Last year, more men than women (13,900 men, 12,100 women) were raped by their fellow soldiers in the military. Percentage-wise, however, a much higher percentage of women were raped than men (there are 1.2 million men vs. 203, 000 women).

Men are having to fight against the tough-guy, hyper-masculine culture of the military to even report or seek treatment for the sexual assaults they have experienced. Not a good situation.

Male rape survivors tackle military assault in tough-guy culture

By Bill Briggs, NBC News contributor

  Former Navy Petty Officer Third Class Brian Lewis talks about a sexual assault "epidemic" within the U.S. military while speaking on Capitol Hill Thursday. Lewis emphasizes that his chain of command "failed" him during his time in the U.S. Navy. 

Amid the legislation and indignation sparked by the military's sexual abuse crisis, male rape survivors are stepping forward to remind officials that men are targeted more often than women inside a tough-guy culture that, they say, routinely deems male victims as “liars and trouble makers.” 

The Pentagon estimates that last year 13,900 of the 1.2 million men on active duty endured sexual assault while 12,100 of the 203,000 women in uniform experienced the same crime — or 38 men per day versus 33 women per day. Yet the Defense Department also acknowledges “male survivors report at much lower rates than female survivors.” 

“As a culture, we’ve somewhat moved past the idea that a female wanted this trauma to occur, but we haven’t moved past that for male survivors,” said Brian Lewis, a rape survivor who served in the Navy. “In a lot of areas of the military, men are still viewed as having wanted it or of being homosexual. That’s not correct at all. It’s a crime of power and control. 

“But also, you’re instantly viewed as a liar and a troublemaker (when a man reports a sex crime), and there’s the notion that you have abandoned your shipmates, that you took a crap all over your shipmates, that you misconstrued their horseplay,” he added. 

Lewis, who was raped by a male superior officer aboard a Navy ship in 2000, spoke Thursday at a press conference introducing a bill that seeks to strip serious sex assaults from the military’s chain of command. At that event, he said: “Too often male survivors are ignored and marginalized.” 

“The biggest reasons men don’t come forward (with sex assault reports) are the fear of retaliation (from fellow troops), the fear of being viewed in a weaker light, and the fact there are very few, if any, services for male survivors,” Lewis told NBC News. 

Men in the spotlight 

All sexual assault response coordinators within the military are instructed to provide “gender-responsive, culturally competent and recovery-oriented” resources, said Cynthia O. Smith, a Pentagon spokeswoman.  

“Based on that guidance, each of the services customizes its training and implementation specific to their service,” Smith said. DOD offers a 24/7 “safe helpline” providing anonymous victim support, and its staffers “have been trained to assist male victims.” 

Still, the Defense Department acknowledges it must do more to help male victims. 

“A focus of our prevention efforts over the next several months is specifically geared towards male survivors and will include (learning) why male survivors report at much lower rates than female survivors, and determining the unique support and assistance male survivors need,” Smith said. 

The Pentagon “has reached out to organizations supporting male survivors for assistance and information to help inform our way ahead,” she added. 

“I applaud that stand on behalf of male survivors,” Lewis said. “However, I would be interested in hearing what organizations they are partnering with considering there are none especially geared for male survivors of military sexual trauma.” 

  Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., is joined by a group of colleagues on Capitol Hill while introducing sexual assault legislation that would reform the military justice system. 

'Critical' part of process 

At Protect Our Defenders, a leading advocacy group for male and female service members who've survived sexual assaults, president Nancy Parrish said she would welcome the chance to offer guidance to the Pentagon as it develops better programs to support male sex assault victims. 

“As of yet, we have not been asked to participate in such an endeavor,” Parrish said. “For the success of the military efforts to end the ongoing epidemic of male and female military sexual assaults, it is critical that survivors are part of the process." 

An annual DOD report on sexual abuse, released May 7, described separate attacks on two male soldiers who were shoved down by fellow troops then sodomized with a plastic bottle or broom handle. 

Next month, a documentary called “Justice Denied” — which explores sexual assaults against men in the military — premiers at the Albuquerque Film and Media Experience. 

Assaults on men have been “carefully hidden from the public and covered up,” not only by the victims themselves but also by superiors within the chain of command, contends the film’s producer and co-director Geri Lynn Weinstein-Matthews. “It’s time for men to have their voices heard. It’s time for them to stand up against these vicious attacks and against the deception of some of their commanding officers.” 

  U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel addresses the growing concern over the number of sexual assaults occurring within the U.S. military. 

