Steubenville. The Naval Academy. Vanderbilt University. The stories of young men sexually assaulting young women seem never to stop, despite all the education we’ve had and all the progress we’ve supposedly made. There are times when I find myself darkly wondering if there’s some ineradicable predatory streak in the male subset of our species.
Wrong, Chris Kilmartin told me. It’s not DNA we’re up against; it’s movies, manners and a set of mores, magnified in the worlds of the military and sports, that assign different roles and different worth to men and women. Fix that culture and we can keep women a whole lot safer.
I contacted Kilmartin, a psychology professor and the author of the textbook The Masculine Self, after learning that the military is repeatedly reaching out to him. Right now he’s in Colorado, at the Air Force Academy, which imported him for a year to teach in the behavioural sciences department and advise the school on preventing sexual violence.
The gentleman is talking through his, er ….hat.
[blockquote] The integration of women into combat duties will help, bolstering women’s standing and altering a climate of inequality, Kilmartin said.[/blockquote]
He completely neglects
[blockquote] The stories of young men sexually assaulting young [men][/blockquote]
emanating from the formerly DADT now “you can tell if you want, we don’t care anymore” battle zone.
Not a few of us who were in the military during the transitional period between the old UCMJ and DADT, continuing throughl today, could see this train wreck coming, and said so (at least privately).
Creedal Episcopalian’s comments are, I think, very much ad rem. This trend, if it continues, is going to revolutionize the U.S. military, and do so with likely disastrous results for the country.
Pax et bonum,
Keith Töpfer
Martial Artist — are you saying you warned against the male soldiers’ collective lack of morals?
stevejax,
Not exactly warned, in the sense of attempting to communicate an alarm or prediction to anyone involved in making the decision. Further, I retired from the US Navy in 1991 as a Lieutenant Commander, in a non-combat specialty (Naval Oceanography) with 241 months of active service (day for day). I had spent five of my first six years as an enlisted submariner—the aggregate service hardly qualified me for an assignment advising anyone senior enough to have an input to the proposed changes.
What I am saying is that not a few of us saw as seriously problematic the introduction of the idea that males and females were interchangeable in combat roles, and that it was going to present significant problems in operational combat units. In my mind, this is based only somewhat on questions of morals. It has at least as much, if not more, to do with differences in male and female behavioral characteristics related to the aspects of the roles of motherhood and fatherhood coupled to the sorts of bonds that form between military members in combat roles—land, sea, and probably to some extent air—and also to how the stresses of combat affect emotions and emotional needs. Put simply, I saw the integration of women into warships (surface and submarine), ground combat units and fighter/bomber units as opening up a number of “cans of worms” based on an untested, and in my mind, unfounded theory that men and women with certain mental and physical skills and abilities were interchangeable. That is demonstrably not the case in what I suspect is the vast majority of the young adult population of the U.S. and probably most other industrialized western countries. Based on my experience (at 67 years of age), it frequently doesn’t even work well in much of the civilian workplace.
Pax et bonum,
Keith Töpfer
RE: “The integration of women into combat duties will help, bolstering women’s standing and altering a climate of inequality, Kilmartin said.”
What’s so richly humorous in that assertion is that, in the past, “the integration of women” in the military involved drastically lowered physical standards for the women. And those drastically lowered standards themselves created a “climate of inequality” since it was manifestly obvious that men actually had to pass the *real* test and women the faux test in order to achieve. That’s never a good way to develop a “climate” of “equality.”