Gelded Army Update

Van Wijk writes:

On top of everything else, male soldiers are now responsible for preventing female soldiers from getting raped.

LA replies:

I haven’t been able to run the video, but the text on the page only mentions sexual harassment and sexual assault, not rape. Your thinking they meant rape is an understandable mistake, as I believe that sexual assault is a term deliberately inserted into our language to create confusion; most people probably inchoately think it’s a technocratic synonym for the more intense and morally meaningful term rape, in the same way that sexually transmitted disease is a technocratic replacement for the more colorful and morally meaningful term venereal disease (which has been banished from our language).

In any case, when you said raped, I thought you meant protecting female soldiers from getting raped by enemy, but looking at the page I realize it’s about preventing sexual harassment and sexual assault by other soldiers. So now, because of the sexual integration of the military, the qualities of honor, courage, loyalty, have to be directed against one’s fellow (male) soldiers, to prevent any act of sexual harassment of one’s fellow (female) soldiers. And who knows how sexual harassment is defined nowadays?

As for sexual assault, it is such an elastic term it is impossible to know precisely what is meant by it. However, since sexual assault generally means nonconsensual sexual contact short of rape, and since the text is silent about rape, which would certainly not be the case if there were rapes going on, we can reasonably assume that the kinds of sexual assault they’re talking about fall well short of rape, in the area of unwanted touching and things of that nature. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if a friendly male hand on a female shoulder, not proceeded by the statement (made out in triplicate and filed with the JAG in charge of intra-military male-female relations), “Do I have your consent to place my hand in a friendly, encouraging, non-sexual way on your shoulder?”, is the sort of thing the today’s Army means by sexual assault.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 05, 2008 03:58 PM | Send