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A Brigadier General in the US Army has been charged with rape. Well, actually, Brig. General Jeffrey Sinclair has been charged with a veritable laundry list of offenses, as set forth in an Army press release, among them
forcible sodomy, wrongful sexual conduct, attempted violation of an order, violations of regulations by wrongfully engaging in inappropriate relationships and misusing a government travel charge card, violating general orders by possessing alcohol and pornography while deployed, maltreatment of subordinates, filing fraudulent claims, engaging in conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman and engaging in conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline, or of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces.
While details are still sketchy, the charges apparently involve misconduct with several female subordinates.
Over on The Spearhead, W.F. Price bravely takes on the real villain here: women. Apparently their mere presence in the Armed Forces is enough to provoke male soldiers and generals alike to rape them and, while they’re at it, to buy booze and porn, mistreat their subordinates and rack up unauthorized purchases on government issued charge cards. In a post with the title “How’s that Women in the Military Thing Going Now?” Price gets right to the heart of the matter:
I suspect that the more combat-oriented environment an environment is in the military, the more likely these problems with women are to come about. For one thing, fighting men are more passionate by nature, and then there’s the fact that these men also turn women on more.
Yes, because when male soldiers rape female soldiers, the problem lies with woman in uniform getting “turned on” by men in uniform.
A forward base in hostile territory is not likely to have the same atmosphere as an assignment stateside. The sense of danger actually tends to make people more sexually charged, or so I’ve heard from those who survived battles and sieges on the Eastern Front in WWII, where female-operated AA batteries behind the front lines became de-facto brothels.
Of course, male soldiers are also known to rape civilian women, so by Price’s logic women should neither serve in the military, nor not serve in the military. In times of war, they should just do all us dudes a favor and cease to exist at all.
If not, well, women just need to face up to the danger of “hanky panky” that their mere existence creates:
[O]ur personnel are serving in a remote Muslim country with no access to local females to speak of, and things are bound to happen. As to whether Sinclair “forced” anything on anybody, we don’t know at this point, and it seems unlikely, but it isn’t surprising at all that some forbidden hanky-panky may have occurred.
At this point, virtually all we know about the alleged crimes here is contained in that laundry list of charges I posted above. Yet someone Price is able to deduce that Sinclair is likely to be innocent here. Evidently Price is convinced that anyone who is a “real combat general” and who has “earned a number of awards related to combat arms and parachuting” is someone who is to be implicitly trusted.
In the comments, the Spearhead regulars offer their own unique takes on the issues of women in the military.
Keyster seems to dream of a day when women can not only be kicked out of the military but also out of pretty much everything else as well, except presumably the kitchen:
It’s not safe to work or serve with women.
The potential for trouble is way too high.
Once they invaded the workplace the last vestige of male only space was the military. Now even this is no longer true. I don’t know where men can go and work with other men without female interference anymore. Even if you own your own business, the government forces you to hire them…and invest in all manner of special female accommodations, like breast pumping stations and tampon dispensors.
Ironically the safest “male only” space is a Gay Bar. And even then curious women wander in to meddle and cause disruption.
Numnut drops some biotruths on us all:
Appears women are very horny once a month and will have sex with the most aggressive male available to them at that time.This re-enforces the “thinking with the vagina” theme that a women herself espoused.
Now that the lawz have given wymyn free pass to act out their base animals nature,no man is safe from the Whiplash regret post-sex.(ref to OT)
No doubt these milfem cursors were ovulating and thinking with the gash when they asked to be screwed.
The proper thing for the law to do is recognize this animal instinct and either regulate wymyns behaviors of legalize male sexuality again.
Women want it both ways,a rough man for sex,and prison for rough men.
Jean Valjean hopes that this case will help to expose women for being the filthy sluts they really are:
The question on my mind is will this man fight the charges and reveal the sexual nature of many women in the military or will he go meekly to his fate?
A commenter with the highly ironic name Reality offers up this bit of secondhand shitthatneverhappened.txt.
There was a guy who had been in the military who told me that in actual warfare when the bombs start dropping & the gunfire starts coming at them in an actual combat situation, women just throw down their guns and start running screaming like they would do any other situation.
