The idea of using women in combat positions in the US military has little support among those who would be affected by it, but it seems to be moving inexorably to its realization. The forces behind it are political correctness and extreme feminism. They derive their power not from reason, but from emotions. This paper addresses the nature of these emotions. It begins by exploring some of the unconscious dynamics of the feminist response to the Tailhook scandal of 1991, then develops a psychoanalytic model that would account for them. According to this view, political correctness and extreme feminism arise from an identification with a primitive image of an omnipotent, sexually self-sufficient mother, which renders men helpless, infantile and emasculated. Some of the implications of having these dynamics operating within the military are discussed. The prognosis for the military, if this analysis is correct, is exceedingly grim.

Introduction

The notion of placing women in combat roles[1] has the appearance of an idea whose time has come, but it is difficult to understand why. Assessed in terms of our usual ideas of the bases of political power, it should not have much strength behind it. A presidential commission recommended against it (1993)[2]. Military men don’t want it[3]. More interesting, the women in the military who would be most intimately involved don’t want it either, at least for themselves[4] [5]. The countries that have tried it abandoned it shortly thereafter[6]. The consequences of making a mistake in adopting it are incalculable. Yet it keeps gaining ground like an inexorable and unstoppable force. Thus, in a study of military personnel, sociologist Laura Miller (1997) reported:

When I asked men who opposed women in combat roles what they thought would happen in the future, they all asserted that integration was inevitable. They concluded that women eventually would “have their way” despite any reasonable objections. (p. 48)

The question, then, is why? What power lies behind this apparently inexorable force? And if this power is of a different sort than we customarily encounter in political decision making, what are the consequences one may expect from its emergence? These are the questions toward which this paper is directed.

Miller’s research provides a number of different approaches to answering the question. To begin with, her female research subjects have no doubt about who is pushing the issue. They think it is the feminists, a group they see as different from themselves, especially with regard to class and race, and as illegitimately claiming the right to speak for them:

Army women in my survey … hardly agree on the issue of women in combat. Enlisted women and women of color particularly are likely to oppose assigning women to combat military occupational specialties (MOSs). Many express resentment toward officers and civilian activists who are attempting to open combat roles to women. They argue that the activists do not realize the hardships associated with those roles on the enlisted level. Some, like one white NCO [ i.e. non commissioned officer] with Desert Storm experience, were obviously frustrated: “Who does that Pat Schroeder think she is? Has she ever talked to me? To her? To any of us? If she came here, I’d sure give her a piece of my mind.” (Miller, 1995: 14)

But while Miller’s subjects may be correct, the question of who is pushing the issue does not entirely resolve it. For the source of the feminists’ power itself is an issue. If Miller’s subjects are representative of the fact that feminists are often detached from the lives of most women (also see Sommers, 1994), and if they therefore would have a hard time mobilizing the power of most women within the conventional political sphere, how is it that they are able to effect such drastic change in the area of military policy? Surely, most of the holders of politically powerful roles within the government are still men. How do the feminists get their way among them? Why do men fall down in front of them?

In a more recent paper (1997), Miller provides another way of approaching the question by offering insight into the tactics of the feminists. Discussing what she calls “gender harassment,” which she defines as “interactional, indirect forms of protest” engaged in by men who “object to women’s increased participation in the military,” she says:

Gender harassment is an attempt to push women back into their more “natural” roles, restore the meritocratic order of the organization, and ensure that all soldiers on the battlefield can do their jobs and assist the wounded in times of battle. Certainly these views are considered sexist by many, and potentially could cause problems for any soldier who expresses them openly in mixed company. (42)

This gives us another piece of the puzzle. The idea of women in combat gets power from the fact that the arguments against it, even when they are based on such obviously relevant considerations as restoring the meritocracy and ensuring that soldiers can do their jobs and assist the wounded, are “sexist” and, therefore, “politically incorrect” and unmentionable.

Yet saying that does not so much answer the question as it shifts it to another level. For where does “political correctness” (PC) get its power? What is there about calling an opinion “sexist” that stops the expression of that opinion in its tracks, and that does so even when that opinion points to consequences that should be considered in making an important decision? The idea that it could have a major impact on policy in a matter that affects life and death, and that it could do so in an institution whose concern for the lives of its members is legendary, seems almost fanciful. But there it is.

