Submitted by: Mike Spindell, Guest Blogger
As a male who met his wife at age 36, I had many years as a single male and many relationships with women. While being experienced sexually the idea of forcing myself on a woman was not only repellant, but emotionally I was and am unable to understand why men would do something like that. Emotionally even as a fantasy, on film, or in literature I find nothing the least bit stimulating, or manly about forcing oneself upon an unwilling partner. Yet I understand it very well intellectually as a power trip having little to do with sex and much to do with an innate hostility towards women.. One of the places where it seems rape and sexual assault has run rampant has been the military. A recent AP story has related that one third of fired military commanders were canned for sexual misconduct. http://jezebel.com/5977856/nearly-a-third-of-fired-military-commanders-were-canned-because-of-their-penises Congress is discussing harsher military penalties for rape and sexual molestation. This is a disgraceful situation in my opinion and a continuance of women being treated as second class citizens.
In May, the Department of Defense released its “Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military,” which found that up to 26,000 service members may have been the victim of some form of sexual assault last year, up from an estimated 19,000 in 2010. The report also found that 62 percent of victims who reported their assault faced retaliation as a result. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel responded to the report by calling the assaults “a despicable crime” that is “a threat to the safety and the welfare of our people,” and General Martin Dempsey affirmed that sexual assaults constitute a “crisis” in the military.
I find that the figure of 26,000 service members being victims of sexual assault this past year appalling. Almost all of those victims were females. Yet as we shall see there are some who minimize this behavior and seem to excuse it as just the natural workings of the male libido. I’ll explain.The following story came from this past week and appropriate linkages are provided:
“In an effort to address this longstanding problem, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) has blocked the promotion of Lt. Gen. Susan J. Helms, who granted clemency to an officer found guilty of sexual assault, in an effort to obtain more information about why the officer was effectively pardoned. As The Washington Post reported, an Air Force jury found the officer guilty of sexually assaulting a female lieutenant in the back seat of a car, and sentenced him to 60 days behind bars, a loss of pay, and dismissal from the Air Force.
Helms’ decision to effectively pardon the officer “ignored the recommendations of [her] legal advisers and overruled a jury’s findings — without publicly revealing why.” The Post explained that McCaskill has not placed a permanent hold on the promotion, but is “blocking Helms’s nomination until she receives more information about the general’s decision.”*
It goes further regarding McCaskill’s reasoning:
“But McCaskill is not trying to re-litigate the case; she is trying to determine why Helms ignored her legal advisers and overturned a jury of five Air Force officers. As the Post explained, advocacy groups charge that “any decision to overrule a jury’s verdict for no apparent reason has a powerful dampening effect,” contributing to a culture in which the majority of sexual assaults in the military remain unreported.
The Department of Defense report on sexual assault found that while 26,000 service members said they were assaulted last year, only about 11 percent of those cases were reported. The findings listed several reasons why individuals did not report the assault to a military authority, including that they “did not want anyone to know,” “felt uncomfortable making a report,” and “thought they would not be believed.” The report also noted that concerns about “negative scrutiny by others” keeps many victims from reporting their assaults.” http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/06/18/wsjs-taranto-dismisses-military-sexual-assault/194498
“The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto dismissed the epidemic of sexual assault in the military, claiming that efforts to address the growing problem contributed to a “war on men” and an “effort to criminalize male sexuality.””
This is a transcript of Mr. Taranto’s interview” from The Wall Street Journal’s webshow Opinion Journal Live.
“MARY KISSEL (host): President Obama is fond of talking about the war on women, but what about the war on men? We’ve got Best of the Web Today columnist James Taranto here to talk about an especially perverse example of this war. James, who is Lieutenant General Susan Helms and how is she a victim of a war on men?
JAMES TARANTO: Well Susan Helms was a female pioneer, she was the first American military servicewoman in space. She graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1980, became an astronaut in 1990, flew on the space shuttle six times, four times as a crewman and twice as a passenger en route to the international space station, where by the way she set, along with a male astronaut, the record for longest space walk. She was working on a docking device known as a pressurized mating adaptor. And they were out in space for 8 hours and 56 minutes.
