“These are crimes of domination and violence.” A quote from Senator Kristen Gillibrand (D-NY) related to her efforts to pass a bipartisan bill removing sexual assault reporting from the military chain-of-command. This is after the bill failed in the Senate’s Armed Forces Committee.
Domination and violence. These are a few of my least favorite things. These are two products of centuries of masculinity festering in the New World. Subjugation and genocide.
These are actions that cut through the physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual; or as Elizabeth Kubler-Ross wrote, the four dimensions of being human.
Somehow, in this society, we have created notions that real men don’t have emotions. If you cannot show nor share your feelings for fear of ridicule, reprimand or other denigration, then you might as well have little or no feelings at all.
Something has happened in the collective souls of men. Harry Potter referred to horcruxes, as objects that captured part of someone’s soul. In order for some fraction of a soul to be removed from a being, it had to fragment.
A new form of masculinity is urgently needed in the 21st Century. One where one man’s dignity does not depend on the oppression of some woman, child or other man. Where one man’s power does not correlate to his prowess or cunning, but on his gentleness, patience and trusting of others; particularly, in trusting other men.
The military brass do not trust some other entity to supervise. They don’t know how to trust some other entity. They have created such vast walls to isolate themselves, and the culture of rape and sexual assault that plagues the armed forces, that they fear what will happen by a law mandating that some external force be responsible for establishing protocols and consequences needed to create a new culture, new forms of safety in the day-to-day of being in the military.
By opposing such a change, the military commanders want to maintain an imbalance of power. They want to continue to have the discretion to grant immunity or a get-out-of-jail free card to a private or an officer who rapes, assaults or abuses a woman or another man.
Our political system is still fumbling with gender, masculinity, entitlement, male privilege and patriarchy. Last year, I realized how the term rape entered the public debate due to the shameful statements of two Republican candidates who are well on their way to being elected until they spoke about rape. Suddenly, rape was in the headlines and on tv. The R-word had become okay to say for the first time in my life whereas abortion has been in the public debate and a fixture in U.S. politics for most of my life. There were choices made back in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s to talk about the A-word, but refrain from mentioning the R-word. The men who led both parties in a two-party political system were complicit in the everyday use of the A-word and countless derivatives like “partial birth” and “abortion clinic.”
This is why it has fallen to a woman on the Senate Armed Forces Committee to rectify a culture of assault that has compounded a failed system for far too long. Fortunately, there is one tireless advocate who refuses to be cowed by custom and the way things have been. A new era is here for the military’s endemic patterns of coercion and rape.
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 