We’re doomed. All so we can pretend ‘women are just the same as women’ [sic] – that’s more important to all these idiots that run this country & half the idiot population than the security of the country. It’s that way in any situation in life- this political correctness & diversity shit is becomes more important than success, life or death- you name it. In that sense it’s like drugs or alcohol addiction – you throw away your whole life for this one stupid, trivial thing.
Equality: Stupid and Trivial.
I learn new things every time I read The Spearhead.
For some actual facts on the epidemic of rape in the military see:
Leon Panetta: Military’s handling of rape is an “outrage.”
Naomi Wolf: A culture of coverup: rape in the ranks of the US military
Victims say military condones rape
Rape in the Military: America’s Dirty Little Secret
New military rape lawsuit filed
@MKlein:
That’s pretty fucking ableist. It’s like when people here were going on about how Anders Behring Breivik was OBVIOUSLY mentally ill, because OBVIOUSLY “normal” people don’t commit mass murder. No, he wasn’t. Being evil isn’t a mental illness. Most people, even “good” ones, have some contradictory ethical beliefs and ideas that they haven’t thought through very well, and it’s true of almost everybody (arguably everybody) that they can’t rationally prove that their ethical outlook is true.
Note: With “here” I meant Scandinavia, not Manboobz.
@Kakanian:
Oops, blockquote fail. @ kakanian:
Well, maybe you shouldn’t have called them nazis if they weren’t nazis. Maybe people would be less confused if you actually WROTE, for instance, eugenicists if you meant to say eugenicists.
Words have meanings, you know. You can’t just plaster the nazi label on any group with some kind of evil behaviour.
@Dvärghundspossen
It wasn’t just the eugenistic policies, believe me. nazism and nazism-like nationalist policies used to be fairly well-regarded during the time the first eastern european Zionist settlers decided that they really had suffered enough under the recent Pogroms and set out for british Palestina. That meant that they also escaped nazi persecution and never saw much need to fundamentally rethink their political stance, I guess. And that stance was more or less a race-based, militaristic, expansionistic nationalism that enacted some eugenistic policies and wasn’t exactly kind to all those identified as not belonging to a specific race. I do understand where you’re coming from when you tell me to not call that nazism, but even if I would not, certain historic facts simply stand IMO. I’m not using it as a general boogeyman-term here either. One part of the Zionist movement simply was ideolgically as close to nazism as could be while all other parts were not. I’ve mentioned that in the post that spawned this controversy.
The longterm-effect of that was that quite a few conflicts broke out between the latecomers, who experience the genocide in Europe, and the already established settlers who generally were trying to refashion jewish self-image along the lines of racial pride and strength rather than victimhood.
And no, I’m not trying to paint the current nation of Israel as particularily exceptional or evil here. It’s a fact that all european nations have to wrestle or come to terms with remnants of facist, nazi- or dictatorial thoughts within their current democratic systems. The allied de-nazification of Europe wasn’t exactly thorough.
@Kakanian: Well, maybe you honestly thought that you could convey everything you wrote now by simply using the word “nazi” in your original post. But you didn’t, the only thing you achieved by writing a sentence about Jewish nazis was making people think “WTF”? So, in the future, when you want to convey a message about how nazism and nazi-like ideas were wide-spread in Europe before Hitler and how this influenced early Zionists and still influences people today, you should probably write what you want to say, rather than just writing about nazi Jews. Since nobody understood what you meant by that.
@Fitzy
Yeah, he is just a little TOO perfectly hateful. Problem is, I’ve met men in real life who try to argue that women are inherently inferior, or that “the masses” are too dumb to have voting rights. So it’s hard to tell; he could be real. Or he could be a 16 year old troll who just discovered Ayn Rand or watched Idiocracy and thinks he’s above it all.
So this is what happens when I’m having a Supernatural season 7 marathon. Wow, Otis the Shitty is the total package, ain’t he? Classist, sexist, racist… anyone got a bingo card for this asshole?