My concern in this paper will not be so much with the substantive issue of women in combat, but rather with the way PC, as wielded by certain feminists, affects the determination of whether they will be in combat. In earlier papers (Schwartz, 1993, 1995, 1996, 1997) I have tried to gain an understanding of the primitive, unconscious forces underlying the power of certain forms of feminism and PC. These forces are very much at work in the issue of women in combat. Indeed, I shall argue that, in the end, the real danger of women in combat comes less from their presence there, which may very well never to amount to much, than it does from the damage done to the military through the operation of these primitive forces. My point will be that these forces are directed against male sexuality and masculinity. I will also argue, from a related perspective, that if masculinity is undermined, military organization will be emasculated. If that happens, it will not be able to fulfill its mission, no matter what the sexual composition of those who occupy its ranks happens to be.

The power of feminism, as it operates within the issue of women in combat, is due to the most primitive forces operating in unintegrated form. In the course of this paper, I will elaborate the framework of this analysis. First however, it will be useful to get a feeling for the way feminism has operated in this connection. For this purpose there is no better place to start than with the Tailhook scandal.

Tailhook

The drive to place women in combat roles gained much of its momentum from the scandal over the Tailhook convention of 1991. Tailhook, a convention of naval aviators with Navy support, had been an annual event since 1956. Valued by the Navy because if afforded the opportunity for frank communication among ranks (Vistica, 1995: 234), it was also well known for its raucousness. Following its origination in the northern Mexican town of Rosarita, it moved to San Diego, where it was thrown out of most of the local hotels. Finally, in 1963, it settled in Las Vegas where, according to Vistica (1995)[7], “nobody seemed to mind the men launching couches and other items from hotel windows.” (p.233) The 1991 convention, which followed the US triumph over Iraq, billed itself as the Mother of all Hooks, after Saddam Hussein’s boast. By all accounts, it left nothing to previous conventions in the way of drunkenness, sexual debauchery, or other sorts of wildness.

The difference between the 1991 Tailhook and previous ones was largely due to a charge by a Naval lieutenant named Paula Coughlin that she had been sexually assaulted by a group of Naval aviators, who had arranged themselves in a “gauntlet,” and that her superiors had not responded promptly to her complaint. Out of this emerged a series of charges and investigations that shook the entire institution of the Navy. Taking place in an election year, and following the lurid charges of sexual harassment in Clarence Thomas’ nomination hearings, the scandal gave overwhelming momentum to one side in what had previously been a fairly balanced debate over women in combat. As Vistica (1995) put it:

If there were two issues that every candidate either feared or was talking about, they were sexual harassment and lifting the ban that restricted women from combat. Tailhook had combined those two into one extremely powerful mega-issue. Advocates for lifting the ban claimed that until the Navy – indeed all of the services – gave women the same jobs as men had, the sexual harassment and abuse so prevalent at Tailhook would continue. (p.348)

With regard to Tailhook, it may be stipulated that some men behaved in a disgraceful fashion that was unacceptable under any reasonable standard of behavior and certainly worthy of punishment.[8] This was a fact that was recognized by Naval personnel in their own sobriety, and is represented in a letter whose disclosure was a major starting point in the controversy. Written to all aviation squadron commanders by Captain Frederick “Wigs” Ludwig, a Navy fighter pilot who was president of the Tailhook Association, the letter said, in part:

just a few specifics to show how far across the line of responsible behavior we went … definitely the most serious was “the Gauntlet” on the third floor. I have five separate reports of young ladies, several of whom had nothing to do with Tailhook, who were verbally abused, had drinks thrown on them, were physically abused, and were sexually molested. Most distressing was the fact that an underage young lady was severely intoxicated and had her clothing removed by members of the Gauntlet.

Tailhook cannot and will not condone the blatant and total disregard of individual rights and public/private property!… We in Naval Aviation and the Tailhook Association are bigger than this. (Cited by Vistica, 1995:333-4)

But seen in this way, the misconduct at Tailhook may simply be seen as a breakdown of discipline, and while such breakdowns are regrettable, ordinarily they are understood to be within the purview of military organizations’ disciplinary apparatus and dealt with there. The enforcement of discipline, after all, is the core process in a military organization. Enforcing discipline would have been an affirmation of military culture. But the events at Tailhook gained their significance because they were not seen as a disciplinary problem within the culture; rather they were seen as a problem of the culture itself.

