“Rituals of sexual mutilation and rape – including the rape of enemy men – can be dated at least as far back as the Greeks, and almost always in the context of male groups, where competition to demonstrate sexual cruelty as the mark of manhood works as a kind of psychological accelerant. The introduction of social instability, and the destabilization of masculinities, brings this collective cruelty out with the special force of a reactionary backlash.”

- from “Sex & War” (to be released February, 2006, by Soft Skull Press)

The following was first published at www.freedomroad.org in the Military matters column:

At Delta, I finished what was called the Operator’s Training Course (OTC), and was assigned to B Squadron – now well-known to military aficionados who have read Eric Haney’s book, Inside Delta Force – The Story of America’s Elite Counterterrorist Unit. (Haney was eventually my team leader there.) My first assignment was to Tommy Corbett’s team of assaulters – people who specialized in close quarter battle inside buildings, aircraft, trains, and the like. One of the team members was a man named Marshall Brown.

Marshall adopted me.

He was small and wiry like me, and like me he had a great deal of nervous energy. We were very compatible in that regard. Marshall was one of the most dedicated, one might even say obsessive, ‘operators’ in Delta. He had plenty of recognition and a fine reputation. He was a very fast medium distance runner. He practiced his every skill religiously. And he was one of the finest pistol marksman and ‘practical’ shooters in the unit.

Marshall would take me to the McKellars Lodge pistol range at Ft. Bragg on the weekends, with ammunition from the unit, where he would drill me mercilessly and coach me on the fine points of pistol shooting on the match-quality .45 caliber Colts that were standard issue in the unit. It was not unusual, between shooting on the job, and Marshall’s weekend sessions, for me to fire 2,500 rounds of pistol ammunition a week. Marshall was showing me his peculiar intensity, one that was highly valued by the unit.

Marshall was single and lived in a trailer. He also had his own personal pistols at home. Marshall went to International Practical Shooting Confederation (IPSC) competitions every chance he got, and he practiced dry firing, quick draw, magazine change, and position changes when he was at home. He also practiced his lock-picking, his climbing, his various surreptitious entry techniques – and he read his OTC manual constantly to stay abreast of his tradecraft and explosives. Intensity!

When I first came to the team, he took me aside and told me, “This unit is at war. Never forget that.”

He was also a former Golden Knight freefall parachutist, and had participated in the failed raid in Iran in 1979.

Marshall was a Texan. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was raised by an emotionally abusive father who set standards for his behavior to which he could never measure up. His mother was also subject to the despotism of the father, and by some accounts never intervened. In what, I’ve never learned. This is partly speculation, but it seems like the army was a place where Marshall could work hard to earn the accolades he’d never received from his father, a place where the rules were clearly spelled out and if you really understood them and didn’t violate them, you wouldn’t get into trouble. Those who know little about the military do not understand the value of this kind of bureaucratic consistency for anyone who has suffered from capricious domestic power. (That includes women who have suffered, as many have, from capricious domestic power.)

Marshall enjoyed a good practical joke, and would often place Vaseline under doorknobs, turn windshield washer nozzles to squirt people riding on the passenger side of his car, and reach into the shower when your eyes were closed against cascading shampoo and switch off the hot water. He was playful, despite his weird intensity. And practical jokes are often tiny displays of cruelty, but that’s not what we saw.

He was always seeking training opportunities. He and I had asked to design a field training exercise, and were riding dirt bikes to look over the training area. We were buzzing over a fire trail, and I had fallen behind him, so I rolled back the accelerator to catch up. When I rounded a turn, Marshall was straddling the bike perpendicular to a deep erosion ditch. For me, it was too late.

My bike dove into the ditch and the front wheel fell short of the far side, launching me over the handlebars to land face-first on the other side. The next thing I remember is looking up at an alarmed Marshall calling my name over and over again. My mouth was full of clay. My neck was throbbing. While I sat up and scooped the clay off my lower teeth, Marshall told me that I landed directly on my face, while the rest of me traveled over my head. He though my neck was broken, and was sure I had been killed. When he had calmed down, he remarked that it was a good thing we did our strength training and that this was what had probably saved my life.

I have had problems ever since with periodic spasms in my neck.

