Of course we are.
• • •
In March 2017, when Marines United became breaking news like Armageddon in cyberspace, my visits to Doc’s office seemed urgent. I was fending off waves of depression and fury.
Marines United was a male-only Facebook group in which over thirty thousand active and former Marines shared sexually explicit photos of US service women and female civilians without the women’s consent. Revenge porn; calls to rape, assault, and harass the women; and racist and homophobic comments saturated the site. Sadly, the press regularly softened the impact of the story, calling it a “nude photo scandal” in far too many headlines to count.
Marines United was not a new phenomenon. In 2013, Representative Jackie Speier alerted the defense secretary and the Marine Corps commandant about the prevalence of similar sites, but in response, Facebook merely took the sites down. They reappeared again and again, but the Marine Corps did little to punish the men responsible for their creation. Speier herself received threats for calling attention to the issue. And yet the Marine Corps did nothing.VII
When Marine veteran and reporter Brian Jones wrote a detailed investigative piece in Task & Purpose about these sites in 2014, the Corps still did nothing, and few people aside from those working in women’s rights paid attention.VIII Jones cited extraordinary postings like “Roses are red, violets are blue, be my fucking Valentine, or I’ll rape you.”
What made Marines United different in 2017? Two dramatic things had changed the moral landscape for the military. The first was the election of Donald Trump, a victory for sexually violent men, particularly in the military, where service members get their behavioral cues—and marching orders—from the commander in chief.
The second change was closer to home. In January 2017, the Marine Corps began integrating enlisted women who had graduated from Infantry Training Battalion into Marine Corps infantry units. The backlash from men who’d been trained since segregated boot camp to think of women as weak and undeserving of this rite of passage was vehement. Marine leadership was lost and seemed terrified of these misogynist rabble-rousers. The Marine Corps had essentially created a bunch of monsters. And now they didn’t know what to do with them.
It was a sad state of affairs. And I could only hope that Marine leaders—Mattis and Dunford among them—were taking long looks in the mirror. They and men like them had created this problem every time they opened their mouths in public to resist women’s integration. They had no concept of moral leadership in this regard, and they certainly had no shame.
• • •
I’d like to think our advocacy efforts were partly to thank for a new generation of veteran activists stepping up to change Marine Corps culture. If ours was the first attempt to transform military culture, the second wave looks promising, precisely because it is coming not just from new veterans but also from within the ranks. And women are not entirely alone in their outrage.
Former Marine infantryman turned investigative journalist Thomas Brennan broke the Marines United story. After Brennan spoke out against his own, his family received death and rape threats. Former intelligence Marine John Albert created a team of infiltrators, each named after knights of the Round Table, to monitor and shut down each site.IX For this, he too received death threats. The gallant white male rescue narrative aside, it’s pretty impressive. Young veterans are learning for the first time that in order to change military culture, men have to have a stake in the game. It means being vulnerable to the same attacks that women face as a matter of course.
These young men are a world apart from Marine Corps leadership, which has in the last five years changed its tune from pretending sexual violence isn’t a problem in the Corps, to acting like it’s defenseless to stop it. As for the commandant, General Robert Neller, he had no idea what was going on below him. The press largely reported Marines United as a social media story, as if the horrors of revenge porn, Internet stalking, rape and death threats, and other variations of online trolling were new to the Marine Corps, or to women, for that matter. Worse than this was that the press seemed to blame the Internet for Marines United. The Marine Corps’ culture of misogyny didn’t start with cyberspace, and if the Internet went dead tomorrow, hatred of women in the Corps would still be alive and kicking.
Marines United may have used the Internet to stoke the worst forms of misogyny, but women are fighting back. It is a beautiful thing to watch unfold. There is tons of chatter among uniformed people on social media. Facebook groups for women and survivors have multiplied. Women in uniform are pissed off. And they’re expressing it out loud. I cannot overstress how brave these women are. One just doesn’t do this kind of thing in uniform. But they’re doing it. Because they know shit’s not going to change otherwise.
This second wave of activism faces fierce cultural resistance. Ignorance about sexual assault—why it happens, what victims suffer and sacrifice, and what rarely happens to predators—suffuses the chatter. In one Facebook group that I joined, several genuine attempts by well-meaning women to change Marine culture were met with vehement challenges by other women who were automatically defending the Corps. As if the Corps ever needed defending. I stayed quiet until I realized I had no patience for victim blaming. I called out a fellow officer for enforcing rape myths, and then quietly left the group.
If activism is happening within the Marines and the military at large, it mirrors much of what is happening in the larger world of #MeToo. Some folks—both women and men—are slow to realize their own culpability in a culture that harms women with abandon and is quick to blame them for being harmed. Soul searching the causes of these abusive attitudes will take time, patience, and humility. It will require a transformation of values. It will require centering the lives of women who are most vulnerable in the military, as they are in the rest of the nation: women of color, enlisted women, and queer women. It will require elevating their voices and giving them the microphone. In a grossly hierarchical, classist system such as the military, this is a tall order. But it must happen—with enormous support from more powerful people—if we want to change military culture.