This consideration also applies to the scandalous behavior on the part of the Naval command, who, as Vistica shows, attempted to deflect criticism from themselves by blaming the breakdown of discipline on younger officers, rather than acknowledging their own, very real, contributions. Here again, if they had accepted real responsibility for real infractions, this would not have been in violation of naval culture, but in support of it.

Former Naval Secretary James Webb (1966) drew this distinction very clearly in a speech at his alma mater, the U.S. Naval Academy. In that speech, Webb lauded the traditional virtues of the Navy and the role of the Academy in preparing officers to embody them:

And so I resolved to prepare myself so that when the time came I could honor this heritage by showing the same physical and moral courage, the identical dedication to my country and to the people whose lives were being entrusted to me. I wanted more than anything to have the courage to do my duty, to take care of my people, to speak the truth no matter how it hurt, and indeed no matter what the consequences. And I was not alone. In the messhall, on the parade field, walking to class, I could look around me and see thousands who felt the same way I did.

But he contrasted the maintenance of the Navy’s traditional ideals with the corruption and demoralization that has developed in recent times, largely due, in his view, to the aftermath of Tailhook, and held the Navy’s highest officials accountable:

The aftermath of Tailhook was never about inappropriate conduct so much as it was about the lack of wisdom among the Navy’s senior leadership…. Those who were to blame for outrageous conduct should have been disciplined, and those who were not to blame should have been vigorously defended, along with the culture and the mores of the naval service.

The important point here is that this speech differentiated sharply between the culture of the Navy and its leadership. In fact, it excoriated the leadership precisely for its failure to uphold the culture of the Navy. Yet it received a standing ovation at the U.S. Naval Academy.

Tailhook as a “cultural problem”

Largely through the direct involvement of assistant secretary of the Navy Barbara Pope, the problem at Tailhook came to be seen as the Naval culture itself (Vistica, 1995). In that context, attitudes toward women in combat were seen as part of the problem, and placing women in combat roles was seen as part of the solution[9][9].

The problems of Tailhook were seen as a cultural problem. This means that they were not a problem within the culture, but rather, were a problem as seen from a vantage point outside the culture. But what was the point from which the culture of the Navy was seen as problematic?

I think it would be using the term too broadly to say that this vantage point must be another culture. The idea of a culture brings with it connotations that are far wider than a specific interpretation of Tailhook would support. Looking for a term that is narrower, it seems to me that the idea of a “perspective” is about right. It implies a partial view of a circumstance, a view that is partial because it is from a certain location. The implication is that the characteristics of the location must be understood if what the perspective reveals, and what it leaves out, are to be understood.

Having said that, it must also be said that there are only locations. We always see from a point of view, and cannot do otherwise. Some locations may afford us a broader perspective than others, but breadth is not necessarily the same thing as truth, and at any rate what appears to be breadth from one perspective may not seem to be breadth from another. And if, in the end, certain ideas and ways of seeing things prove more adequate than others, that determination is one that can only be made at the end. Up until that time it is best to do the best one can, and to hold one’s views with some humility.

But if one should hold one’s views with humility, that does not mean that one should not hold them, or that one should not express them boldly and forthrightly. Boldness and forthrightness do not necessarily mean that one is saying “finally, this is the way things are.” It may mean, “this is the way things look to me and I want to express myself as clearly and strongly as I can.” That is want I intend to do here.

My purpose will be to try to understand the power of feminism. I will try to understand it by looking at the feminists’ perspective, and by trying to understand what it tell us about where feminists are, about what is the location from which the perspective of the feminists makes sense. In doing this I am doing no more or less than the feminists have done in trying to understand Tailhook as a “cultural problem.”

