37 Comments

1. Chris:

   The bald-faced criminality…

   I think that should be bare-faced.

   Yeah, we live in a video game-numbed “culture.” Instead of the grace and beauty and gentleness of women inspiring men, as it should, everything gets twisted and coarsened and barbarized, and both men and women suffer the disfigurement. Women get abused and men get to go to war and get maimed or killed, and everyone gets their heart broken. Of course, this has been going on for a long, long time, but the scale of it today is astronomical. Cosi il mondo mal va.

   12 April 2010, 5:12 pm

2. Stan Moore:

   Is any of this really a surprise? War is obscene and training for war tands to be training to practice obscenity in various forms. It involves human desensitization, and the class of humans attracted to military “service” often have a headstart on military training by virtue of their family backgrounds, low intellectual capacity, and low culture to begin with. Sorry to have to say it, but my exposure to military families in my life experience tells me this is generally true, there certainly there must be exceptions.

   It would be interesting to see a psychological evaluation of:

   1) the soldiers and NCO’s who practice rape and sexual aggression/assault/intimidation against fellow soldiers of the opposite sex

   and

   2) the officers who may not necessarily practice such sexual violence but who tolerate it, excuse it, allow it to happen

   When a national military like that of the US allows so much violence towards “sister soldiers”, who the men would say they were fighting to protect if they were civilians at home during wartime, then how could it be a surprise, or even noteworthy that soldiers do much worse to the enemy, civilians in war zones, or even to homosexual soldiers in their own military who they are predisposed against by virtue of their “moral” formations from pre-military life?

   War brings out the worst in people, and the military takes in the worst of people. Soldiers like to think otherwise about themselves, but I say if the boot fits, wear it.

   Stan Moore

   12 April 2010, 5:15 pm

3. DeAnander:

   I’m wondering if the violent behaviour of returned vets has less to do with trauma experienced in combat and more to do with “improved” methods of training and indoctrination.

   A lot of effort — so I have read — has been expended on increasing ‘kill ratio’ and ‘efficiency’ in combat by working hard in basic (and subsequent) training to overcome our fundamental human squeamishness about cold-blooded murder. I am having difficulty tracking down refs to the original factoids lodged in my brain from long-ago research, i.e. that command staff were alarmed by the low firing rates of Civil War squads (a “problem” which continued into WWII) and that training methods were redesigned during the post-WWII for more effective defusing of moral/ethical reluctance to kill.

   This essay on kill ratios in WWII is the kind of thing I’m remembering reading many years ago. Stan, do you have any better refs on this?

   Dave Grossman thinks that increasingly explicit and voyeuristic violence in contemporary media tends to replicate the kind of operant conditioning that enables soldiers to kill without inhibition. However… if you have the patience… you can trawl through a seemingly endless Snopes debate-fest over the validity of Grossman’s (and his favoured source Marshall’s) statistics.

   Is the lower firing and kill ratio in pre-Vietnam conflicts a fact, or just a factoid? Some folks opine that if there is a marked difference over time, it’s attributable to the advent of standard-issue fully-automatic weapons; it’s way easier to pull the trigger on an automatic rifle and “spray” an arc of the horizon with bullets more or less at random than it is to aim deliberately at a specific human being, sight for a vital point, and shoot to kill.

   Is it the technology (aerial bombardment, automatic weapons, delayed-action murder by landmine, all the methods of depersonalising warfare) or is it the training? Or is the higher kill ratio in modern wars just an urban legend?

   Whatever the longitudinal comparison, we do come back to one irreducible fact: we spend a lot of time and effort training young men to defeat their own compassionate and empathic reflexes, embrace alienation from civilian society and bond exclusively with each other, despise “females and other inferiors”, lower their affect in all modes other than anger, concentrate and huff their own testosterone… and then we dump them back into civilian society without any counter-training to restore social necessities like conscience, feeling, empathy, etc. If standard basic training were conducted by people we didn’t approve of — say, militant islamist enclaves — seems to me we wouldn’t hesitate, in light of its openly hateful and hate-inducing aspects, to call it “terrorist indoctrination” and so on.

   13 April 2010, 12:30 am

4. DeAnander:

   oops. I see now that the article Stan cited mentions the firing ratio and training issue (but alas with no citations other than Grossman again). shoulda read it through before posting, apologies for redundant text.

   13 April 2010, 12:34 am

5. The UN-American:

   I’ve got more to say on this, but it’s late so I’m going to bed. In the meantime, in case you haven’t seen this:

   “How Americans Are Propagandized About Afghanistan,” CommonDreams.org; 05 Apr 2010.

   On February 12 of this year, U.S. forces entered a village in the Paktia Province in Afghanistan and, after surrounding a home where a celebration of a new birth was taking place, shot dead two male civilians (government officials) who exited the house in order to inquire why they had been surrounded. The Pentagon then issued a statement claiming that (a) the dead were all “insurgents” or terrorists, (b) the bodies of three women had been found bound and gagged inside the home (including two pregnant women, one a mother of 10 children and the other a mother of six children, and a teenage girl), and (c) suggested that the women had already been killed by the time the U.S. had arrived, likely the victim of “honor killings” by the Taliban militants killed in the attack.

   Although numerous witnesses on the scene as well as local investigators vehemently disputed the Pentagon’s version, and insisted that all of the dead (including the women) were civilians and were killed by U.S. forces, the American media largely adopted the Pentagon’s version, and insisted that all of the dead (including the women) were civilians and were killed by U.S. forces, the American media largely adopted the Pentagon’s version, often without any questions. But enough evidence has now emerged disproving those claims such that the Pentagon was forced yesterday to admit that their original version was totally false and that it was U.S. troops who killed the women:

   After initially denying involvement or any cover-up in the deaths of three Afghan women during a badly bungled American Special Operations assault in February, the American-led military command in Kabul admitted late on Sunday that its forces had, in fact, killed the women during the nighttime raid.