It does seem odd that someone who, as he said, is relatively weak, would use physical strength as the be-all and end-all of determining worth. Unless his purpose is to make himself feel better about not being able to compete physically with other men by making all men the same, and all women the same, so her can be strong by proxy.
I mean, the main reason to belittle people for no good reason is to feel better about yourself when you are riddled with insecurities.
@Dvärghundspossen
While that’s sound advice, I imagine that would also be fairly off topic and an ursupation of other people’s comment section. but yeah, I definately took too much fairly detailed history knowledge for granted when I used the term “nazim” the way I did.
I just found it sorta strange that somebody would call Israel a nation founded on a “socialist ethos” when it was actually a veritable melting pot of all pre-WW2 european political theory, with the nazistic part of it certainly being the equal of the socialists, communists, anarchists and religious ideas.
@Blitzgal I think it was the gradual ante-upping that made me suspicious last night. However you’re right, I have met people who have the same prejudices and biases IRL. Those people usually wrap it in patronizing concern or faux chivalry, but underneath it’s the same racist/classist/misanthropic garbage.
@Kakanian
I think that ‘Fascist-Eugenicist’ may have worked better here. Nazism applys to Hitler’s own personal system. Whilst Nazis were Fascist-Eugenicist, calling Fascist-Eugenicist Jews ‘Nazis’ is highly problematical and offensive to Jewish people. Also, it’s not particularly clear.
We’re all intelligent people here (excluding trolls), we will understand what Fascist-Eugenicist is.
I’m a woman married to an Army lieutenant, and looking to enlist myself. I’ve seen what serving has done for him, both inside (confidence, health, etc) and out (tuition benefits, job opportunities, etc). So, I’ve been training and when he gets back from deployment, I want to go in.
It always puzzles me to read sentiments like Otis’s expressed. First, you’ve got the fallacy that if a woman is a crappy soldier, then all women are crappy, whereas if a man is a crappy soldier that is just the individual guy who is crappy. Wrong. There are crappy soldiers of all genders, races, creed, classes etc. Ask my husband, who has lead many a crappy soldier and an awesome soldier. It’s not a gender thing.
Then you have the fallacy that Army=ONLY infantry. There are myriad jobs in the service, pretty much anything you can imagine, they have. Even scientist-y and egghead stuff where you’re probably not going to be shooting anyone, IF you are lucky enough to live in a state with an opening in such a job. (This is my ideal, I’d love to be an Army research scientist or hell, work in intel, which is more a desk job than hero Rambo stuff).
Then, there’s the fallacy that good soldier=guy who can bench-press the most weight. That isn’t even a thing you do for the physical test to get in. :/ My husband is a skinny-ish, brainy type who has never been into sports. Lots of guys and yes, even some women, outscore him in PT. Does that mean he is useless? No way! He’s a great LT, gets tops in most reviews, is brilliant and driven.
As for me, I’ll definitely admit that I won’t be acing any PT. I’ll *pass*, of course, but I’m not the strongest or fastest. But I can still be an asset. My brain works just fine, thanks. Maybe I won’t be able to lift a 300lb soldier off he battlefield, but that’s not all the Army requires. Computers are a big part of the jobs, and last I checked, you didn’t have to be a tough guy to use one.
The Army is about TEAMWORK. What one individual lacks, the others can make up for. If you have a good platoon, everyone’s weaknesses can be supported by the others’ strengths. They fill in the gaps and make the whole platoon into a well-oiled machine of competency. Each individual does not have to be this Herculean superman.
That’s how I know these chumps know NOTHING about the service. A real soldier would never say these things, and if he did, he’d be a terrible soldier who wouldn’t work well with others and would think he is above orders, especially from a female or black commander. Or hell, whoever he deems unworthy of “respect”.
@Tosca – Yes, a thousand times yes!
The physical standards for the military are there to provide for the overall health and readiness of troops. By the time I finished basic training I could score into the 80th to 90th percentile on every PT test event. But other than just a check the block for physical readiness, it meant shit for my job. I was trained to be a radio operator. I had to set up and maintain what was basically a mobile cell phone tower for use of troops in the field. It involved a little lifting and a lot of pushing buttons. Guys who ran slower than me were equally capable of loading code into the radio transmitters, and I could set up that aerial antenna just as well as men who could lift me over their heads.
