Sexual Violence and the Military

Recently there has been a lot of reporting on the high prevalence of sexual assault in the U.S. military. My favorite is the guy who was in charge of the Sexual Assault Prevention Program, accused of sexual assault himself. I have heard people speculate that this is a result of the transition to allowing more gays and women into the military. Yeah, it is always integration itself that is the problem, not the people who refuse to be integrated.

However, this is just another case in which people are resistant to (or completely incapable of) scrutinizing the military. Not certain things that it does here and there, but the logic of its operation – in fact, its very existence. The natural response to the current scandal is to think of more ways the military can be regulated, or more effective policy that can be put in place. I say, have fun with that.

The truth is, the predisposition toward violence against women lies in the very fabric of the military itself – and not just the U.S. military, but any military. For all of human history, from what I can tell, pillage and plunder has always been associated with rape. You can’t have one without the ooooothers. To understand why, we have to revisit the inherent nature of violence.

Violence is not a universal aspect of human nature, but rather a feature of structures of inequality. There are, of course, plenty of ways to sustain inequality without resorting to violence, and some have argued that power must defined in terms of the ability of both parties to act (thus precluding violence). Therefore, the relationship between violence and inequality/power is not merely a matter of direct practical necessity. Violence is, rather, one component of a particular kind of authority - an authority that is established upon the differential valuation of human life and dignity. Just as the distinction between man and animal, which entailed the exalted status of man, was traditionally justified by man’s dominion over animals (and this was always expressed through the act of hunting), the imposed hierarchical distinctions among different types of human beings are ideologically sustained by the “naturalness” (in some cases even virtue) of violence committed by white men, as the vanguards of human progress, and the complementary insignificance or invisibility of acts of violence carried out against Others (women, people of color, etc.).

In other words, while hierarchical structures do not always require violence to sustain their general existence, individuals employ violence to maintain the day-to-day, lived experience of hierarchy. Wherever the particularity of social life lies in the interstices of structures of inequality, violence works to reproduce the larger structures within the gaps that escape the hierarchy, and in so doing extend the hierarchy into its own margins.

So, with the notion of “legitimate violence” comes the white man as the legitimate purveyor of legitimate violence. There are two ways in which this is ideologically reinforced. First, violence is construed as a masculine characteristic. Science does its part by lending pseudo legitimacy to nonexistent data. Testosterone provides the link between gender and violence, despite a serious lack of knowledge about the effects of testosterone (for a number of reasons, testosterone is very difficult to study). Then families, schools, and entertainment media join the effort by subtly (or not so subtly) implying that “boys will be boys” and promoting violence as a valued expression of masculinity. Real men punch back. If men feel that their masculinity (i.e. superiority) is being threatened, they reliably resort to violence. This is why rape, or any violence against women, is essentially a means for men to assert their hierarchical domination over women.

Second, violence becomes part of the “white man’s burden” when it is encapsulated within the narrative of Progress. This has been true since the colonial era (as colonialism was ostensibly designed to bring civilization to the savages), and it is just as true today when military interventions are supposedly undertaken to support human rights and democracy, by fighting the forces of darkness, as represented by Muslims...err, terrorists... well, really, Muslims.

So yes, the military is inherently racist too. (Since race and religion are co-constructed and intricately entwined, Islamophobia does indeed count as a form of racism.) I have seen photo evidence that basic training primes recruits to view “the enemy” as someone existentially unlike them. Make them look like a cartoon version of the Evil Arab, and suddenly it’s not so hard to envision killing them. That is not to say, of course, that in the end many people in the military don't find it psychologically impossible to cope with the things they are doing. The military doesn’t seem to care too much about anyone’s psychological health once they’ve done their duty, but they do need to make it just a little easier for people to actually accomplish something before they develop PTSD.

If one wants to do anything about the scourge of sexual assault in the military, one has to accept the role of the military in sustaining gendered and racial hierarchies both ideologically and materially. The military itself is the problem. Or, rather, the military functions primarily to enforce the ideological and material regimes of domination that make sexual assault possible in the first place. Only with the dissolution of the military and radical systemic change can anything really be done about sexual assault.