   One NATO official said that there was likely an effort to cover-up what happened by U.S. troops via evidence tampering on the scene (though other NATO officials deny this claim). The Times of London actually reported yesterday that, at least according to Afghan investigators, “US special forces soldiers dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath of a botched night raid, then washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened.”

   13 April 2010, 1:05 am

6. xenia:

   As a victim of US-wars, I’d be the last person to defend soldiers, and I say that in all crassness, knowing that this is, among other things, a site meant to increase empathy and awareness among members of the military and their families.

   Yet, the soldiers who are on the ground at least get their share of human suffering, as minor as it seems from the viewpoint of civilians whom they kill. often they have to live with the consequence of what they did, which is not the case with other people in the chain of military crimes. The ones that I hate the most are those who direct drones while not exposing themselves to any physical harm. Most of them are “just doing their job” and do not even have vivid images of people whom they killed to torment them.

   If I must use that terminology, and I do so facetiously, I’d say that “worst human material” consists of finance guys who profit off the wars and speculate on them, producers and sellers of murderous weapons, and of course politicians who present intellectual and moral justifications for their crimes.

   13 April 2010, 4:48 am

7. Stan:

   Grossman and his killology are interesting, but I’ve always suspected him of some kind of essentialism, though I can’t put my finger on it right now. Operant conditioning works… ask anyone who’s gone to “Jump School,” the Army’s basic parachutist training school… you practice your door exit anywhere and everywhere, in insant response to the command – given at any moment – Hit it!. You practice this door exit thousands of times before anyone gets aboard an actual airplane in the third week. Scared or not (everyone is), almost 100% leap out the door like possessed lab rats.

   And the technology certainly changes the experience. Helicopter door gunners had a different perspective on the whole war, and on killing (from afar) that was different than infantry in Vietnam.

   Thinking now, though, about the Stanford Prison Experiment. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the emphasis on population control has created a group of occupiers who are both powerful and arbitrary, moreso than in the past. The role itself is what forges the nueral pathways to violence as the first, not last, resort. The character of human relations between occupier and occupied is the cultural substrate, as Stanford showed.

   The violent individuals are an outgrowth.

   @ Stan, kind of… the usual notion when the topics of war and sex are paired is to look at how gender determines aspects of war. War is seen as the greater evil, or the tempo task, and war is magnetic north. In a way, I’d like to flip that. Make sex the magnetic north, and look at how war – the subject – can shed light on the power of sexual hierarchies, how these hierarchies operate practically, and how they are formative of “how we know” as human beings.

   The misogynist language of the military, and the misogyny of military culture overall, cannot be subsumed under the category of military violence. Because when an NCO tells his formation of male troops, “Let’s go, ladies,” or castigates complaining troops by asking “You got sand in your pussy?” then this is telling us not about mere violence, but about (1) sexual heirarchies that reach well beyond the military, and (2) about the cultural associations we make between sex, domination, conquest, humiliation, and those impermeable boundaries that De talks about.

   We speak about sex as violence; and we speak about violence as sex.

   13 April 2010, 9:07 am

8. Stan:

   …the class of humans attracted to military “service” often have a headstart on military training by virtue of their family backgrounds, low intellectual capacity, and low culture to begin with.

   hmmmmmm

   [De chiming in:] I think xenia’s response was relevant and accurate

   13 April 2010, 9:33 am

9. Michael Anderson:

   @ Stan, and thanks for the encouragement; here’s an example of a small-town “headstart” (read probative masculinity) kind of experience, one I went through myself. I’ll try and tell this without too much ado…

   Hunting, in the area I grew up in, was something that was accepted as normal—not everyone did it, but it was, in this somewhat rural area, an accepted part of life, as most of you who grew up in small towns can attest to. This area, I guess you could say, was COLONIZED by lumber interests in the mid-1800’s, and in many ways, because of its relative isolation, was like living in a client state—the mills called the tune, and everything else there existed there on their terms. There really was nothing here before the timber interests came, and it is struggling now to find itself in many ways.

   The local Indian tribes were decimated by the usual tactics of war and disease to make way for the white capitalists from San Francisco to extract their fortunes from the land (read “The Origin and Prosecution of The Indian Wars In Oregon”, by US Army Major Charles Drew, for the account from the victors’ standpoint). And, of course, patriarchy was there, in the air, all around us…something most of us never gave thought to.

   There was the usual mix if patriotism and rural pride in town, but at the time I was in high school in the sixties, the student body was as large as some of the large metro schools in the state, which reflected the number of blue-collar families there. A lot of kids left after high school, looking for a different life. That is still true, only now the “different life” is the Military.

   My father grew up in the agricultural area that used to be outside of Tacoma, Washington, and served as a gunner’s mate in the Coast Guard in WW2. He met my mother while stationed on a cutter here during wartime, and like a lot of people, decided to stay there after the war, attracted by the natural beauty of the area. I’m sure many of you of a particular age will remember growing up in small towns in the 50′s and 60′s, so I won’t detail that part of life.

   There were guns in the house, and we were encouraged to be respectful of them, which I suppose, is different from the video-game mentality that is pervasive now, but still, they were there. I was taught how to shoot and take care of them—and not to point them at people.

   I was around sixteen when this incident happened. I had gone, with Dad and a group of 3 of my father’s friends from work (Weyerhauser), to hunt on land that was logged over and replanted, which, for the uninitiated, is ideal deer habitat—they like tender new shoots to eat. The tactic we used, and this is the way you hunt at daybreak with a day-glo red vest on, was “stand” hunting, which is staking out an area with a view, and sitting as still as you can, while scanning the area with binoculars.

   This particular morning, we had staked out a narrow canyon, and positioned ourselves around it. I had found a good stump to sit on, and was scanning down my side of the canyon, and spotted 3 deer, what looked like 2 does and a buck. Following accepted practice, I put the field glasses down and scanned the area with the naked eye, doing this a couple of times to make sure I knew what I was seeing, because the range was fairly long—100 yards+, I would guess. After taking aim with my rifle scope (making sure of the position of the buck), I fired. I could see the deer take off running, immediately. At that time, I was hailed by one of the other men across the canyon, asking where they were. I tried to direct him, vocally, to the general area. Then, as you could say—all hell broke loose. Everyone started firing, rapidly. It sounded like something from a TV show. This lasted for maybe two minutes, after which we ceased firing and gathered on my side of the canyon. At this time, I discovered that everyone but me had emptied their magazines—this would be about 20+ rounds in two minutes—I wasn’t counting at the time.