There are military jobs that require a lot of strength and sheer physical endurance. There are also jobs that require a scary amount of brainpower and mental toughness. There are jobs that require both. And very few people, male or female, qualify for everything. Until they figure out how to breed a Gattica-style supersoldier, the military is stuck with all of us mere mortals.
Good luck with your military career – I hope it works out better than mine ultimately did! 🙂 If you don’t mind my asking, what’s your hopeful MOS?
Only if the sharks have frickin lasers on their heads.
I’m going Air Guard, possibly Army Guard if there’s no Air jobs. I could do either, really.
My dream job was in the Laboratory, but the tech school is 12 MONTHS! Not even counting basic. So I don’t know about that,. Plus, it’s not currently available in my state or in any neighboring states. I was also thinking medic, but I can be pretty squeamish.
So, I’m thinking Personnel or something with computers. Not my dream choice, but there’s lots of full time opportunities and the skills transfer to the civilian set easily. I’m looking more at the big picture. 🙂
Cool deal! I actually wanted to do personnel or finance when I enlisted, but they didn’t have any jobs available at the time and I needed to get away as soon as I graduated (my mother was dead set against my joining up, and she would have made my life passive-aggressive hell if I had to hang around for a few months). How does the Guard work with reclassifying? Can you put in to retrain for another job if one comes up within your unit?
Otis the Sweaty… I don’t think is a Poe. I remember that Steele recommended his blog, one of the times he “quit” antimanboobz. According to Varpole, “His writing style- sarcastic, acerbic, more than a little hyperbolic- may not be for everyone”.
Great comment, Tosca.
Thanks, Summer!
A bit OT; but I remember the case of Jackie Arklöv… A Swedish black guy who was a member of a Nazi organisation and eventually convicted to prison for killing a couple of cops. He explicitly said that he thought Hitler was right in almost everything, only not in his views on black people. Really, really weird. The white nazis accepted him because he had criminal connections that could supply then with weapons, plus he was an ex-soldier and could teach them to shoot and stuff.
@Fitzy, yup! Especially Air, it’s pretty easy to transfer. Especially say, if you are at E4 and in a certain job, if you are up for promotion and there’s no jobs in your field, they will transfer you so you can get promoted and not stagnate.
I haven’t decided yet if I want a full time Guard job, or if I just want to do my one weekend/month, 2 weeks/year and work part time elsewhere and get my GI Bill and go to school. But I suppose that’s a classy problem to have: too many opportunities (for a change. Ha!)
I’m also currently in the process for a government job that’s moving along just fine. I figure I’ll probably do that until the fella comes back from overseas, then go to basic/tech school and return to that job so I can go to school. But a full time Guard job would be very tempting, too!
If you don’t mind ME asking, why didn’t it work out? Was it an injury? That’s actually my biggest fear, being waylaid by a bum hip or ankle. My husband started to develop knee problems in OCS, thankfully it’s not bad enough where he’d be put on profile or anything. But still. :O
@JDC, thanks! 🙂 The military has so much diversity, from young athletic go-getters to middle aged moms and dads and everywhere in-between. And as long as you do your job and pass the baseline PT requirements, YOU ARE AN ASSET.
Little known fact: there are a LOT of nerds in the military! 😀
The characterization of the military as only 20 year old studly muscle men is just ignorant.
Tosca – I’ll give you my whole, stupid tale when I get back from taking the kids to the park. It’s a comedy of errors 🙂
@Tosca – I wish you well in the military. My son made some great friendships there, some of them respected women soldiers. You are absolutely right that there are all sorts of jobs and skills needed in the military. Some men will carry guns, more will move boxes and shuffle papers: ALL are needed. ALL make a vital contribution. Much of modern warfare involves project management, logistics, and supply, not derring-do. Attentiveness, persistence, patience, and attention to detail – traditionally considered female qualities – are very much needed in the modern military. Speaking as the mother, niece, and double daughter of soldiers here.