When we were deployed, Delta would drink. Delta drank a lot. Our punishment for poor marksmanship or errors in training was to buy the Squadron a case of beer. The other favored pastime was marital infidelity, most operators being married men with mortgages. Marshall was not married, didn’t ‘chase women,’ and when he drank with us, it would be an hour or so at a time, nursing maybe half a beer, whereupon he would quietly retire and leave us to our debaucheries.

There were exceptions to this whoopy tendency, of course: a couple of very religious men, including Jerry Boykin (a general now) who only recently gained infamy with his claim that Muslim resistance to American imperial ambition is Satanic. Jerry used to try and force the rest of us to attend prayer breakfasts at Delta. But Marshall was most concerned with his physical edge, and seemed quite frankly to be rather shy on the subject of sex.

Sex was everywhere at Delta though. And Delta Force in those days had one of the biggest collections of pornographic videos one could possibly imagine.

Oh yes. Delta porn. I’ll talk a lot about porn further down.

One of the most odious tasks in the military is charge of quarters, or staff duty. That’s a rotating duty to have someone awake and by a telephone in every active duty unit in the military, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year.

At Delta it was no different, and around once every four weeks, one could expect to be put on staff duty for 24 long hours of wakefulness. Delta, however, being closed to the public, behind gates with surveillance cameras and buzzers, there was the kind of privacy where the men could keep themselves awake watching pornographic videos, one after another, all night long. The joke around the unit was that the wives were asking why their husbands were always so amorous when they finished staff duty.

I watched it too. By the time people started showing up for work and the videos had to be put away, I was almost numb to the images, having often masturbated four and five times throughout the night just to make the time pass, and with the repetitiousness of the images flowing together into a unity of penetrations and ejaculations. I wasn’t unique in this, not by a far cry.

I have no idea if Marshall watched the porno. I actually doubt it. Marshall was squeamish about the subject of sex. At any rate, our teams were reorganized, and my contact with Marshall became less constant. Marshall had fallen under the thrall of a heterodox doctor at Delta who was experimenting with different performance enhancing diets. Marshall would show up at your table at lunch and point to the sugar jar, saying, “That’s white poison.”

At some point in 1985, Marshall got religion. He’d been hanging out more and more with Lance Fennick, an ex-Ranger who was deeply religious and who attended Boykin’s prayer breakfasts with great enthusiasm. One day, Marshall and I got into an argument when I said, in whatever context it was, that it’s better to tell your daughter about birth control than not. He launched into a tirade about how that was giving them permission to sin, telling me I was on the road to becoming an irresponsible parent.

I was, but in no way having to do with Marshall’s outburst.

Then Marshall got married and drifted out of the unit.

Rapist

By December of 1986, I was excommunicated in the middle of a corruption purge for allegedly having had sex with a Salvadoran communist woman on Ambassador Edwin Corr’s bed. It wasn’t true, but it became a legend before I was confronted with it, that was confirmed on station by the embassy Security Section Director John Swafford, who also believed the rumor. Swafford had congratulated me two years earlier on my good sense in directing my carnal appetites at the woman who was Vice Consul in Guatemala, where both he and I had been together in 1983. Adultery was never an issue. Adultery between people who worked at the embassies, military and foreign service alike, was common. Having sex with a communist, however, was not.

The Vice Consul in question, who would later marry the resident CIA agent, was an admirer of fascist dictator Francisco Franco, so that was okay. The story of soiling the presidential representative’s sheets with a communist, however, broke the camel’s back. My career as an elite counter-terrorist came to an end.

When we were tested during Selection – psychologically tested. We were administered a whole battery of diagnostic assistance tests, with names like Thematic Apperception Test, Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, and the like. The day after the “forty (six) miler,” we were queued up to have a conversation with the unit psychologist. As we understood it, Delta did not want to train a member to become a proficient sniper, then learn one day that one of its members was sitting in a public tower picking off random targets like young Charles Whitman did at the University of Texas in Austin in 1966. At that point, I wasn’t questioning what kind of psychologist works for a unit like Delta, or what might be wrong with them. We had a pleasant interview where I intrigued him with my knowledge of Sartre and Camus; I was manipulating him. This shrink was eventually canned in his own sex scandal.