   We decided one of us would walk down into the canyon to see if there was a trail, either blood or tracks. As I was the one who initiated the encounter, I went with my father. When we got to the general area where the deer were when I initially spotted them, we found a blood trail. Following it for a few yards there appeared in the blood plant bits. My father said “damn, gut shot”. The primary concern here was spoiling meat, not necessarily the pain of the creature. We followed the trail for about 25 yards, and we came upon our quarry, which was a doe, that had been, indeed, gut shot—still alive, laying on the ground with its abdominal sac protruding from a hole in its belly. Since it was out of season, this would have cost us a hefty fine, had a game warden happened upon the scene. My father then dispatched the doe with a round to the head, which, surprisingly, was without blood or the usual Hollywood effects that are portrayed in the media—the animal just shook a little, and slowly closed its eyes.

   We made a hurried climb back out of the canyon, and decided (or should I say, the adults decided) that we should leave this general area quickly, because of the out-of-season kill and the general amount of noise that we made doing it. The term that was used was “accidental”—-but it would still get you a fine. However, I was commended for my efforts nonetheless. It is anyone’s guess as to who actually hit the animal—it may well have been me. I’d made a rite of passage—but one with a twist of fate.

   Looking back, the emotions I felt at the time were intense, negative, and suppressed (big boys don’t cry). I did go hunting a few more times, even getting a legit “kill” (another doe), but my taste for it, and things that went with it, had soured. It took many more years to finally get the firearms out of the house, but they are gone now, gladly. The emotional baggage has taken as long to deal with—the baggage of machismo and death.
   As Stan can attest to, you are surprised by the lingering bits of it you come across in unexpected ways.

   All the elements of a military action (gone wrong) were present here: Rules of Engagement (hunting regs), strategy, tactics, objectifying the quarry, the disordered battle for the “kill”—and “collateral damage”. For years afterward, when friends would ask me if I wanted to go hunting, I fended them off with the arguments that “by the time you figure in gasoline, time, & ammunition, that venison gets pretty expensive” (which in and of itself, is true). The reality is; I just didn’t want to go there anymore and to participate in that ritual again. I walk down another street now. That doesn’t happen to everyone. For a lot of kids, it’s just one more stop on the road to the Army. The choice is a very individual one.

   Thanks….

   13 April 2010, 3:07 pm

10. Stan:

    When Jamie sought civil remedies, KBR told her that her rape, and KBR’s part in it, were part of the conditions of her employment contract and thus any complaints would be subject to mandatory arbitration — and they’d be picking the arbitrator. After 15 months in arbitration, she and her lawyers went to court — in a move fought by KBR — to force the court to determine that rape was not a condition of her employment contract and thus her suit wasn’t covered by the arbitration agreement…

    …But KBR isn’t going to roll over and settle the case or admit to any wrong-doing. Instead, they’re backing Jones’ rapist, and using his defense as their own. On their site, they have a “Facts About Jamie Leigh Jones” litigation that is chock full of lies, half-truths, PR spin and rape- apologist sentiment that should make any woman think twice about working for KBR, and should make U.S. taxpayers wonder why their money continues to go to a company that sides with brutal rapists over their victims because it is more financially expedient.

    FULL

    14 April 2010, 7:33 am

11. Stan:

    Institutionalised in sports, the military, acculturated sexuality, the history and mythology of heroism, violence is taught to boys until they becomes its advocates.

    -Andrea Dworkin

    14 April 2010, 1:45 pm

12. DeAnander:

    @Stan interesting — don’t you think the use of “roll over,” as in “KBR isn’t going to roll over and settle the case,” illustrates yet again the association of sexual receptivity with submission? In other words the encoding of sex as a dance of dominance and submission, violence and conflict, victory and defeat, predator and prey, master and servant, is so deep in the language that people can hardly write or speak without alluding to it.

    14 April 2010, 3:13 pm

13. Stan:

    Very. Roll over. Bend over. Get punked. Get caught with your pants down. Anyone want to list the expressions in day-to-day speech that equate sex with hostility, dominance, and aggression?

    14 April 2010, 5:20 pm

14. DeAnander:

    @Stan — we’d be here all day it’s possibly a longer list than the list of expressions deriving from agriculture or the age of sail.

    14 April 2010, 7:02 pm

15. Mark:

    Hmmm, I always assumed the phrase “roll over” referred to the behavior among dogs and some other animals to roll on their back and expose their belly as a sign of submission.

    15 April 2010, 9:53 am

16. Marcilla Elizabeth Smith:

    My completely anecdotal experience is that people used to say (more often) “we aren’t gonna roll over and play dead!” but over the years have become more likely to say “we aren’t gonna roll over and take this!”

    I’m going to go beyond just saying it is a case of association and say expressions of affection are being *replaced* by expressions of violence. I think if a man said he was “locked, loaded, and ready to put a round in that pussy” the meaning would be substantially more clear to the average (man, in particular) listener than if he were to say he was “filled with bliss and butterflies at the thought that his M-4 would soon be making love to one of the opposition forces for whom he had such passion and emotion.”

    I thought of some examples where gender seemed to become the primary contextual necessity, the terms and grammar having become so enmeshed. [TRIGGER WARNING ON SOME OF THE LANGUAGE TO FOLLOW] Consider a man saying the following:

    “I did him in the chest and the head”
    “I did her in the ass and the mouth”

    “I fucked him up good”
    “I fucked her good”

    “I tore him a new asshole”
    “I tore up her asshole”

    “I *destroyed* his ass, yo”
    “I destroyed her *ass*, yo”

    “I’m gonna ram it down his throat”
    “I’m gonna ram it down her throat”

    “I’m gonna bust his lip”
    “I’m gonna bust her cherry”

    OTOH, “when I see her/him, I can’t help but think about stroking her/his hair” only means one thing. I think this linguistic shift substantially only plays out in one direction and really underscores that culturally we are moving away from sex-as-affection and toward sex-as-violation.

