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
Nick,
If you want more info…. I belong to military.com….. You can usually stay abreast of all the happenings….
Thank you, gents.
nick spinelli 1, June 22, 2013 at 3:04 pm
If I did something offensive or bad, I apologize. I was and am just trying to understand something that seems counterintuitive to me. and something that just smells fishy. Whatever my offense, I do not need representation, I plead guilty and await sentencing. Hopefully it doesn’t include incarceration.
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Nope.
No incineration.
In the civilian population (“those who derive all their rights from soldiers” – OScrew) these are the rape statistics:
(Wikipedia, Rape In US). The ratio is (320 million people, 90,000 rapes = 2/10ths of 1%). The soldiers rape more than the civilian population (except some of those non-military rapes may be done by ex-right makers?).
Anyway, Nick skates.
Nick: the problem is the nature of the reporting; what NBC reports is based on an anonymous survey (by the military) of men and women in the military. it is NOT based upon actual charges brought. Of the men that reported “sexual harassment,” the vast majority checked the box on “inappropriate touching.”
A far lower number of men than women in the survey checked off forced intercourse (which included oral and anal intercourse).
Of actual disciplinary hearings and actions in the military, victims are 90% female and 10% male, and assailants are 97% male and 3% female.
If I did something offensive or bad, I apologize. I was and am just trying to understand something that seems counterintuitive to me. and something that just smells fishy. Whatever my offense, I do not need representation, I plead guilty and await sentencing. Hopefully it doesn’t include incarceration.
lottakatz 1, June 22, 2013 at 1:52 pm
Dredd, buddy, thank you for doing math. Srsly. 🙂
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You are welcome!
A Russian publication says:
(More men raped in US military than in prisons, The Voice of Russia). The fog of rape within the fog of war.
Dredd, buddy, thank you for doing math. Srsly. 🙂
nick spinelli: “lottkatz, That was your deduction, not mine?”
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Nick, as anyone that has visited this blawg for any time knows I don’t do math beyond the most basic level. But I do do grammar and sentence construction and I do know what your words said and by the construction of your paragraphs, what the clear implication was “Assuming it was true”. It was your deduction based on the assumption it was true. I just restated it without actually losing any of the meaning. You brought up ‘teh gay’ with “unwanted gay advances almost certainly has to be the reason for so many male victims” and went from there.
Even as I admit math is beyond me I do understand the nature of 2+2 in its most simple aspect. LOL, that was some powerfully weird s*it you wrote Nick.
Nick,
There are supporting data for men being raped about as much as women, however these are based upon “the ones that are not reported” … so in either case there is room for argument either way:
(NBC). This leads to the percentages of men who are raped (1.2 million men / 13,900 raped = 1%) (203,000 women / 12,100 raped = 6%).
So, your point to the extent it says both are raped and both are injured and suffer for the rest of their lives in some degree is a good point.
nick spinelli 1, June 22, 2013 at 12:47 pm
… I don’t know if these “facts” are true. …
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They are false.
The research by the Joint Chiefs would have loved that fantasy, but alas, the data paints only one picture:
(Rape in the Military a Culture of Coverup). What is called “the war on men” is the reporting of rapes, not the acts of rape.
Ever notice how every tv show the husband is always some idiot and the wife is the smart one? Hell yeah there is a war on men
Btw women should not be in the military. Instead of bringing more peace it will bring more war and not because they are more for war but because it will become more acceptable to kill ANYONE
lottkatz, That was your deduction, not mine? For the last time, I don’t know if these “facts” are true. But, if they are, I don’t know the breakdown of whom assaulted whom, and what that means. Don’t kill the messenger just for asking basic questions.
Gene H: “LK, …. with free shipping”.
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it’s always the shipping charges where one gets gouged.
Els DL:
Hey, I called myself a feminist not long ago too. I totally believe in equal rights for men and women. And the operative word there is “EQUAL”.
That unfortunately is not the experience of men in the legal world, particularly in Family Court law and domestic violence law.
After having been put through the mill in these courts in the most obviously gender discriminatory ways (they don’t even see it because it’s just the way they do things), I have to withdraw my membership from being a feminist, because what a feminist is is no longer a campaign for equal rights, but rather superior rights for women.
And that is only my experience in a small part of our legal machine, it goes on and on in every other part of our society.
I do not like Rush Limbaugh, and I would bet you that we both agree with the ideals of feminism. The problem is radical feminism is now taken for idealistic feminism, and that being the meaning of the word now, I could not agree with.
Watch the video I posted to see what I mean by radical feminism.
nick spinelli: “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. …. 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. [of closeted gays in the military]”
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Sooooo, A heretofore secret class of closeted homo soldiers in all branches of the military went around raping male soldiers at truly stunning numbers of incidents and that never became public and now some liberals (because “PC” is associated with the left) will gloss over that so that these marauding gay rapers won’t give gays in the military a bad reputation historically OR that it can be addressed going forward OR to prevent open gayness in the military can again suppressed?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZxzJGgox_E
This thread is making my head hurt. And my soul wither.
Being checked by a UCS chiropractor on a list on upcspine or finding one by putting your zip code in on the web page, upper cervical heath centers, will help in not having to use pharmaceuticals in the first place.
LK,
You left out “women should be available mail order and over the internet, preferably with free shipping”.
Folks seem to be missing my point. The US Senator leading this much needed investigation is asserting that half of the sexual assault victims in the military[Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force and Coast Guard] are MALE. I have not found via a cursory search[I’m not that interested] from where those stats a derived. It’s certainly an interesting “fact.” Is it true? If so, what is the ratio of women harassing men, men harassing men, men harassing women and women harassing women. These are facts that would be interesting to know. As stated previously, I’m not so interested as to research this but any meaningful discussion should have these questions answered. Any volunteers? This doesn’t need to get testy. I’m currently sedated so I’m virtually incapable of being testy. If nothing else, doesn’t the assertion that half the victims are men seem counterintuitive?
artiewhitefaux 1, June 22, 2013 at 11:59 am
An exceptional nation would look like a foolish nation to people that die but wise in the eyes of God. What do you think would be different to make people think USA is foolishness but be wise in the eyes of God?
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You are preaching to the liar.
GaryT: “More men are raped than women per annum.”
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A bridge too far Gary, a bridge too far.
_____________
“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. ”
*
Right, men can’t control themselves. I agree, it’s just how they’re made. Really, we can’t hold them to any standard of self-discipline when it comes to sex. Obviously they must be held blameless for their sexual behaviour due to this biological flaw. Women on the other hand, being a less biologicly damaged sex must then be held to a higher standard, they must be responsible for their own as well as male sexuality.
They should not talk to males that are not family or even look at them. They should remain in their home and not mingle in public places. They should be escorted by a male family member whenever they must go out. They should cover themselves head to foot so that sight of them doesn’t inflame male passions.
Gosh, a country that could persuade it’s women to buy into that kind of philosophy, or impose it, would be truly enlightened. If only there were places in the world that would adopt these kinds of policies to protect its men, they would be a paradise on Earth for men, AND women. Yea, that’s the ticket.