The psychological evaluation didn’t screen out crooks, because almost the whole unit became embroiled in a fraud scheme that threw us into the crisis that contributed to the atmosphere for my expulsion. We were dummying up rent receipts all over the world, after the State Department paid our rent, then collecting the reimbursements from the Army when we got home. It worked great until one guy got religion and dimed the whole unit. The officers probably knew, but didn’t want to acknowledge that they knew.

Apparently these psychological evaluations didn’t screen out rapists either.

In 1988, an investigation began when two women were attacked in Raleigh, one at North Carolina State University, apparently by the same man, a stranger. He climbed in through their second story windows – hooded and dressed in black – ordered them to silence with a knife held to their throats, covered their faces, then raped them. During the rapes, he apologized, telling them that he didn’t want to hurt them and that he “had to do this.”

On June 11, 1989 in Cranston, Rhode Island, Marshall Brown was taken into custody and charged with the rapes of two Rhode Island women. These women were raped with the same modus operandi as the North Carolina women. While in custody, Marshall was deferential to the police, calling them by their ranks and observing scrupulous courtesy. Police described him as soft-spoken. He even spoke approvingly of the professionalism of the arrests and complimented one officer for his handcuffing technique. He had been arrested for prowling in Fayetteville, North Carolina, earlier that May, whereupon he had forfeited his bond for a dismissal of the charge.

Marshall went to work in jail studying the patterns of the Federal Marshals who transported him to and from court, and making friends with a 20-year-old inmate named Frederick Heon. Marshall stayed in shape in jail, using his exercise periods to run.

On July 30, he was cuffed to another prisoner in the back of a Federal Marshal van and driven to Providence to attend his hearing. When the back door opened, Marshall – who had picked open his handcuffs – walked with the escorting marshal and his fellow inmate for a bit, then sprang past the startled Federal Marshals and ran like an Olympic athlete up the street and out of sight.

Heon was out on bail and had rented a car, per Marshall’s instructions. He was waiting at an appointed rendezvous point, and drove Marshall to the Connecticut state line. Heon then went to a church where he was told he’d find money, which wasn’t there. Three days later, Marshall was caught in a stolen car and re-arrested. Marshall told the police about Heon’s assistance, and Heon was taken back to jail for a parole violation.

Marshall had burglarized a house 15 miles outside of Providence for food and credit cards, and was camping in a pine grove nearby. He stole the car in the same neighborhood. When back in custody, he admitted to nine rapes in Rhode Island, Texas, Arizona, and North Carolina. Marshall had been attending the Navy version of a sergeants major academy in Norfolk when he was caught the first time.

His wife, Michelle, who was taking care of their young son, was stunned.

I can’t even pretend to understand Marshall Brown, after spending many hours with him and going on one combat operation with him. I have heard the statement that rape is not sex, it is an exercise of power. I don’t buy it. Rape is violent power, but it is sexualized violence, and it is also violent sex. Sex in patriarchal society is in almost every case practiced, portrayed, and understood as a form of aggression and power, and all power is in many ways sexualized. This is recognized in our everyday speech, even while it is denied by many policy makers and academics.

Marshall’s brother-in-law spoke with me many years later and said that Marshall told him that he felt he had to use his skills somehow, or he’d begin to lose them. Marshall saw the rapes as a training opportunity at some level, and therefore the women as training aids.

But there is something that has to be said here. I did a lot of different kinds of training over the years, and I never became aroused by my training aids. I never ejaculated on them. And Marshall, even as he was violating these thoroughly terrified women with a knife held to their throats, and arousing himself to an orgasm in the process, was apologizing and explaining to them, “I have to do this.”

One might suppose, since he repeated this ritualistic rape at least nine times, that there was some generic rush he needed. I don’t buy it. He had jumped out of airplanes a thousand times, was a proficient technical climber, and had been in combat. I think the rush – if that’s what it was – was transgression. Hartsock said that “without the boundary to violate, the thrill of transgression would disappear.” (Hartsock, p.172) Marshall’s criminality was not in spite of his religious conversion, his squeamishness about sex, or his uptight WASP upbringing in East Texas. It was an outcome… of all those things, but also of a masculinity defined by a culture of rape, and a man who had made a career of pursuing that masculinity. The transgressions of his career, invasions of other countries, for example, or killing, were legally-sanctioned. Why should it surprise anyone that he crossed the fuzzy line between legal and social sanction? He lived on that line.