KISSEL: I see. But your op-ed in the paper today says that she’s somehow a victim in a war on men? How is that?
TARANTO: That’s right. Well, this goes back to the effort to combat, the political campaign against sexual assault in the military. And this seems to be turning into an effort to criminalize male sexuality, much as we see with sexual conduct codes on campus. And so what happened was, the general exercised her authority to grant clemency to an officer under her command, a man named Captain Matthew Herrera, who had been convicted of aggravated sexual assault, in a case in which the factual underpinnings were quite thin. The general wrote a long memo explaining why she made this decision and it’s very convincing, and Senator Claire McCaskill has put a permanent hold on the general’s nomination. She was nominated by President Obama to serve as vice commander of the Air Force Space Command. Claire McCaskill says she’s not going to let her through, because she wants to callattention to this problem of sexual assault in the military.
KISSEL: So the women are always victims, regardless of the facts?
TARANTO: Well here’s what happened in this case. It was a drunken sexual advance in the backseat of a moving vehicle, involving Captain Herrera and a female officer who was a lieutenant. They differed on whether it was, on who initiated it and whether she consented. She claimed that she fell asleep, woke up to find her pants undone and his hands on her genitals, he claimed that she undid her own pants, he touched her and she responded to the touch by putting her head on his shoulder. Now the officers in the front seat didn’t even hear this going on. But the officer who was driving, the designated driver, who was also a woman and by the way the only one who was sober, on several other disputed points corroborated his testimony and contradicted hers. In addition, there were text messages exchanged between the accuser and the defendant, after the incident. She claimed only a couple of times, then she changed her testimony when they looked at the logs of the text messages. And it turned out there were 116 of them, of which 51 were sent by her. So, it was pretty clear that this guy was overcharged, he would have ended up on a sex offender registry for the rest of his life if this had stood, he was still discharged from the military.
KISSEL: What a perverse outcome here. So you have this really accomplished woman, in this lieutenant general who’s up for promotion, and getting held up by another woman because of the war on men. James, when did this war on men begin? Can you pinpoint a starting point?
TARANTO: Well, it all goes back to the beginning of contemporary feminism in the early ’60s. You know, women wanted to be equal to men, they wanted to be able to do all the sort of professional things including the military that men could do, and —
KISSEL: Was there anything wrong with that, though, James? I mean, that sounds —
TARANTO: Well, that’s too long to go into now, the question of what’s wrong with that, but in addition they wanted sexual freedom. Well what is female sexual freedom? It means, for this woman, that she had the freedom to get drunk, and to get in the backseat of the car with this guy. There was another woman who accused him, he was acquitted in this case, of sexual assault. This so-called assault happened in his bedroom, to which she voluntarily accompanied him, even the jury said that was consensual.
KISSEL: James, 30 seconds left. Is there any chance that Senator McCaskill’s going to reconsider this hold?
TARANTO: Well I certainly hope so, I mean that’s why I wrote the article. But I hope that her constituents will turn up the heat. Because Lieutenant General Helms lived up to her oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. She really gave this guy the protection that anyone accused of a serious crime deserves. And McCaskill took the same oath, and she ought to uphold it.”http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/06/18/wsjs-taranto-dismisses-military-sexual-assault/194498 And: http://mediamatters.org/video/2013/06/18/wsjs-taranto-female-sexual-freedom-has-led-to-a/194507
So is this an example of “The War on Men” as Mr. Taranto describes it? Or is it the same old male hypocrisy justifying women as sexual objects created by God as Man’s playthings? I’ve written in the past about the importance of female equality so you know where I stand. http://jonathanturley.org/2013/02/09/the-most-important-human-rights-issue-women/
Just like FOX News though I’m giving you the facts, you decide. Is there a war on men?
Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest Blogger
You’re welcome, Tupac.
nick spinelli 1, June 22, 2013 at 11:53 am
Dredd, Don’t be such a cynic, We both love baseball. That’s quite significant.
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There are several cults of cynics:
(Grandpa’s Dictionary).
Baseball?
That is what base commanders call rape.
Dredd, Don’t be such a cynic, We both love baseball. That’s quite significant.
Thanks Biggie.
Actually the spam filter had you, Dredd. You caught in a spam filter. Imagine that.