    15 April 2010, 7:50 pm

17. Stan:

    Thanks Marcilla.

    TRIGGER ALERT HERE TOO

    Just the way we generally use the term “fuck” as a phatic utterance. De and I had this conversation somewhere (“phatic” was a word I learned from her).

    Fuck you.
    That’s fucked up.
    He fucked me over.
    Fuck that dude, man.
    Get fucked.

    In one of the crescendo moments in “Man on Fire,” our hero anally rapes a “bad guy” with explosives, the explosion itslef serving simultaneously as sexual climax and completion of domination.

    Common jokes and language in the army (Marcilla will recognize these (BIG TRIGGER ALERT):

    Q-Why do women have pussies?
    A-So men will talk to them.

    She has perfect legs, feet on one end, pussy on the other.

    You can’t trust anything that bleeds five days a month and doesn’t die.

    She’s a nice looking bag of guts.

    I’d like to run eight inches up in her guts.

    (Male) Private Jones is a cunt.

    (Female) Private Jones is a cunt.

    I tore that pussy up.

    I knocked the bottom out of that pussy.

    Quit being a little bitch.

    That weapon is your wife.

    (to tired or frightened soldiers) Is your pussy hurting? You got sand in your clit? Do you need a kotex?

    He bitch-slapped that dude.

    Don’t be a faggot (like a woman, sexually receptive).

    The Colonel [fucked me and] didn’t even kiss me.

    *

    This could go on a long time. You get the picture.

    These are not the exception. They are the rule.

    16 April 2010, 8:59 am

18. Marcilla Elizabeth Smith:

    You should lock this thread before someone starts in with the Jody calls, lolz.

    I think what we’re talking about is also the elephant in the room when it comes to DADT. And I think this is part of why sex between two (appropriately feminine) wimmin is so much more acceptable (in the dominant culture), even desired at times, and yet sex between any men is particularly heinous. Men know that even if most men aren’t rapists, most rapists are men. They also know that sexual assault is never ok (when it’s happening to oneself).

    Let’s break kayfabe on this (to borrow from pro wrestling parlance): fear of sexual assault is used to keep even the *men* in the military toeing the line (or is it “towing”?). I don’t really know what it’s like in a conventional unit or even an active SOF unit, but I can tell you that the threats of sexual assault in the Army National Guard Special Forces unit I was in (before transitioning from M to F for those just tuning in) had no such DADT policy. It was more like Don’t See, Don’t Report or to compare it with another militaryism, “what happens on TDY, stays on TDY.”

    We had E-8′s who would show up naked to a company staff meeting. I had an O-4 get up in front of the company formation to admonition officers that while we weren’t better than our enlisted men, “it’s just that we’re better looking and our dicks are bigger.” NCO’s and officers both tea-bagged while they slept. I had a team sergeant who would talk to me about how he was going to have sex with “the cute new guy” as we were walking over to PT in a voice intentionally loud enough that the aforementioned “cute new guy” would hear him. As Stan said, this was VERY much par for the course and definitely a way to jockey for the informal rank structure that existed. I have more stories than this, and I was only there one weekend a month!

    This would make a good article unto itself. Has anyone seen anything written about male-on-male sexual assault-based intimidation in the military?

    16 April 2010, 12:31 pm

19. Richard:

    Interestingly, in my own usage, I will use “fuck” phatically all the time, but I would never use anything like the language in your list of army jokes (and those kinds of remarks make me more and more uncomfortably; I encounter them most often in sports conversation, not surprisingly). They do seem qualitatively different to me. I think for most people I know anyway “fuck” in the phatic sense has been divorced from it sexual-violence sense. It remains as an abstract taboo word. And yet I can easily see how quickly it can and does fade into the sexual/violence/abusive language…

    16 April 2010, 1:41 pm

20. Stan:

    Fuck as phatic has been naturalized, and so many people use it without thinking of its connotation… that to fuck is to humiliate and defile, and to get fucked is to be humiliated, broken, beaten somehow.

    I can’t help thinking of the male-popular porn convention wherein the male ejaculates on the woman’s face.

    Back to my old fight with the liberal canard that rape is not sex. Right! Sex is tangled up in power; domination is highly eroticized in our society, and trying to separate sex from power is an exercise in denial.

    Thoughtful, mutual sexual relationships in this society are hard, very hard, precisely because we have to very intentionally “check in” and negotiate with our partners… finding ways around the power-dynamics we have inherited from our culture.

    I know people who have chosen sexual abstinence as an ethical choice on this account. And I have a great deal of respect for that.

    16 April 2010, 4:28 pm

21. Richard:

    well, and what I was saying is that so many people don’t see it as having that connotation, precisely because it’s been naturalized… in a sense, it does not have that connotation for them. I think for that reason I have always shied away from using “fuck” when talking about sex, and I wince when others do.

    I agree with everything else you’re saying… actually, I’m not quite disagreeing about the word–I see what you mean and know it’s true–just trying to explore my own usage…

    16 April 2010, 9:42 pm

22. 1st Lt L Diablo:

    I wonder if insular is a word that means anything ’round here? Lol.