Trying to get at the feminist perspective, I need to be able to register the difference between those of their observations that are unproblematic and those that are odd, and therefore need to be explained. In order to do this, I have to take my own perspective as the measure of oddness. I will do this boldly and forthrightly, because I think that is the obligation of the thinker and writer. The reader may be assured, however, that my ultimate confidence is not in the specifics of my case, but in the capacity of thought, in the end, to take what it needs and leave the rest. Perhaps that will make do for humility.

My purpose, then, will be to try to understand the force of the idea of women in combat by trying to understand feminism, the agent that is pushing the idea. For this purpose, it will be useful to reexamine the question of Tailhook, trying to ferret out the dynamics of feminism by understanding its perspective on the Tailhook incidents.

Thus, in order to see what was involved in the idea that the events at Tailhook represented a “cultural problem,” what we need to look at are these questions: First, over and above the acts of sexual molestation engaged in by the participants, what were seen as the sins of Tailhook for which the Navy needed to undergo a cultural change? Second, what does the response to the Tailhook events tell us about the feminist vantage point from which the traditional military culture is being criticized, a vantage point that is evidently intended as a replacement for that military culture, and whose power is represented by the apparently inexorable force of the idea of women in combat.

The crime of male sexuality

Trying to understand the feminist response to the events of Tailhook, what stands out to me above all else is that while attention focused on the relatively rare instances in which women were handled against their will, by all accounts most of the sexual activity that took place at Tailhook was consensual. This was true even for the famous Gauntlet. Thus, Vistica reports:

for every woman who resisted, there were many more who couldn’t wait to walk down the Gauntlet and be manhandled. (p. 335)

The consensual nature of some of the activities was apparent in their very nature. For example, one of the events was “leg shaving,” in which there was not even a hint of coercion or force:

According to the witnesses and the officers involved, the leg shaving was a rather elaborate ritual that included the use of hot towels and baby oil, as well as the [sic] massaging the woman’s legs and feet. The entire process took between 30 and 45 minutes per shave. (Vander Schaaf, 1993: VII: 1)

and which ran to great general approval:

the Barber of Seville, Lieutenant Rolando “Ghandi” Diaz, had set up his leg and pubic hair shaving chair in room 303. Outside, a fifteen foot-long banner proclaiming “Free Leg Shaves” hung on the pool patio of the suite, and women had lined up to have Diaz “make them see God.” (p. 327)

What is interesting from the standpoint of analysis, though, is the way the acts in which women participated enthusiastically were responded to with the same outrage as the acts of patent abuse, as if the two were equivalent to one another. Thus, Leg Shaving gets a chapter in the Inspector General’s report on the horrors of Tailhook (Vander Schaaf, 1993), as do Streaking. Mooning, and Belly/Navel Shots. From this it appears that the apparent crime at Tailhook was not so much sexual abuse, but sexuality.

Now, the obvious response is that such public displays of sexual behavior by its officials tend to bring discredit upon the institution and, in that respect, represent “conduct unbecoming an officer.[10]” Certainly such behavior constitutes “indecent exposure.” These are, of course, offenses in their own right. In fact, the rationale for the Department of Defense Inspector General’s investigation, was that earlier investigations “should have been expanded beyond the assaults to encompass other violations of law and regulation as they became apparent.” (Vander Schaaf, 1992: 1)

But even putting aside the question of whether sexual assault and leg shaving should be regarded with equal opprobrium, this point brings into focus another aspect of the matter, which is close to its heart. It is that while sexuality was seen as being criminal when it was engaged in by men, the women who engaged in it were seen as blameless. Thus, Vistica (1995) observes:

It was an easy story for the press to trumpet: drunken military men sexually assaulting innocent female victims. The networks, CNN, and the major newspaper dailies easily latched on to that theme and avoided the more complex issues of women as aggressors and men as victims. There were several cases of women grabbing men’s crotches in a “package check” or other male officers having their pants pulled down by women. (p. 347)

And

In one suite, a female Navy lawyer, who is now a naval judge, was serving drinks in a suite while topless. (p. 234)

Perhaps the most ironic example of this was the fact that Paula Coughlin, whose complaint brought the whole investigation into being had her own legs publicly shaved, (Donnelly, 1994).