In 2017, one of these Facebook groups wrote an open letter decrying misogyny in the Corps, signed by almost a hundred senior Marines, including some I served with way back at OCS. It was a group of mostly women officers, and their letter was filled with plenty of inspirational language: “In a culture that prizes masculinity, it is easy to mistake barbarism for strength. Brutality for power.” And yet it was also clear to me that the letter fell short, in characterizing the Corps as some bastion of equal opportunity: “Our leaders decided they would no longer embrace bigotry.”X
I wondered what Lance Corporal Ameer Bourmeche would say to that. In 2015, Bourmeche’s Marine drill instructors hazed him for being a “terrorist” and stuffed him into a dryer, turning it on three times. It was one of several racist incidents at Parris Island, including hazing that led another recruit, Raheel Siddiqui, to leap to his death. I wondered how many of the women who’d signed this letter had deeply reflected on their own culpability in a Corps in which racial epithets against people of color still run rampant. I wondered how many women of color had signed this letter. I wondered how these officers could be so naive as to think racism wasn’t part and parcel of life in the Corps, as it was across the United States. I wondered how many had made the connection between white supremacy and racism across the country and within the Corps, where bigots had access to rank, weapons, and the luxury of an echo chamber.
• • •
Since I left SWAN several years ago, legislative momentum for service women’s issues has slowed. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand reintroduces her bill each year, without much fanfare, and Representative Speier continues to take to task anyone with the audacity to mistreat service women.
There are still clear policy changes waiting for a champion to push them through the Pentagon. Deep in the swampland of Parris Island, South Carolina, Marine wom
en and men continue to be trained in separate battalions. Inside the Corps, more women are resisting double standards. Many are volunteering to do pull-ups. There’s even a jacked lieutenant colonel, Misty Posey, who’s come up with her own successful pull-up training program for Marines, with an eye on getting all women to do them.XI
Still, despite this evidence, pull-ups for women aren’t required, because the men in charge underestimate women, and allow women to choose a way out, instead of requiring them to train to standard. And as long as women are taught that they are separate and unequal, as they are at Parris Island, it’s hard to get all of them on board with the idea that they can do what the guys can do. It’s a vicious, endless loop.
I thought I was the only one beating this point into the ground until I heard about Lieutenant Colonel Kate Germano. In her last stint as a Marine officer, Germano was in charge of the female recruit training battalion at Parris Island. For trying to improve women’s training—for holding women to a higher standard and actually improving their fitness and marksmanship marks—she was fired. It is a story that is so absurd, and so unjust, that it almost sounds unbelievable.
When I found out about Germano’s story, I was moved to tears. She was the only other Marine I knew of who put her career on the line to help women in the Corps. For the first time in fifteen years, I was not alone. I wondered what kind of world we lived in when it seemed like the right thing to do was to fire Germano and prevent thousands of women from succeeding in the Corps. I want a better world.
The Marine Corps is facing stubbornness and bigotries that are deeply entrenched, but the policy changes to remedy Marines United and all its nasty permutations are clear. The moral courage required to make these changes—to integrate boot camp, increase women’s numbers, and make physical standards gender neutral—is enormous in a system where misogyny rules. Unfortunately, Secretary Mattis, an old-school infantryman to the core, does not have the broad experience or forward vision of Leon Panetta, who integrated women into combat assignments. But I have no doubt that these changes will come with new leadership.
I’m optimistic, because as I write this, the Army has integrated hundreds of women into infantry and armor units throughout the service. And the Marine Corps has its first female infantry officer. Times are changing on the inside, and federal policy always catches up to reality. I’ve seen it firsthand. An enterprising defense secretary under the leadership of a forward-thinking president will see this. It’s only a matter of time till they force the Marine Corps to do the right thing.
#MeToo has laid bare what countless women have lost and sacrificed simply navigating their lives. What I’m curious about is how far men are grappling with how much they’ve lost as well in this patriarchal mess we’re all living in. For military men, the losses are rarely talked about in the open. I am speaking not just about the loss of humanity that comes from taking lives. I am speaking mostly about the mistreatment of women all around them. I am speaking, obviously, of Thailand. And Okinawa, the Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam, and so many places around the globe where American GIs have left and continue to leave a horrendous imprint of commercial sexual exploitation and sexual violence. And of course I’m speaking about the violence committed against US service women and service men. How do men take part in this system and then leave the service without a worry in the world, as if they’ve seen or done nothing? The truth is, most don’t.
I have spent years resenting and fearing these men with whom I served, and seething in enormous contempt for the women who protect them. I no longer feel that particular burn. I know deeply now that the harm committed upon others never sits still. It eats you up inside. And when it cannot be contained, it harms the ones you love.
We must take stock of this matter.