    Look, men are naturally more violent in general and aggro sexually. It’s the TESTOSTERONE! Our endocrine systems are not irrelevant. All this Watson/BF Skinner crap has been discredited already. Only atavistic feminists and christians (e.g., Stan, et.al.) still think people are exclusively designed by their environments. It’s nonsense. If it is all milieu, then I guess gay people can “learn” to be straight then? (uh, nope…) Oh, ok, then I guess some parts of us are indeed innate and not constructed… I guess that could mean all manner of sexuality -including the desire to dominate even rape is innate (you realize other species rape– right? It aint moral, legal or desirable in our society– but it is natural for some men to be so sociopathic and sexually libidinous that rape is ‘natural’. We shouldn’t tolerate it, but calling it ‘unnatural’ is fatuous). We’ll never unpack it all– but genetics matter; endocrine systems matter… we are not blank slates. Think: Chomsky’s language cortex for some help on this Stan…

    And sociopaths are probably more likely to service in the military due to the central function of the service: violence; sanctioned violence. Does the military milieu then craft these borderline psychopaths into full fledged wackos— yes. But, the seed is there my homies; the seed is there. No matter the nutrients, water levels, or sunshine a rose seed will not become a Crocodile (and a baby Croc will never be a rose no matter the milieu). Our genetics matter. QED.

    I’m gonna keep posting this shit, until someone admits that all this behaviorism nonsense is foolish and counter-revolutionary (all lies are counter-revolutionary; the LEFT is first and foremost a movement of honest, truth seekers in my opinion).

    17 April 2010, 4:36 pm

23. DeAnander:

    One of the generational differences when used in the non-phatic or literal sense is that f**k used to be unidirectional — as the old radfeminists said patriarchal grammar is simple… “Man f**ks woman: Subject Verb Object.” But these days I have heard people under the age of 30 saying “OMG, you mean she actually *f**ked* that [male] loser?” Clearly for them the word has come to mean “participated in intercourse” regardless of gender. I don’t think it yet means “had any kind of sex” though, I think it’s still reserved for penile penetration. Not sure whether this upcoming generation still regards this as the only “real” sex, whether they still believe in that weird and condescending word “foreplay”, or…? The Millennials are a foreign generation-culture for this rapidly fuddying duddy.

    17 April 2010, 9:06 pm

24. Marcilla Elizabeth Smith:

    I’m not entirely sure that “Lieutenant Devil’s” (whether there is a “full bird” devil, as well, I have to wonder) post is meant to be ironic, but whether it is or not, it is rather representative of many people’s ideas about, well not just the endocrine system but signaling pathways, human physiology, and organic systems in general. There are many things a leading endocrinologist would tell you we don’t know. Most GP’s would know even less, folks with a BS in Biology prolly less, etc.

    I think a better way to talk about the tabula rosa would be to point out that even a “blank” piece of paper can have lines, shape, texture, watermark, ring holes, etc. My Dell was built to run Windoze 2000, but XP ran better, and Ubuntu better still – to take the analogy in a more modern direction

    I would say we are talking about strata again. Here, I would say there is an ultimate substrate of natural law/physics/whatever that is radical, absolute, and relatively immutable. Way above that in the taxonomy would be socio-cultural/behavioral/whatever which would be tertiary, variable, and relatively dynamic. In between would be genetic/physiological/whatever. I think that would be a much more useful model than the old “nature vs nurture” model. I have to think it is obvious to most people that these two would interact and it certainly isn’t as if it were one *or* the other.

    And the question (in my mind) is not whether Queer people can learn to be straight (most of us certainly have learned how to act it at some point or another), but rather why the hell would we want to?

    18 April 2010, 2:38 am

25. Stan:

    Lieutenant,

    No, you will not keep posting after you state it as a kind of threat, or if you continue to personalize your attacks. It is a moderated blog, and you can take your rude macho ass elsewhere.

    I admit we are in awe of you as the standard-bearer and intellectual policeman of the “Left.” Good luck with that revolution thang.

    BTW, you continue to misrepresent my position (as Skinnerian of all things!), so your rebuttal of that position may give you a springboard for announcing your own position, but it has nothing to do with mine.

    Did your endocrine system teach you to read and write?

    18 April 2010, 6:32 am

26. Jen:

    This is in response to Marcilla Elizabeth Smith’s comments. Just thought the following article might be of interest.

    http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/12/the-science-of-success/7761/

    I’m a sociologist and have run the gamut from essentialist to constructivist thinking and various incarnations in between from adolescence to 40. I found the above article a pretty interesting, accessible discussion of how the thinking about nature vs nurture has changed.
    Keep the dialogue flowing. I love this site – in a needing alternative lenses way – not because the content is particularly uplifting most days!!!! But seriously, thanks Stan…

    18 April 2010, 12:11 pm

27. Timothy R. Anderson:

    If a society’s already-marginalized military servicemembers are sexual-assault-victims month after month after month, and YEAR AFTER YEAR AFTER YEAR, but their Commander In Chief ( Obama) DOES NOTHING ABOUT IT, is said society a civilized one ? Perhaps not ?

    Here’s a link to a more soundly articulated ” Counterpunch” write-up :

    http://www.counterpunch.org/rosen03192010.html

    As a person, as a civilian person who has been an American citizen for whooooooo-weeeeeeee
    a looooooooong time now, I don’t recall the USA’s current and most-recent-previous Presidential Administration including the SEX ASSAULTS of AMERICAN mil. servicemembers in their sales-pitch of the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

    I don’t recall the Bush/Cheney Rumsfeld/ Rice including the SEX ASSAULTS of AMERICAN
    military servicemembers in their sales-pitch of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

    I don’t see any improvement, any effort to improve with Obama and Gates. None.

    Timothy R. Anderson

    18 April 2010, 7:30 pm

28. Joel:

    Nature or Nurture?

    Why Soldiers Get A Kick Out Of Killing

    By John Horgan

    April 27, 2010 “Scientific America” – April 23, 2010 — Do some soldiers enjoy killing? If so, why? This question is thrust upon us by the recently released video of U.S. Apache helicopter pilots shooting a Reuters cameraman and his driver in Baghdad in 2007. Mistaking the camera of the Reuters reporter for a weapon, the pilots machine-gunned the reporter and driver and other nearby people.

    The most chilling aspect of the video, which was made public by Wikileaks, is the chatter between two pilots, whose names have not been released. As Elizabeth Bumiller of The New York Times put it, the soldiers “revel in their kill.” “Look at those dead bastards,” one pilot says. “Nice,” the other replies.