The crime of Tailhook, it thus appears, was male sexuality itself. But if that is the case, it puts an entirely different slant on the matter. For if what was exceptionable about Tailhook was sexual behavior that passed a certain point on a line between permissible and impermissible, one could imagine stamping it out, as I have said, by a simple tightening of discipline. But if the crime was male sexuality itself, that would mean that the problem arose not from behavior that passed a point on a line, but from the line itself. And that, arguably, might go to fundamental considerations of motivation and meaning that would, indeed, put the whole “culture” of the military into question, with potential consequences of the utmost seriousness.[11]

That the seriousness of these consequences should not be underestimated is revealed by what it seems to me is the second most striking feature of the Tailhook scandal, which was the disproportionality of the response to the events that caused it, and the extraordinary degree to which the lens of sexual abuse was used to examine the entire range of military affairs.

Disproportionality in the Response to Tailhook

As I have said, there is no denying that some of the activities at Tailhook were disgraceful, but it should also be said that the very worst of them were not felonious. No one was hurt, let alone raped, yet the level of outrage in the response was extremely high-pitched. There is no way that, without a failure of proportion, these incidents by themselves could have resulted in what has been called “The Navy’s worst disaster since Pearl Harbor.” (Vistica, 1995: 355)

The lack of proportion is shown in the very prominence of the Tailhook scandal itself, and certainly in its consequences. As James Webb put it, in his 1996 speech:

Tailhook should have been a three or maybe a five-day story…Instead, we are now at four years and counting, and its casualty list reads like a who’s who of naval aviation.

Trying to understand this lack of proportion, what is especially interesting from my perspective was that much of the opprobrium, and the official punishment, was directed against individuals whose actions were quite tame. Thus, by all accounts, only a relatively few men were accused of assault, but the careers of all of the men at Tailhook were put in jeopardy simply on the basis of their presence there.

Perhaps the most egregious case here was that of Commander Robert E. Stumpf, an F-18 pilot who was a former commanding officer of the Navy’s prestigious Blue Angels. He was at Tailhook to receive an award, on behalf of the squadron he commended, as “best in the Navy” during the Gulf War. Yet his promotion to Captain was blocked because it was rumored, though never proved, and despite his denial, that he was in a room at the same time a stripper was performing. As a direct consequence of his treatment, left the Navy (Vistica, 1995).

Perhaps most central to the disproportionality in the response to Tailhook was the loss of recognition that non-sexual matters should have a bearing upon the formulation of naval policy. The entire institution of the Navy was seen through the prism of a few acts of sexual abuse, and a readiness to subordinate every aspect of the Navy’s activity in the attempt to eliminate sexual abuse was demonstrated. The most obvious instance of this was the rampant disregard for the fact that Naval aviators, among the most rigorously selected and highly trained combatants in the history of the world, were allowed to have their careers jeopardized, en masse, with no apparent regard for the consequences it would have for the Navy’s capacity to carry out its mission[12] [13].

Vistica (1995) relates an incident concerning Barbara Pope, who was at the time dissatisfied with the results of the Navy’s investigation, that illustrates this disregard:

Pope wanted the investigators to go back and interview the several dozen commanding officers whose squadrons had taken part in organizing the hospitality suites. They were commanders and captains and, in the case of one suite, a rear admiral. Something had to be done to make them cooperate, she said, and she threw out ideas like grounding them or docking their flight pay. Hold a board of inquiry or a blue ribbon panel. If necessary, use your secretarial right, she said to [Navy Secretary] Garrett, to remove them from their jobs. “I’m not saying you fire them, I’m saying you remove them for lack of confidence. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have confidence in these people’s leadership abilities.” (p. 345)

A particularly striking example of this sort of lack of proportionality is present in the case of Lieutenant Rebecca Hansen. Hansen, who had joined the Navy in response to an ad for women who wanted to become pilots, had a history of marginal performance. She also had a history of believing, rightly or wrongly, that she was a victim of sexual harassment. (Frontline, 1996) During the course of her flight training, in which again her performance was marginal, she formally charged her flight instructor, Lieutenant Larry Meyer, with sexual harassment. Meyer was investigated and found guilty of “inappropriate remarks.” He left the Navy a year later, but, before he did, he made threats that he would see to it that his friends would cause her to wash out of helicopter training.