But thanks for your false allegations.
I approved your spam, er, comment for you.
Els DL 1, June 22, 2013 at 11:36 am
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I much agree with Nick Spindell that the ‘war on men’ is a phony one
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Yeah, that Nick Spindell and his brother Gene Spindell are quite an agreeable bunch. 😉
Lt. General David Morisson with the Australian military gave a speech only a couple of weeks ago, addressing the issue. It is the best one I’ve heard from a military leader and I wish that the American military had a male leader who can speak as frankly as he did. I don’t know if the professor has posted it on here before but I recommend everyone here to google it and to listen to it. I don’t know how to add a link on here, so I’ll have to recommend googling it. Perhaps one of you can put the link on this blog?
I much agree with Nick Spindell that the ‘war on men’ is a phony one. It smacks of a similarly invented ‘war on Christianity in the US’ masterfully crafted and delivered on an almost daily basis on Fox News.
The saying that ‘men will be men’, which is what some of the people like Mr. Taranto, are basically saying, is, no matter how one phrases it, a huge insult to the vast majority of men who would never, ever, take advantage of a woman whether she is drunk/drugged or not. The men who have sex with a man or woman without their full consent (not influenced by drugs) should, as Lt. General Davis Morisson says just get out of the military. I feel the same if you replace the word ‘men’ to ‘women’. It is a crime!
Feminism has nothing to do with this. Gary T uses the phrase ‘radical feminism’ but fails to define what he means by that. What he considers ‘radical feminism’ may be considered ‘normal’ female demands by many people in the world. Rush Limbaugh, as many of you know, calls women whom he doesn’t like ‘feminazis’ and he calls women who believe that their healthcare should help cover expenses for birth control ‘sluts’. Is that where Gary T gets his views from? From my own experiences I can tell that I am called a feminist derogatorily by a man only when I happen to disagree with that man’s views on the rights of women. Case in point, my father spat in my face only a few years ago because I travel alone sometimes (work/visiting family and friends). He believes that I am a bad woman and that my husband deserves a woman who stays home, takes care of him, my daughter and the house. His wife, my stepmother, was proud of him for ‘putting me in place, once and for all’.
As a woman and as a woman’s rights activist I refuse to let some examples, as referenced by Gary T, above get in the way of the fact that, world-wide, violence against women remains a huge stain on humanity. Gary T brings up that 40% of all domestic violence is woman upon man’ without any proof whatsoever. I call that ‘lame’.
Thank you Mr. Spinelli for bringing up this issue and for standing up for the many other decent men who feel similarly. And to those women who have accused men of violence against them untruthfully, shame, big shame on you for you not only wreaked havoc to that man’s life but also to his family, your family and to the many women who are hurting and looking for justice!
Nick: Of course a college professor knows the US Army is only one branch of the military.
And of course a mentally competent human would not assume any other branch of the military is going to present a significantly different ratio of victim gender when compared to the Army. There may be less opportunity to commit, but the stats in the Army (which match common sense) are proof enough that the gender correlation is going to be extremely high in virtually any venue.
Nick,
I replied to your assertion that only one branch of the military suffers this anomaly.
Your Big Brother is holding back my comment at this time. Let’s be patient. Biggie reads very slowly moving the lips to and fro in the process.
Word Press, the resident censor, is at work again. It hates truthiness.
Again, totally missing the point that “sexual assault” isn’t sex. It’s assault via sexual acts. Now I know you’d like for consent not to be at issue because doing away with the consent requirement would also undermine the legal arguments against bestiality, but humans are not that kind of animal. When sex is forced on another human without consent, most societies consider that a crime, Artie. Because it hurts people physically and emotionally.
The connection between being 34 when you met your wife and your aversion to forcing yourself on women is a bit tenuous, but for some reason that resonated with me. I was fifty when I met my wife, and I shudder at least as much as you at the thought of forcefully… Well you know. I grew up in an age and a culture that resembled “chivalry” where women were to be treasured and protected.
They were, however, supposed to be gently and graciously seduced at every opportunity, so I cannot claim much in the way of purity.
nick spinelli 1, June 22, 2013 at 10:28 am
Of course a college professor knows the US Army is only one branch of the military. As stated previously, Senator Gillenbrand from NY, who has taken the lead on this, has facts stating ~half of the victims are male. Maybe they’re horseshit facts, but I have seen no refutation to date.