There are few men who’ve spoken openly with me about the impact of military misogyny on relationships with the women and children in their lives. But every man who serves, who is wrestling with the questions of how he ought to treat women, or how he can be a better ally to women in the military, needs to consider these matters, and with a sense of urgency. It is not enough to call forth the knights of the Round Table. We women don’t need saving. We need you—military men—to get your shit together.
Women already know from direct, felt experience the harm caused by segregated service and the rape culture that it fosters, even if the language to describe this experience isn’t encouraged or readily available. My own incredible inferiority complex in the Marines was not my own fault, but rather by careful design. This self-hatred took ages to see through, and discard, and the language that I searched for to describe my own and others’ experience not only lay dormant, it lacked the privilege of a platform that the heroic male experience was often granted.
What does it mean for a man to volunteer to join this same culture that causes so much deliberate harm to women? I have never understood why men have let themselves off the hook for this. Can the rite of passage in becoming a Marine or soldier be distinct from the rite of passage of degrading women? Can a man honestly say he is untouched by his total training, and that degrading women was not part and parcel of his right of passage? That the power of military culture to think of women as without worth has evaded him, while he has absorbed everything else that makes him a Marine? This, I think, is the harder question for men to answer truthfully. What does it really mean to stay silent as you are told by peers from every direction to look down upon women who serve, and to objectify women back home, to be immersed in slut walls, revenge porn, and constant banter about how little women deserve to wear the uniform?
Service men’s conditioning to degrade women is as much of a threat to long-term individual wellness and the health of our communities as post-traumatic stress or traumatic brain injury. Most men do not walk away from the military with PTSD or TBI. But every single military man has been indoctrinated in some amount of misogyny. Why don’t we consider misogyny as much of a threat to the health of our veterans as any other injury from service?
It’s unfathomable that a man who has spent several years being trained to look down upon women can totally respect women. This is not his fault. It is the fault of the institution. It takes great work to undo misogyny, even as a woman. I know this. But most women are intimately familiar with self-hatred. It’s rooted early on in our lives, in our first anorexic Barbie dolls and Photoshopped magazine covers. Do men know how misogyny affects them? It doesn’t seem so. Even those rare men who support women’s full equality in the military would have to doubt women’s place at least a little bit. Segregated training by the most effective trainers in the world does this. I’ve seen the best men clam up and lose their ability to speak on behalf of women’s dignity once indoctrinated in military training and groupthink. The choice to learn to step out and speak up again is theirs.
It’s hard to talk about this, but we need to. Inculcation in violence and misogyny are a deadly combination, and we need to think hard about the impact not only on human beings who serve but also on their families. Few people dare to talk about domestic violence (DV) by our service members. When I spoke about DV to members on the Hill, the rooms literally went silent. It is hard to believe that back then, sexual assault got more attention than domestic violence, when sexual assault barely got much attention to begin with.
It’s easy to say DV happens everywhere. That it’s not worse in the military. The powers that be used to tell us this when we were educating folks about military sexual violence. But the fact is, it is always different in the military.
In my experience, when it comes to matters of sexual or domestic violence, the only people who are often treated worse than service women are spouses themselves. And it’s heartbreaking. Units tend to close ranks, protecting their own at the expense of wives and children. Simply wearing the uniform can protect a man from facing the law.
Which means, of course, that military spouses and children suffer unnecessarily. According to the Pentagon, in 2016 there we
re 13,916 reported cases of child abuse and neglect, and 15,144 reported incidents of domestic violence. We have no idea what the total numbers are, because most cases are unreported, and the DOD does not do annual surveys on domestic violence the way it does on sexual assault. Amazingly, the DOD refuses to share some of the data obtained through Centers for Disease Control research on the military with the public. There’s clearly a lot more to this than the government wants the American public to know.XII
In a March 2018 Senate hearing on intimate partner violence and child abuse in the military, much was said by senators about the unique hardships experienced by deploying soldiers, but little was said about the unique culture of misogyny in the military, or how violence itself isn’t something you turn on and off like a light switch. Elected officials dare not dig deep into the ways human beings harm one another, particularly when those who are harmed are women or children. I get the feeling it’s not just dangerous reelection territory. It seems too personal, and too real.
I had an infantry corporal once who’d never deployed to a war zone. One day he went apeshit. Tried to chop his wife up with a machete. She, thank god, is fine. He’s now in the brig. I often think about him. His is an extreme example, but one that illustrates that violence cannot be contained in neat boxes on the battlefield. And it is naive and irresponsible to think that training folks to kill doesn’t affect the way we function in situations where violence is unacceptable. It has taken me over a decade to undo my Marine training, to lose my violent edge. I still ache because of the harm I was willing to do to other people. And I never even saw combat.
If you want to hear the real scoop on DV in the military, talk to social workers and psychologists who deal with the impact of intimate partner and family violence on a daily basis. Doc has some dark stories. So do her colleagues. It’s time to treat veterans like multidimensional human beings, and not like monolithic heroes. We have a lot of work to do.
Unbecoming Page 31