In the event, when she went up for helicopter training, her performance was found sub-standard and she was indeed washed out of the program. Believing that it was Meyer’s vendetta, rather than her inadequacy, that had caused her downfall, she enlisted the power of her Senator, David Durenberger, who took an interest in the matter and brought it up with the Navy.

The Navy assured Durenberger that Hansen was, indeed, incompetent as a pilot but he was not convinced and wanted to see the actual investigative report. The Navy, however, would give it only to the Armed Services Committee, who maintained that the report contained confidential information and would not give it to Durenberger. The Navy did, however, offer to have the matter reviewed by Admiral Stanley Arthur (Vistica, 1995, p.390).

Arthur, Vice Chief of Naval Operations, veteran of 500 combat missions in Vietnam, winner of eleven Distinguished Flying Crosses, commanding officer of U.S. air forces in the Gulf War, and soon to be nominated by President Clinton to be CINCPAC, commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific, was widely regarded in the armed forces as a fair and honest man. He called in Hansen, then an Ensign, to hear her side of the story. Later interviewed for Public Broadcasting System’s Frontline (1996), she made it clear that she was not impressed by him:

REBECCA HANSEN: He was likable, in a …in a … I guess, a meeting sort of way. Was he wanting to get down to facts and business? No. He had his mind made up. He was patronizing to me.

In any case, Admiral Arthur, when he had investigated, found that he could not recommend her. This again is from Frontline, here narrated by Peter Boyer:

PETER J. BOYER: Admiral Arthur looked at these documents… her failing grades, her marginal performance evaluations. He says what he saw frightened him.

Adm. STANLEY ARTHUR: No, she was not going to be a Navy pilot and I knew this was an accident waiting to happen, that at some point in time there would be a failure and the failure could well be tragic.Again, Ensign Hansen was not impressed:

REBECCA HANSEN: When you have someone of the… that has the rank and the respect of Admiral Stanley Arthur declare that you're an unsafe pilot, it doesn't matter that he doesn't have anything to back it up with. Just the fact that he has 11 Distinguished Flying Crosses… that's all anybody needs to… he's a war hero and he's a known quantity and I'm… nobody knows. I'm just some… some junior officer and on top of that… not just some junior officer. I'm a woman. I'm a woman who filed sexual harassment charges. I must be a bad pilot. Why else would I do such a thing?

Of course, Arthur did feel that he something to “back it up with”:

Adm. STANLEY ARTHUR: If you had to explain it, you could take 10 years to try to explain it, but you get this feel. You've had the feeling before. I've watched people die when I had that feeling, saying, "Maybe this individual shouldn't have been here. Why were they here? This is an accident waiting to happen." And then the next thing you know, it's an accident that happened and you say, "Should I… am I responsible because I didn't say anything?" You know. And I know today that that was the right call, in my mind.

But these sort of considerations did not register with Senator Durenberger, who put a hold on Arthur’s nomination. This began a process that culminated in Arthur’s being called in by Chief of Naval Operations Jeremy Boorda, who made it clear that Arthur would not have his backing in a sexual harassment scandal, leading to Arthur’s retirement. Here, returning to our subject of disproportion, was Hansen’s response:

REBECCA HANSEN: I had no agenda to take him down, but if he can't deal with the facts, then maybe it is time for him to move on and maybe we're better off not having him in charge of a very heated area in North Korea if he is not able to deal with things in a balanced way.

Another form of disproportion consisted in a failure to distinguish between behavior and attitudes. The fact is that many of the “crimes” at Tailhook did not involve behavior, as such, but rather what the behavior was thought to indicate about the attitudes of those who engaged in the behavior. Thus, for example, wearing T-shirts with slogans, making jokes or even standing for their making[14][14], even asking questions at a public meeting, were greeted with the same horror as overt sexual abuse. The crimes, that is to say, were not behavioral crimes, but attitudinal crimes. It was a belief in the widespread character of these criminal attitudes that constituted the belief that the problem revealed by Tailhook was a “cultural” problem.