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The statistics apply to the entire military, from Coast Guard to Air Force.
It is systemic:
(Bully Worship: The Universal Religion – 2). That quote is several years old, so Mike S’ figures in this post point out that they went up from 19,000 to 26,000 explains the variation in the numbers.
One of the first things I noticed when I studied this data from the Joint Chiefs was that it is a systemic phenomenon.
The NSA military outfit spying on Americans is another manifestation of the bully culture that is cultivated in the military more so than anywhere else.
People talk about war on men with sex. Why isn’t there an outcry with war so easily engage in that ends in death or maiming of the body? Why isn’t their an outcry about all of the military bases in the first place with stock pills of weapons?
Mike Spindell 1, June 22, 2013 at 9:57 am
…
In the psyche of many males sexual abuse of women is a matter of “boys will be boys”. I find that not only repellant, but essentially a license to commit violence.
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It is one of the most fundamental of social tenets:
(Bully Worship: The Universal Religion – 4). Our culture is a bully culture, and it should be no surprise that microcosms develop within that macrocosm.
Of course a college professor knows the US Army is only one branch of the military. As stated previously, Senator Gillenbrand from NY, who has taken the lead on this, has facts stating ~half of the victims are male. Maybe they’re horseshit facts, but I have seen no refutation to date.
Your Senator Gillenbrand sticks by the “half of victims are male.” Now, assuming that’s true, maybe it doesn’t comport w/ gays being in the military is a good thing. Before you or anyone jumps on me, I SUPPORT open gayness in the military. But, unwanted gay advances almost certainly has to be the reason for so many male victims. And, that opens up a can of worms for those who would like to go back to no gays in the military days. You know, the “See what happens” horseshit. It’s an interesting dilemma. But, chances are pc will play too important a role instead of direct and honest questions about why this is happening, and how to deal w/ it, w/o going back to the bad old days.
“Your Senator Gillenbrand sticks by the “half of victims are male.” Now, assuming that’s true, maybe it doesn’t comport w/ gays being in the military is a good thing.”
Nick,
She is not my Senator and I am not a NY resident. In any event the real percentage is from my perspective irrelevant. The two points I was making were that there is not a “War on Men” and that forcing sexual contact upon anyone is a repellant and violent act. By violent I include an unwanted touching, which if I remember correctly from my law school days was considered battery.
“The connection between being 34 when you met your wife and your aversion to forcing yourself on women is a bit tenuous, but for some reason that resonated with me.”
Bill H,
It was 36 and the point I was trying to make delicately was that by then I had a lot of sexual experiences. 🙂
“They were, however, supposed to be gently and graciously seduced at every opportunity, so I cannot claim much in the way of purity.”
I believe that my own “success” with women came about because I always considered their wanting to have sex with me as a gift of intimacy that was to be accepted with gratitude. We live in a commercialized/com-modified country that measures sexual pleasure in terms of the orgasm, rather than the entire wonderful experience of sharing deep intimacy with someone else. It is therefore easy to see why some men skip all of the beautiful steps of foreplay to make sex into insertion and orgasm. With that kind of mentality for some then rape becomes a triumph.
Govt statistics show that more than 40% of all domestic violence is woman upon man.
Same statistics show women are more likely to abuse their children then men, and are more likely to kill their children then men.
More men are raped than women per annum.
Radical feminism has skewed the public perception of who abuses who in the gender wars.
And very often, what women cannot do to men directly, they will do through false allegations, and get the govt to do it for them.
You should all see Ms. Straughan’s overview on radical feminism, presented this April 2013:
http://youtu.be/3dwLzB0kFxI?t=2m31s
“In the absence of a signed and witnessed Sexual Authorization Form, any sexual contact should be deemed a sexual assault or rape and the man should be automatically deemed guilty upon any accusation by a female, regardless of whatever evidence there may be. Now, what could be more fair than that?”
Tom Blanton,
Underneath the obvious irony, do you believe there is a “War on Men?”
What Justice Holmes and Tony said.