    The exchange reminds me of a Times story from March 2003, during the U.S. invasion of Baghdad. The reporter quotes Sgt. Eric Schrumpf, a Marine sharpshooter, saying, “We had a great day. We killed a lot of people.” Noting that his troop killed an Iraqi woman standing near a militant, Schrumpf adds, “I’m sorry, but the chick was in the way.”

    Does the apparent satisfaction—call it the Schrumpf effect—that some soldiers take in killing stem primarily from nature or nurture? Nature, claims Richard Wrangham, an anthropologist at Harvard University and an authority on chimpanzees. Wrangham asserts that natural selection embedded in both male humans and chimpanzees—our closest genetic relatives—an innate propensity for “intergroup coalitionary killing” [pdf], in which members of one group attack members of a rival group. Male humans “enjoy the opportunity” to kill others, Wrangham says, especially if they run little risk of being killed themselves.

    Several years ago, geneticists at Victoria University in New Zealand linked violent male aggression to a variant of a gene that encodes for the enzyme monoamine oxidase A, which regulates the function of neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin. According to the researchers, the so-called “warrior gene” is carried by 56 percent of Maori men, who are renowned for being “fearless warriors,” and only 34 percent of Caucasian males.

    But studies of World War II veterans suggest that very few men are innately bellicose. The psychiatrists Roy Swank and Walter Marchand found that 98 percent of soldiers who endured 60 days of continuous combat suffered psychiatric symptoms, either temporary or permanent. The two out of 100 soldiers who seemed unscathed by prolonged combat displayed “aggressive psychopathic personalities,” the psychiatrists reported. In other words, combat didn’t drive these men crazy because they were crazy to begin with.

    Surveys of WWII infantrymen carried out by U.S. Army Brig. Gen. S.L.A. Marshall found that only 15 to 20 percent had fired their weapons in combat, even when ordered to do so. Marshall concluded that most soldiers avoid firing at the enemy because they fear killing as well as being killed. “The average and healthy individual,” Marshall contended in his postwar book Men Against Fire, “has such an inner and usually unrealized resistance towards killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life if it is possible to turn away from that responsibility…At the vital point he becomes a conscientious objector.”

    Critics have challenged Marshall’s claims, but the U.S. military took them so seriously that it revamped its training to boost firing rates in subsequent wars, according to Dave Grossman, a former U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel and professor of psychology at West Point. In his 1995 book On Killing, Grossman argues that Marshall’s results have been corroborated by reports from World War I, the American Civil War, the Napoleonic wars and other conflicts. “The singular lack of enthusiasm for killing one’s fellow man has existed throughout military history,” Grossman asserts.

    The reluctance of ordinary men to kill can be overcome by intensified training, direct commands from officers, long-range weapons and propaganda that glorifies the soldier’s cause and dehumanizes the enemy. “With the proper conditioning and the proper circumstances, it appears that almost anyone can and will kill,” Grossman writes. Many soldiers who kill enemies in battle are initially exhilarated, Grossman says, but later they often feel profound revulsion and remorse, which may transmute into post-traumatic stress disorder and other ailments. Indeed, Grossman believes that the troubles experienced by many combat veterans are evidence of a “powerful, innate human resistance toward killing one’s own species.”

    In other words, the Schrumpf effect is usually a product less of nature than of nurture—although “nurture” is an odd term for training that turns ordinary young men into enthusiastic killers.

    ABOUT THE AUTHOR

    John Horgan, a former Scientific American staff writer, directs the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology. (Photo courtesy of Skye Horgan.)

    27 April 2010, 1:59 pm

29. Marcilla Elizabeth Smith:

    Why is it these stories seem so often to put forth the “boys will be boys” line first, even when the conclusion (in the story, even) is that it’s bullshit?

    (The question is rhetorical, of course. I’m fairly aware of the myriad reasons why :: sigh :: )

    27 April 2010, 7:46 pm

30. DeAnander:

    “the poor defences, the penetrable gates: how terrible to be a woman”

    Bang! by Sondheim: possibly the longest continuous war/sex metaphor in musical literature…

    28 April 2010, 1:40 am

31. DeAnander:

    We often talk about the “connection between” misogyny and warfare, the use of misogyny in military training, the violence against women which “accompanies” war. I sometimes think we are shying away from the present day reality, which is that warfare is increasingly waged directly *against* women (and children); that modern warfare is, literally, a war on women and kids — not as metaphor but literally.

    * At the turn of the 20th century, 5% of war casualties were civilians
    * In World War I, 15% were civilians
    * In World War II, the figure leapt to a 65% civilian death toll, as whole cities were bombed
    * By the mid-nineties, 75% of war deaths were civilians
    * Today, 90% of the human war toll are civilians-the majority women and children

    Forget the complaints of “collateral damage”. As military leaders brag that modern technology has produced the most accurate weapons in history, during war strikes in places like Iraq or Afghanistan, women and children die.

    They are not the collateral damage — they are the targets.

    [emphasis mine]

    These figures bear examining, repeatedly. Something has shifted — even in the already warped value system of traditional patriarchy. 90 — NINETY — percent of the victims of modern mechanised warfare are civilians, primarily women and children. An old saying in games theory is that if a given game repeatedly produces a certain outcome, eventually we must conclude that this game is rigged to produce this outcome; if modern warfare repeatedly and predictably kills 9 times as many civilians as combatants, and far more women and children than soldiers, then we must conclude that at some level, this is the intent. The purpose of warfare, which at one time could be said to be some kind of plumage and fitness display for young males proving themselves, has become a grim exterminist exercise: the object is to destroy the “enemy” population by killing the children and females.

    Why?