“We live in a culture that condones and celebrates rape,” says bell hooks (hooks, pp. 109-113). Catharine MacKinnon says that “male and female are created through the eroticization of dominance and submission. The man/woman difference and the dominance/submission dynamic define each other. This is the social meaning of sex and the distinctly feminist account of gender inequality.” (MacKinnon, p. 113) Robert Jensen says, “Rape is illegal, but the sexual ethic that underlies rape is woven into the fabric of the culture.”

A culture that defines the male as a sexual aggressor, the do-er, the taker, the subject, and the female as the done-to, the taken-from, and the object, is a culture that has defined the parameters of rape and normalized them. The only rape that is illegal is the kind that Marshall committed. The definition is narrow, and the bar of legal proof is very, very high.

Rape has to be understood simultaneously as both social and personal, because social control is exercised through individuals, and with individual bodies.

“The defence of injustice in gender relations constantly appeals to difference,” says Robert Connell, “to a masculine/feminine opposition defining one place for female bodies and another place for male. But this is never ‘difference’ in a purely logical sense…”

“bodily difference becomes a social reality through body-reflexive practices, in which the social relations of gender are experienced in the body (as sexual arousals and turn-offs, as muscular tensions and posture, as comfort and discomfort) are themselves constituted in bodily action (in sexuality, in sport, in labour, etc.). The social organization of these practices in a patriarchal gender order constitutes difference as dominance, as unavoidably hierarchical. This has been documented in immense detail by two decades of feminist cultural criticism – and it was of course visible long before, to observers of masculinity such as Alfred Adler.

“Difference/dominance means not logical separation but intimate supremacy. It involves immediate social relations as well as broad cultural themes. It can be realized violently in body practices such as rape and domestic assault.” (Connell, p. 231-2)

There’s that complementarity that [Jessica] Benjamin talked about [in “Bonds of Love”]… difference.

It is masculinity as institution and ideology that posits a Cartesian duality between Man and the Other (be that other woman, lesser man, or nature), and defines masculine practice as conquest, often even of one’s own body – like my own experience with Delta selection and a host of other military ‘pain-schools’.

In the military, the exercise of professionally sado-masochism in preparation for the violence of warfare is often sexualized in our vernacular, disguised as humor. Allusions to pseudo-Victorian naughtiness are common.

“Push me, hurt me, make me write bad checks!” Yes, we talked like that.

“There is a surprising degree of consensus that hostility and domination, as opposed to intimacy and physical pleasure, are central to sexual excitement,” writes Nancy Hartsock. “[T]he mechanisms that construct sexual excitement rest most fundamentally on fetishization and on the dehumanization and objectification of the sexual object. And these are associated with debasement of the object and the construction of mystery, risk, illusion, and a search for revenge.” (Hartsock, p. 157)

“Men’s bodies are the most dangerous things on earth.”

– Margaret Atwood

Destabilization

Those who dealt with Marshall from the time he was arrested remarked how polite he was throughout the whole process, how observant and supportive of social conventions. Implicit in these remarks was the idea that rape – and in this case, serial rape – is aberrant in this society. But rape is not seen as fundamentally aberrant in this society, it is seen as excess, as crossing a line, and at times as provoked excess (as in warfare). Hidden within the open public discourse about rape are exclusively-male assumptions, and in this space rape is routinely portrayed as understandable and even at times desirable.

Socially, rape serves as an extrajudicial instrument of social control. Bell hooks says that “rape of women by men is a ritual that daily perpetuates and maintains sexist oppression and exploitation.” (”Outlaw Culture”, p. 129) And in the same way, the exercise of male prerogative in rape and the exercise of military prerogative in killing carries with it a transgressive thrill that is in some respect still socially sanctioned (against designated enemies, against Abu Ghriab prisoners, against ‘fallen’ women… away from higher ranking men). This is the fusion of the subjective experience of desire and violence with the socially instrumental violence of rape.