So what were these criminal attitudes? To the extent that these attitudes were limited to the belief that sexual abuse was justified, one could grant credence to the feminists’ belief that there was a cultural problem in the Navy. But, as we have seen, Naval authorities understood perfectly well that disgraceful actions had taken place. James Webb, for example, in the speech referred to above, observed that “Those who were to blame for outrageous conduct should have been disciplined…”, yet his speech was given a standing ovation.

The fact that there was something deeper going on is exemplified, for example, by a speech made by Dan Howard, a former spokesman for the National Security Council who had been appointed acting Secretary of the Navy. This is from Vistica’s (1995) account:

On July 1, four days after he took over the helm of the Navy, Howard sat some three hundred senior officers down in the Pentagon’s auditorium and held what he called a “Come to Jesus” truth meeting. “I think it’s important to underline the fact that what happened at Tailhook was not just a problem with the integration of men and women in our ranks,” he told the admirals and generals, who felt as if they were being lectured. “It was just as much a problem with the toleration of stone age attitudes about warriors returning from the sea, about Navy and Marine Corps people who think the rules of civility and common decency can be suspended at will, and most of all about alcohol as an excuse for disgraceful behavior.” (p. 356)

Now, as has been said, to the extent that Howard had confined his remarks to the suspension of discipline and the abuse of alcohol, there would not have been anything exceptionable in his remarks on this occasion. But “toleration of stone age attitudes about warriors returning from the sea”? How does that fit in?

A memorandum written by Garrett (Vander Schaaf, 1992) before he resigned may help us focus on the shift in attitudes that the Navy had in mind. Addressed to the Chief of Naval Operations and the Commandant of the Marine Corps, entitled “Behavior and attitudes towards women,” is says, in part:

We cannot – and will not – tolerate the demeaning and insensitive behavior and attitudes of the past. Our goal in the Department of the Navy must be to cultivate through education and environment where actions demeaning to women are as a matter of course considered unacceptable – and, even more, where behavior and attitudes reflect respect for women and the valuable contribution they make as an integral part of the Navy/Marine Corps team. How do we get there?

Referrals for Appropriate Action

First, all individuals within the Department of the Navy must understand that we indeed take very seriously our “zero-tolerance” policy; appropriate action will be taken on any incident of sexual harassment by anyone in the Department of the Navy…

Garrett’s message seems to be clear enough. The problem, in his view, arises from attitudes and behavior which “demean women” and reflect a lack of respect for them and their contributions. It also seems that he associates these demeaning and disrespectful attitudes and behaviors with sexual harassment.

The problem is, of course, that while the severe sanctions for sexual harassment are associated with these attitudes and behaviors, the terms “demeaning’ and “disrespectful” are left undefined. This leaves the way open for them to be defined in practice by political forces. If these forces were moved by the dynamics of the mature personality, there would be no problem. But if they reflected irrational and primitive forces, the consequences would be horrible. Considerable evidence suggests that they have, in many cases, reflected such irrational forces. Here again, we look for the strange. It is not hard to find.

Evidence is readily available to show that the attitudes that have been found demeaning and disrespectful, together with their various cognates such as “sexist,” and “antiwoman,” have run across a broad range and included affirmations of the traditional male role, positive valuations of male sexuality, the belief that men should protect women, and, along with that, the belief that women did not belong in combat roles. These have been lumped together, and conflated with acts of sexual harassment and overt physical abuse[15].

The definition, in practice, of demeaning attitudes and sexual harassment
A good example of the strangeness in the way sexual harassment has been defined is given in a study on sexual harassment at the military academies, conducted by the General Accounting Office, and published at about the same time as the Inspector General’s report on Tailhook. The study, as discussed in an editorial in the Washington Times (1992) , revealed “significant” sexual harassment at the academies. But looking at the categories of “sexual harassment,” what we find, in decreasing order of frequency, are: (1) Remarks that standards have been lowered[16], (2) Derogatory comments or jokes, (3) Offensive posters, signs, graffiti, or T-shirts, (4) Remarks that women don’t belong there, (5) Mocking gestures, (6) Unwanted horseplay or high jinks, (7) Exclusion from social activities, (8) Unwanted sexual advances (9) Derogatory letters or messages, (10) Unwanted pressure for dates. Clearly, only when one comes to the eighth of ten categories[17] does one arrive at something that involves ordinary notions of sexuality, and even here it is difficult to distinguish how it differs from the sort of trial-and-error in courtship that people of this age characteristically go through[18].