    Warfare and Gender Justice

    16 May 2010, 12:51 pm

32. Curt:

    DeAnander,
    I think that this report is a foul ball. In the past couple of centuries Western against Western Warfare, and I include the Muslim world in my concept of the west, (It is Monotheistic-Paternalistic, and through centuries of trade, and the joint translation of many ancient texts, and yes warfare especially with the Ottoman Empire, the differences between Islam and Christianity seem to me to be trivial, COMPARED WITH THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN CAPITALISM AND MARXISM.)war is seen as a continuation of business or politics or something like that by violent means. Woman and children do not make politics or business do they? Do they? Yes of course there are rare exceptions. When I was a child I would spend summer days delivering campaign flyers door to door and writing letters to the editor, but few children were as stupid as I was.
    Shit now that I think about that is the western model. Yes children get involved in politics and warfare in third world countries. Damn it is sometimes hard to remember everything that is relevant at once.
    Still to think that the majority of US or NATO troops are deliberately targeting women and children in Iraq or Afghanistan takes a point of view towards them even more extreme than my own. Such thinking should not be tolerated. I mean a view more extreme than my own of course.
    I think that this rise in civilian casualties over the century can be attributed to the fact that western against western battles had in the past for the most part been waged in deserts and in jungles and in forests. When city fighting took place the civilians were often for the most part relocated. The modern guerrilla must stay very close to the civilian population for a variety of reasons.
    I am no expert but I think that it would be possible to engage guerrillas with lower civilian casualties but at greater risk of casualties to the conventional army and with that a greater risk of defeat. Stan could probably dispute or confirm such an idea. But perhaps there are people who consider themselves tactical experts who would have conflicting opinions on such an idea.

    Now that being said I could see a couple of factors that could contribute to the possibility that those on the fighting end of an occupying army may reach a point that they do not give a **** about civilian casualties. One is that the indoctrination process that some soldiers under would not be consistent but would vary from unit to unit. With this statement which may still be used in the military, I am not sure, “Mission First, soldiers always.” Or something to that effect there is a lot of pressure on low level commanders to protect their subordinates. There will be some pressure to minimize civilian casualties but can such pressure ever even come close to the pressure to save the lives of the people serving under you who you know very well versus saving the lives of people who you do not know and most likely you would not even like if you did get to know them or they you. Which leads in to the next point when one understands that the people shooting at you have the support of those they are hiding amongst would does not the whole population become the enemy?
    Yes we have to face the fact that all of them every single one of them is the ENEMY of the occupation forces. But when an occupier is being shot at who is going to stop and start thinking about ends and means? Perhaps people should be asking questions about what ends they are trying to accomplish and what means would justify those ends before they start shooting at a bunch of peasants.
    Of course this critique does not apply to US forces in Iraq or NATO forces in Afghanistan because they are not occupation forces now are they?

    17 May 2010, 3:29 am

33. Marcilla Elizabeth Smith:

    Assuming the question is not rhetorical, I would say to continue with a theory of warfare as economic model.

    The battlefield may be one of the last if not *the* last large-scale examples of a truly free (unrestricted) marketplace. The currency here is in human lives since humans are order of magnitude more adaptable and more energy-efficient than any machines they operate. They are the “cash” in a warfare as economic model, but they are not *entirely* fungible. Those with child-carrying capacity are more valuable since they are analogous to the means of production in Capitalism.

    IOW, as nice as it might seem to have your own bank vault, your own US Mint would be much better.

    This is just one way of extending the economic model. If we look at humans as consumers: all humans default to civilian, and so the question becomes (for policy-makers) how to entice consumers into choosing their product (service to the mechanisms of warfare). If it actually becomes *safer* to serve in the military/insurgency/other war-making entity, there is a rational incentive to join the fight in addition to any ideological inclinations.

    I remember an article in an official US Army publication maybe 10-15 years ago discussing the “terrorist” as the warrior of the future, as the US had vanquished any reasonable threat from fellow nation-states, and so now would turn/have to turn to non-state actors in future warfare. Ultimately this is un-winnable for US national power (I believe), so to hold out as long as possible, the US will have to fight as much like their foe as possible.

    17 May 2010, 9:32 am

34. eoinmonkey:

    “* At the turn of the 20th century, 5% of war casualties were civilians
    * In World War I, 15% were civilians
    * In World War II, the figure leapt to a 65% civilian death toll, as whole cities were bombed
    * By the mid-nineties, 75% of war deaths were civilians
    * Today, 90% of the human war toll are civilians-the majority women and children

    These figures bear examining, repeatedly. Something has shifted — even in the already warped value system of traditional patriarchy. 90 — NINETY — percent of the victims of modern mechanised warfare are civilians, primarily women and children.”

    And before the 20th century? Isnt the assumption that warfare did/should involve predominently fighting men is an erroneous one- ancient armies (that is, from earliest known “organised warfare” to the rise to total dominance of the modern state-identified military systems, somewhere in the 17th century) always sustained themselves with what they could take from the land around them- a great reason why wars of choice were always fought somewhere that wasnt yours (something we have gone back to?). This appropriation of food and other generalised sustenance would have been accomplished with use or threats of force, and the resultant famines (exacerbated by the accidental-deliberate destruction of unripe crops, farmland, water supplies, tools and agricultural workers) would almost certainly have killed more people than any battle. Perhaps what we are looking at in modern conflict is a return to older norms of rapine and pillage.
    As for pre-historic warfare, what little we can tell doesnt look all that good:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talheim_Death_Pit

    http://www.arch.ox.ac.uk/IVNE.html

    “The Schletz-Asparn mass grave was located near Vienna, in Austria, and dates back about 7,500 years. …
    In similar proportions to those found at Talheim, fewer young women were found than men at Schletz. Because of this scarcity of young women among the dead, it is possible that the women were kidnapped by the attackers”

    17 May 2010, 10:59 am

35. (Boer) Tom:

    @DeAnander
    I haven’t looked specifically at any studies on the death toll, so this is somewhat anecdotal. In Iraq, much of the death toll is from large-scale bombing (including bombs containing) DU, which in the long run targets civilians (see e.g. this documentary), and similar things are true elsewhere, e.g. clusterbombs, landmines and so forth. Both the Bosnian civil war and the Rwandan invasion of Congo-Kinshasa involved mass rapes, although I find it strange that there’d be a connection between the two – how would the idea/plan be transmitted? With the Congo war, Canadian ‘peace-keepers’ had been aiding and abetting Paul Kagame in Rwanda (see Herman‘s piece). Another proximal cause is the greater tendency toward guerrilla warfare; when an invading army fights guerrillas, it fights the populace.