Related:

• Senators seek to reform military's 'unacceptable' sex abuse policies
• Gillibrand leads charge for protocol changes in sexual assault cases
• US military faces historic tipping point on rape epidemic
• Army sergeant assigned to sex-abuse prevention investigated for pimping, sexual assault 
• Air Force's sex-abuse prevention honcho charged with sexual battery

Omnivore - Gendering Everything

From Bookforum's Omnivore blog, a great collection of links on gender studies, masculinity, tough guys, and how being attractive makes men funnier (and here I thought being funny might be make me more attractive).


Gendering everything

MAR 28 2013 

9:00AM

• Katharine K. Baker (IIT): Sex and Equality. 
• Emma Poulton (Durham): “If You Had Balls, You'd Be One of Us!” Doing Gendered Research: Methodological Reflections on Being a Female Academic Researcher in the Hyper-Masculine Subculture of “Football Hooliganism”. 
• Christian Williams on the trouble with tough guys. 
• Erika Bachiochi on why U.N. feminists should want to partner with the Holy See. 
• It’s well-established being funny makes men more attractive — now a new paper reports that being attractive makes men funnier. 
• Sympathy for the stay-at-home mom: Judith Shulevitz on an argument about work, life, and the modern calendar. 
• The final feminist frontier: Why men still don't do their share of the dirty work. 
• The retro wife: Lisa Miller on feminists who say they’re having it all — by choosing to stay home. 
• Donald N.S. Unger on how men can't have it all either. 
• Yes, we’re still gendering everything.

Christian Williams - The Trouble with Tough Guys

This brief article by Christian Williams serves as an introduction to the special section in the March/April UTNE Reader issue on issues facing boys and men in our culture. Here are the three articles in the collection.

• The Trouble with Men and Counseling
• Male Role Models and Recent School Shootings
• What Makes a Man?

I already posted the third article above, which offers the perspective of a transman on what makes a man. All of the articles are good and recommended.

The Trouble with Tough Guys

2/26/2013
by Christian Williams

When I was growing up the boys in my neighborhood relished every opportunity to prove how “manly” we were. We shot fireworks at one another for fun, raced (and crashed) our bikes with reckless abandon, and played football in rocky lots. It’s almost as if we invited injury and looked forward to the chance to show off to the girls in the neighborhood that we could take the pain. We knew “real men” didn’t cry, no matter how much it hurt. Man, were we stupid.

Fortunately, I outgrew that adolescent bloodlust, but I’m still not immune to the trappings of traditional manliness. Hubris is my adulthood Achilles’ heel; I don’t normally read instructions and often find it more appealing to get lost than ask for directions. Somewhere along the line, stubbornness became baked into my psyche. How did that happen?

Take a look at the male icons of Western culture and you’ll see a pattern: tough and rugged like Clint Eastwood, charming and fearless like James Bond, overconfident and womanizing like Don Draper. Consciously or not, boys in this culture identify these traits as “manly,” and the result is a continuous cycle of boys becoming men who strive to show no weakness, whether it be physical, mental, or emotional. You might assume that tendency is just a natural male characteristic, but the truth is men aren’t wired that way—it’s something we learn.

Take mental health among men, for instance. For a man who’s been taught by his father and the culture he lives in that burying your feelings is the manly thing to do, stress becomes something you ignore and depression something you just learn to live with. It goes without saying that the end result of this emotional neglect isn’t usually a good one for the man or the people around him. Everyone has a breaking point, and some are more violent than others. To make matters worse, if a man does summon the courage to ask for help, our current mental health system is woefully underfunded and understaffed to provide adequate treatment.

The good news, though, is that more people are starting to recognize and rectify these damaging and potentially dangerous myths about masculinity. The call for better male role models signals the emergence of a mentor/mentee approach that’s sorely needed in our society today. Equally valuable are the lessons about masculinity we can learn from those experiencing it from a transgender perspective. Altogether, there’s hope that we’re breaking down yet another wall of ignorance.

Speaking of curing ignorance, you may have noticed something different on the top of the website; specifically, the tagline right beneath the Utne Reader logo.

The purpose of the tagline as we see it is to pique a reader’s interest into what we’re really about. While the previous tagline “The Best of the Alternative Press” did a great job identifying where the articles within came from, it didn’t do much to explain why we think they’re important enough for you to read. In this age of climate change, income inequality, and corporate influence on every facet of our lives, we think it’s necessary to emphasize the active role all of us need to play if we hope to leave this world better than we found it.

We recognize our duty to that end is to provide readers with the most interesting, surprising, cutting-edge, and thought-provoking information we can find on the issues that matter to you most (and some you didn’t even know about yet). You may not always agree with what you read, but we’re confident we’ll at least get you thinking and formulating your own opinions. It’s our mission to cure ignorance, and we figured we may as well say it loud and proud. We hope you like it, but more importantly, we hope you’ll join us.