Inga Muscio, in describing her traumatic and illuminating discovery that her mother was raped at the age of nine, concluded that “rape… viewed merely as a crime… is the fundamental, primal, most destructive way to seize and maintain control in a patriarchal society,” little realizing as she wrote, I’d wager, that a military principle of strategy against an enemy uses exactly the same language: “Seize and maintain the initiative.”

“The language reveals this at every turn. Men – in the “man talk” they speak in all-male environments and increasingly in general discourse even when women or children are present – often use metaphors of rape (male-male rape, for example) to indicate aggression, anger, submission, domination. Just bend over… we really took it in the shorts that time… check out the web site today, Juan Cole just ripped Goldstein a new ass… I’ve got a hardon for that SOB… he just rolled over for it… he thinks I’m his bitch… did you hear him reaming that guy out… and of course, the routine uses of “to fuck” as in “fuck you”, “we are so fucked”, that’s fucked”, plus the perjoratives applied to the “submissive/receptive” role, as in… he’s such a scumbag (recipient for sperm),… that sucks… what a cocksucker… and so on. The very texture of the vernacular expresses everything any sociologist could want to know about the association of sex and aggression, sex and ranking, etc. – and then every mawkish pop song rambles on about (hetero)sex being exactly equal to and definitive of Love, tra la la. It’s a wonder we don’t drop in our tracks from terminal cognitive dissonance.”

-email from De Clarke

Marshall did not appear abnormal, because he was not ab-normal. He was, if anything, hyper-normal, as a male, going above and beyond the call of duty (expected of commandos) to preserve social stability.

MacKinnon says that this implication that rape is psychopathological serves as a smokescreen by validating the notion that rape is not about sex – because if it is about sex, then sexuality itself comes under review as a construction of power. This is exactly why both MacKinnon and her late colleague, Andrea Dworkin, were vilified from both right and left. People do not want to go there.

“Rape becomes something a rapist does, as if he were a separate species. But no personality disorder distinguishes most rapists from normal men.” (MacKinnon, pp. 145-6) (italics mine)

Marshall Brown served in a profession with a constant subtext of coercion, and in a field within that profession (Delta Force/Special Operations) where we were expected to work outside the rules, behind the scenes, in the shadows, employing a host of very specialized skills, to ‘preserve a way of life.’ The expectation of us was that we would go ‘above and beyond the call of duty,’ or we wouldn’t have suffered the kind of extreme physical trials we accepted in selection just to qualify for a chance to be in the unit. And for that, we were – in the traditional militarist mind – entitled.

His outrage at my suggestion that my daughter might be given access to reproductive control or her own sexual agency, his affinity for obscurantist ultra-patriarchal religion, his commitment to take profound risks on behalf of maintaining a social order, are all perfectly consistent with the manner in which he carried out these rapes.

With the same aplomb that accompanied his acceptance of collateral damage had the Iranian rescue mission in 1979 that he participated in succeeded (planners conceded that hundreds and probably thousands of Iranian civilians would have been killed had the rescue-mission reached Tehran), Marshall Brown accepted the psychological wreckage that he left scattered around each of his rape victims.

“Rape,” writes Inga Muscio, “makes you wonder if there’s a safe place.” And that’s the point, isn’t it?

If you don’t want to be raped by a man, you need the protection of a man. It’s a psychosexual protection racket.

Maria Mies wrote about feminist anti-rape campaigns in Bombay and Delhi, where activists were astonished to discover that as women came to the cities from the countryside – where feminist activists assumed rape was a backward feudal vestige like dowry murders – the frequency of rape exploded, and the fastest growing group of perpetrators was the police. These feminists were slow to associate the increasing number of rapes with the increasing independence and political agency of women. (Mies, p. 153) Rape punishes women who get out of their places. This is often displayed as a ‘playful’ theme in pornography.

This phenomenon need not occur as a socially conscious strategy by the perpetrators. In fact, it is a reaction that should lead us to interrogate the categories of the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ in social relations. Objective and subjective are interfused and inextricable, and it is this very interfusion that consolidates both patriarchy and rape as perceived norms.

When Marshall Brown became a serial rapist in 1988 (we think), the institution with which he identified absolutely – the military – was undergoing a series of significant transformations related to gender.

