressed that their bestial sides would take over, and males would rape any female who didn’t have the protection of a stronger male (we argued a lot about what constituted people’s ‘bestial side’).
He wasn’t a bad guy, he thought it crucial to democracy to have women in the police-force, and in every part of the army that didn’t include standing in trenches shooting at people. And his attitude towards women in combat was that, as much as he didn’t want them there, it was still his job to be professional and cooperative towards them. But I have to admit, it wasn’t exactly encouraging. Even the guys who frame it benevolently (“I just don’t think I could stand to watch a woman die”) annoy me, because I know I’ll be the one feeling the consequences of the lower number of female soldiers, not them.
That’s extraordinarily bitter of you.
This sounds like something governments are interested in not necessarily the poor shmup on the frontline. My grandfather was glad he was way behind the frontline in Russia back in WWII, wanted to get home to see his son (was born in war time, he first saw him years after being released as POV). He gave shit about conquering Russia.
Which is part of why I don’t think it’s fair to expect women to acknowledge some collective depth of gratitude to men because men fought wars with other men. Because it usually wasn’t a voluntary sacrifice for the greater good as much as something the solider had been told to do, and even the people who made their own choices were usually selfish.
Likewise, I don’t think men owe women some collective depth of gratitude for dying in childbirth. Just as with the male soldiers, we can mourn their faith and do whatever we can to reduce to losses, but it’s not exactly a choice. And since many women don’t give birth and many men don’t go to war, collective depths between the sexes are stupid anyway.
I suppose the difference is, no one volunteers to give birth to children in order to stave off armies that would like to kill you.
That’s why you should have some gratitude. Others died so that you may live. They died so that you could comment about your ungratefulness.
I don’t really see how it’s unreasonable to say all women don’t owe all men a debt of gratitude just because some men went to war. Also, the fact is, not all wars were fought so that anyone could live. Some wars were fought for stupid reasons and that’s not the fault of any individual soldier who did what they did, either because they had no choice or because they thought it was right, but I really don’t see how saying all women should be grateful to all men, is really going to help anyone. Or for that matter, I don’t see how saying all men should be grateful to all women for whatever, would help either.
I believe in showing respect for the armed forces but I feel like, that really shouldn’t translate to all women automatically owing all men, especially since while most soldiers and veterans may be men, not all men are soldiers or veterans or ever will be, and claiming so is just silly.
You’re right, that is silly. I never said that all women owe all men, or that all men owe all women (or should be grateful, or whatever). I said that people should be grateful for the men who served.
How about I don’t demand that men owe me a collective debt for how many male soldiers killed, raped, and oppressed my ancestors, and men don’t demand that I owe them a collective debt because most of the soldiers who protected my ancestors (but might have killed, raped, or oppressed other ancestors instead) had a penis like them?
And how about we acknowledge that pregnancy can be a choice and sacrifice too (“Honey, I would love to have more children, can’t we try again?”, “Women, do your duty and make us numerous!”, “Give birth to more soldiers”) now that we’re at it? And that it still doesn’t justify talking about collective debts owed to one sex by another?
Hmm, while I don’t agree fully with either you or AB, I find it difficult to be grateful that my ancestors (my specific ancestors) were American Indian slaughtering slave-owning killers, even though if they hadn’t been I wouldn’t be here today. I can be grateful for what I have and acknowledge where it comes from and the evil that was done to bring it about at the same time, I think.
And don’t forget the draft…