~ Image courtesy , licensed under Creative Commons

Andrew Cotto - America Has a Macho Problem

From Huffington Post, Andrew Cotto argues that we are letting a minority of faux tough-guy wanna-be bad-asses dictate our national dialogue on important issues such as guns, the environment, taxes, health care, censorship, immigration, entitlements, military spending, gay rights, abortion, terrorism, and religion.

Here is the meat of the argument:

Most of us are taught from an early age that tough is good. Tough is character. Tough is necessary. Being tough makes you a man. But the truth is that most of us in America never get within an arm's length of real tough. Most of us are just too privileged to be exposed to the conditions which require mettle to survive. Good for us. And some of us appreciate this, but for many young men indoctrinated in the gospel of tough, not being tough leaves them feeling insecure as grown men. This insecurity often manifests in big talk from men with little guts. And many of these men covet power. These are the ones who publicly grandstand but privately cower. 

I think he is correct here in his assessment, but I also think there needs to be a real understanding of this issue, not mere labeling or name-calling, as this article could be easily dismissed for that reason. We need to understand the genesis of that insecurity, and then offer a corrective, not simply a dismissal.

America Has a Macho Problem

Andrew Cotto, Author

America has a macho problem. Too much of our culture is informed by the idea of manhood being defined by toughness. We love the idea of the bad ass as the good guy, doling out physical justice to those who have it coming. The archetypal American "hero" is often promoted through our narratives, particularly our film heroes. Just look at the trailer for the new Tom Cruise film, where the eponymous character of Jack Reacher, from the Lee Child novels, is brought to life. The trailer features a scene where Cruise as Trapper is in the middle of the street surrounded by a posse of apparent bad guys with bad intentions. Cool and collected, Trapper mocks and dismantles his foes with devastating force and ease. Talk about fiction. I imagine this scene is in the very beginning of the film, not part of the primary plot but merely a vehicle for characterization, though it dominates the trailer for a reason: Many men eat this shit up. Too many of them think Clint Eastwood is actually Dirty Harry (based on his attempt to bully a chair that supposedly symbolized our sitting president, Eastwood might actually think he's Dirty Harry, too).

This conflation of tough reality versus tough fantasy is dangerous. Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president and CEO of the National Rifle Association, openly advocates a solution to our fire arms problem with "good guys with guns" shooting the "bad guys with guns." Such a reductive and ignorant purview should be the domain of children in the "Bang! Bang! You're dead" world of youthful imagination. It should not be part of the rhetoric from the nation's most powerful lobby. LaPierre is not alone. Too many of our public figures -- those who seriously influence our culture, conversations, and laws -- have a relationship with violence that is rooted in reductive fantasy. They are novelists, filmmakers, game developers and musicians. They are also radio personalities, politicians, activists and lobbyists. This is one of the rare moments where the traditionally liberal world of entertainment conspires (unwittingly, I'm certain) with factions of the super conservative camps.

It's easy to sell this macho schlock to men because most of us are susceptible when it comes to the idea of toughness. Most of us are taught from an early age that tough is good. Tough is character. Tough is necessary. Being tough makes you a man. But the truth is that most of us in America never get within an arm's length of real tough. Most of us are just too privileged to be exposed to the conditions which require mettle to survive. Good for us. And some of us appreciate this, but for many young men indoctrinated in the gospel of tough, not being tough leaves them feeling insecure as grown men. This insecurity often manifests in big talk from men with little guts. And many of these men covet power. These are the ones who publicly grandstand but privately cower. Their inner impotence turns into outward anger. So some scared men howl belligerence into microphones; and some seek office; and some create fantasy narratives that glamorize violence; and some are lobbyists for gun makers who refuse to budge from their obstinacy even when the "Bang! Bang! You're dead" world of our children is no longer imaginary.

This macho problem is really about bullying. America is being bullied by a loud minority of cowardly men (and some women who share their faux-tough stances). Look how those who lack courage dominate (or attempt to dominate) the conversation on guns, the environment, taxes, health care, censorship, immigration, entitlements, military spending, gay rights, abortion, terrorism, and religion. Look how they poison our progress with absurd stances and a refusal to consider compromise.

The rest of us need to stand up for the greater good. We all have it in us, men and women. With our voices and our votes and our power as consumers, we can steer this country towards a more perfect/less preposterous union where faux-toughness stands down to logic.


~ Follow Andrew Cotto on Twitter: www.twitter.com/andrewcotto