In 1973, when I was taking my first break in service, women constituted 1.6% of the United States armed forces. When Marshall and I had participated in the invasion of Grenada in 1983, the follow-on occupation included 170 Army women. The U.S. Naval Academy had a woman graduate first in her class in 1987. By 1989, when Marshall was first arrested, and three years after Lissa Young graduated from West Point as the first female Deputy Commander of the Corps of Cadets, that percentage had leapt to 10.8%. Marshall, with his East Texas upbringing, could hardly have missed this, or the fact that 30% of these women were Black. By the time Marshall was arrested, 59% of the Army’s occupational specialties were open to women (That’s not the same as 59% of the positions.). Women were being rated as test pilots. Lissa Young, a fine soldier whom I had the pleasure of knowing, was flying Chinook helicopters – a huge incursion into the male domain.

With this new influx of military women came another dynamic: Fraternization, as the military calls it. Men and women in the military were interacting socially, dating, having sex, and getting married. The male-male and female-female liaisons stayed as much as possible under the official radar. But among these ‘heterosexual’ pairings, there were significantly higher numbers of interracial contacts than in the civilian sector. The most frequent combination among those in uniform was Black male/white female. I’m not surprised. They have something in common… whom they have reason to fear. White men.

Marshall was sure to notice that, too. In fact, it was a constant subject of conversation among white male troops, mostly expressing outrage at this Black male infiltration and white female ‘betrayal.’ Resentment was directed at the Black men, but with lynching not an option, that same fierce sullen rage was re-directed at the white women, who were referred to as ‘zebra-women’ and ‘mudsharks.’

When Kimberle Crenshaw wrote “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” she noted that a “singular focus on rape as a manifestation of male power over female sexuality tends to eclipse the use of rape as a weapon of racial terror,” pointing to Black women’s virtually ‘unprotected’ status. In the same essay describing the mixture of white and male supremacy, she shows how white men attempt “to regulate the sexuality of white women.”

Hegemonic (white nationalist ) masculinity is profoundly threatened by a perceived inability to control the sexuality of white women, creating what Connell calls “sexual vertigo.” This recombinant mixture of sexual and racial construction that obliges white men to both ‘control’ and ‘protect white womanhood’ is ignited as violence against both women and Black men.

The bogeyman of the potent Black satyr raping the white woman has been paired with virtually every call in the United States for anti-Black pogroms. It is hardly coincidental that assertions of Black social agency have been met with expanded outbreaks of racial terror, and it is likewise not a coincidence that police rapes increased in Bombay when women began organizing politically.

Connell says that “Violence is part of a system of domination, but is at the same time a measure of its imperfection. A thoroughly legitimate hierarchy would have less need to intimidate. The scale of contemporary violence points to crisis tendencies in the modern gender order.” (Connell, p. 84)

When Marshall Brown began his career as a serial rapist, there were myriad influences on his target selection. Marshall went through Special Forces training where the sign at Camp Mackall said:

Rule #1: There are no rules.

Rule #2: Obey the first rule.

Marshall was the commando, root world ‘command,’ who follows orders without question within established hierarchies. He was committed to in his role as the colonizer’s paladin, with its admixture of violent conquest and ‘civilization’ to be imposed outside those disciplinary restraints.

[end of re-post]

I will refer readers here to the series on this blog entitled Jurrasic Park, Pseudo-events, and Prisons, for a more in-depth examination of the role of prison-rape as a means of socially controlling male prisoners by “feminizing” them.

http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=67
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=66
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=65
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=64
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=63
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=62
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=61

I also want to encourage readers to think about the contradictions involved with race and rape. About how “white” men are powerful in the dominant order, while Black men are relatively power-less. About how the threat of prison-rape by a Black man is a disciplinary threat against white men. About how (in particular) Black women and other women of color have traditionally been counted “un-rape-able” because they are assumed to be sexually receptive (read: less human) all the time.

I will also refer people back to the series on sexual aggression in the military for a review of how the law treats rape victims differently then other crime victims.

http://feralscholar.org/blog/index.php?p=165
http://feralscholar.org/blog/index.php?p=166
http://feralscholar.org/blog/index.php?p=167
http://feralscholar.org/blog/index.php?p=168
http://feralscholar.org/blog/index.php?p=169