    Finally, I doubt that wars historically mainly killed soldiers. Colonial wars generally hit civilians almost exclusively; the thirty year war mainly targeted civilians.

    17 May 2010, 11:12 am

36. DeAnander:

    There was a form of warfare — common among e.g. Plains First Nations people in N America — in which the warriors from two different groups would meet on a battleground more or less equidistant from their home turfs and perform ritual battle (but with real injuries and deaths) at a designated time of year. The contest was more for glory and status and bragging rights (counting coup) than for the acquisition of material goods or land. This ritualised warfare can be recognised also here and there in the feudal era in Europe where similarly, there were seasonal set-piece battles on “neutral” territory involving a lot of plumage display (banners, caparisons etc) and “keeping score” like a sport rather than “conquering” for resources/land.

    I wonder if this institution of ritualised warfare was an adaptive development, a sublimation of territorial/resource aggression into a more manageable and less mutually destructive form. Maybe an adaptation over millennia of dealing with neighbours of approximately equal strength and power. Possibly if one side had been instantly, heavily armed by an outside force the ritual aspect might have disappeared and the conflict turned exterminist and colonial.

    OTOH asymmetrical warfare over resources I would guess has always been exterminist in nature — if you intend to steal the biotic productivity of the land then you intend to exterminate the people now surviving on it (by starvation) so there’s no inhibition against just killing them all right now. and warfare to steal people-as-resources (slave taking, including the “theft” of women from a neighbouring polity) has probably always been brutally expedient. Haida used to raid for slaves and loot, somewhat on the Viking model, and there was nothing ritual (for the victims anyway) or evenly-matched about that kind of warfare: it was all sneak attack, maximum mayhem and terror, and making off with anything valuable. The canoes came back decorated with human heads, but afaik only the heads of men were considered suitable trophies. Women were kidnapped and brought home (but never in huge numbers, as the canoes had limited carrying capacity) as domestic and sexual slaves.

    OTOH as far as I know Haida warriors never tried to exterminate their neighbours outright. They apparently had no ambitions to occupy other people’s territory; they just dropped by now and then to terrorise and steal. Perhaps if their own population had eventually outgrown the resource base of Haida Gwaii (instead of being decimated by the European incursion) they might eventually have become exterminist conquerors and formed an empire…

    So maybe the distinction is between ritual warfare enacting probative masculinity in a channelled, stylised, mitigated way, and raw armed robbery (the essence of conquista/colonialism).

    Mass rape seems to be a constant in invasive warfare (as opposed to ritual sporting battles on neutral turf). The idea or plan seems to be intrinsic to the scenario: a horde of angry men amped-up on risk and testosterone, in a situation of impunity without any “civil” law and order mechanisms, in proximity to a vulnerable population (women and children)… It may also be worth mentioning that a fair number of Classical Greek artifacts (vases and urns and whatnots) show male warriors on the battlefield raping their defeated (male) opponents. (Gerda Lerner comments on this in The Creation of Patriarchy).

    18 May 2010, 1:54 pm

37. eoinmonkey:

    “There was a form of warfare — common among e.g. Plains First Nations people in N America — in which the warriors from two different groups would meet on a battleground more or less equidistant from their home turfs and perform ritual battle (but with real injuries and deaths) at a designated time of year. The contest was more for glory and status and bragging rights (counting coup) than for the acquisition of material goods or land.”
    -This kind of warfare, generally known as pure ‘savage’ or ‘unorganised’ warfare, typically only exists in societies where there is no real competition for resources- because of their abundance (this is why it existed amongst Plains Indigenous Nations). That is, it seems to be something people do for reasons other than the acquisition of materiel- fun, perhaps, or practice for a future where resources are more scarce? It doesnt seem to have ever been that common, as in most parts of the world resources were so often affected by outside factors (such as the weather, availability of growing land, crop parasites, etc) regularly, leading to conflict between groups. That said, all warfare has an element of the ritualistic to it, even modern warfare (despite priding themselves on being purely practical, even present-day western militaries are superstitious, tribalistic and traditionalist about their dress, structure, and operation). It also seems that the first practitioners of what would come to be “Total” warfare, the quest for a decisive battle or victory (including decimating ones opponants to pre-empt a rematch), first appeared in settled societies that had adopted animal husbandry over hunter gathering. Similar skills are needed for both- herding animals is much the same as surrounding an enemy force, and the work of efficient slaughter is more or less the same when applied to cows and sheep as it is to other people.

    That said, just as the Plains Cultures did not possess the ability to exterminate the Buffalo, so they also did not possess the ability to exterminate their human enemies. Where such an ability DID exist, it was usually taken if that was the desired end.
    “Maybe an adaptation over millennia of dealing with neighbours of approximately equal strength and power. Possibly if one side had been instantly, heavily armed by an outside force the ritual aspect might have disappeared and the conflict turned exterminist and colonial.”
    You dont need to hypothosise about this: there are plenty of examples throughout history. This is a particularly interesting one, from the Chatham islands:

    “The Moriori society was a peaceful society and bloodshed was outlawed by the chief Nunuku after generations of warfare. Arguments were solved by consensus or by individual duels singular combat rather than warfare, but at the first sign of bloodshed, the fight was over. …
    On November 19, 1835, a British ship carrying 500 M?ori armed with guns, clubs and axes arrived, followed by another ship on December 5, 1835 with a further 400 M?ori. They proceeded to massacre the Moriori and enslave the survivors. A Moriori survivor recalled: “[The M?ori] commenced to kill us like sheep…. [We] were terrified, fled to the bush, concealed ourselves in holes underground, and in any place to escape our enemies. It was of no avail; we were discovered and killed – men, women and children indiscriminately”. A M?ori conqueror justified their actions as follows: “We took possession… in accordance with our customs and we caught all the people. Not one escaped…..” ”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatham_Islands#History

    19 May 2010, 6:32 am

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