First, there's the world of militant Islam, against whom for over a decade our most war-friendly leaders have put us on a war footing. For many, Islam itself has become the new boogie man to replace the communism of the Cold War era. One critical factor in this war is how the Islamic world sees the treatment of women.
I first encountered this difference when as a young man I was traveling in Turkey. I was amazed at the young American women travelers who wanted to hook up with me and even wanted to share a room. Unfortunately, I soon realized it was not my prowess they were interested in. They sought protection from the incessant fondling and groping that Turkish men felt entitled to with young American females. These women clearly feared the possibility of rape.
I concluded, perhaps rashly, that Muslim men tend to take what they see as their male, masculine rights seriously and see liberated western women as a flagrant provocation.
"We're living a schizophrenic situation, in which important advances have been made in women reaching positions of influence in our society," Rogeria Peixinho, from the Brazilian Womens Network, told The Times. "At the same time, the situation for many women who are poor remains atrocious."
Kori Cloca, left, and Panaylota Bertzlkis were threatened for charging rape
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As I see it, a similar "schizophrenic situation" exists within the US military. Women are advancing in the military ranks at an unprecedented rate and they recently were legally accepted in combat roles. The top brass have no problem welcoming women into the ranks of the military since in a volunteer military women are essential.
The problem is at the lower levels, on what the military likes to call "the granular level" where individual male and female soldiers engage with each other as comrades and peers. Many red-blooded young male soldiers may not have gotten the memo that women are to be treated as equals. Or they may have concluded anti-rape rhetoric was only for PR and did not apply to them. The sorry track record of commanders dismissing indictments and convictions would seem to reinforce this view.
Our soldiers are now propagandized to see themselves as "warriors." Many male soldiers have experienced combat in Iraq or Afghanistan, many with multiple deployments. By reputation and through the demonization process of war, our warriors learn how tough their Islamic enemy is and that these Muslims warriors tend to separate themselves from their women and often treat their women quite harshly.
This is the world our warrior/soldiers fight in. Their mission may even include the idea, expressed by some very conservative commentators, that we are fighting to liberate oppressed women in Muslim lands. Military life is full of contradictions, and one of them is that on the deeper, hyper-masculine, atavistic level of warfare there's tremendous pressure to dismiss and dominate the softer qualities of women.
It's also interesting to raise the dirty little secret of warfare, prostitution. I confess to having experience with prostitution in Vietnam, where it was epidemic in scale. Young male soldiers amounted to a huge market with dollars burning holes in their pockets, and lovely young Vietnamese women were the product. It's a rarely mentioned fact of the Vietnam War that the Fourth Infantry Division managed a collection of tin-shack bordello-bars just outside the camp gate on the outskirts of Pleiku. Too many American fighting men were getting the clap. So what they now call the Fourth ID got into the whoring business. Other units did the same.
Filmmaker David Goodman is making a documentary on the Military and Prostitution. I was his cameraman during a two-week trip to Baghdad in 2004. It became clear, there, that in today's Muslim war zones things are very different. While prostitution was everywhere in Vietnam, it has been virtually non-existent for US troops in Iraq or Afghanistan.
We interviewed families living as squatters in bombed out buildings. David waited until the end of the interview to ask the family patriarch what they would do if a young girl "sold herself" for money. I watched the interviewees through the viewfinder, and no one skipped even a beat before he said in Arabic: "We would kill her."
What this all suggests is that the sexual life of a US soldier/warrior today on a distant deployment in the Muslim world is more bottled up and repressed than in other times or places. To make things even more explosive, add to the mix how rape has become a weapon of power in war zones like Bosnia and Darfur. Rape and war go hand in hand. And some men feel a need to project their masculine exceptionalism onto the closest woman, as in the famous Clint Eastwood line: He was a legend in his own mind.
So there's a contradiction afoot, what the Brazilian women's rights worker called a "schizophrenic situation." While women may be flying helicopters in combat and women may be three-star generals and secretaries of state, for the thousands of ordinary young women on the granular level of day-to-day military life, it must be confusing who's the greater threat, our much demonized enemies or the sexual predators in the ranks.
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