Within the service itself, Vistica (1995) observes this in the context of Navy aviators’ response to the climate of criticism that arose out of Tailhook:

The daily drumbeat of negative news, and the brass’s implementation of new rules to help end a culture grounded in sexism, only increased the anxiety among men at Miramar and at other bases around the nation. Many of the men held strong, conservative views about duty, honor, country – and embraced moral values instilled in them to protect women and children. Now, even to discuss their fundamental beliefs could cost them their jobs if they were construed as antiwoman. (p. 361)

Defining the belief that men should protect women as “sexism” may be strange enough, but it does not help us with our investigation because we do not know what “sexism” means, or why it is a crime. More interesting, and the point upon which we shall focus, is the idea that it was defined as “antiwoman,” how did that happen[19]? What is the idea of “woman” that this is “anti”? That question clearly goes to the heart of our investigation.

Other examples of the strange results of this process of definition may be observed in the case of Colonel James Hallums, as described in a front-page article by Thomas E. Ricks in the March 13, 1997 issue of The Wall Street Journal. This article describes the controversy surrounding the dismissal of Colonel Hallums from his position as chair of the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at West Point.

According to the Journal, Colonel Hallums, described as a “soldier of the old school” was brought to the Academy because of concerns that the academy had lost its military and disciplinary edge. While there, although he was revered by many, he ran afoul of a number of the members of the faculty, especially including some of his female subordinates. He was accused of, among other things, sexism, found guilty of sexual harassment, and ultimately fired for “abusive leadership.”

One incident that got Hallums into trouble involved a line of cadets waiting to file course change slips. He asked one what branch he was going into. The cadet replied that he was going into the infantry. Col. Hallums responded: “Go to the head of the line.”

Out of this, and I presume other incidents, came the charge that Hallums “showed a gender bias because he was so gung-ho about combat forces, and under Army rules, women are excluded from ground combat roles.” As an investigative report put it “Many in the department perceive that he disdains the non-combat arms, and by implication, female officers.”

Now, from the standpoint of organization theory, I can see some validity in this. Arguably, in future conflicts, the effectiveness of the Army as a whole will increasingly depend on the effectiveness of its non-combat arms. To this extent, one might say, as some said of Hallums, that he was a man out of his times.

On the other hand, that was not the charge that was made. Hallums’ views were not repudiated as inconsistent with contemporary military requirements as such, but were criticized because they could be seen as belittling roles played by women. In other words, Hallums’ attitude was judged heretical, not because it was out of keeping with military necessity, but because women were offended by the subordination of their role that it implied. In the terms used here, it appears, Hallums’ crime was that his attitude toward women was demeaning and disrespectful toward their contribution.

As further evidence of his demeaning attitudes toward women, his gender bias, and sexism, Ricks reported that he called in the department’s civilian female teachers and asked them whether they had any romantic entanglements that he should know about. One of them, Barbara Hunter, later recalled that he told her she was expected to serve at West Point “for the long haul and that I couldn’t be expected to get married and move.” A married man with three daughters, Hallums was evidently unaware that she was divorced and, according to her, told her he thought people who divorce lack commitment.

Material like this formed the basis of formal charges, filed by two of the department’s three civilian female professors, accusing Col. Hallums of “sexism.” Ms. Hunter identified his denunciation of those who divorce as “gender discrimination.” The other teacher, Ms Rooney, said that in a conversation with her he had “implied that as a woman, my career shouldn’t come first. This is sexism.” (The third female civilian professor differentiated herself from the charge. She filed a statement saying that she had found Col. Hallums to be supportive.)

But if we are interested in the truly strange, we need to look at the material that supported the charge of sexual harassment. It was based on two charges. One was that he made women feel uncomfortable by walking through the department in his exercise clothes: a sleeveless shirt and Spandex shorts. The other, made by a Capt. Sharon Bowers was that he showed off his biceps and invited her to touch them. “In retrospect, I believe this was sexual harassment,” she said. On the basis of these charges, Col. Dennis Hunt, the head of West Point’s law department, found Col. Hallums guilty of sexual harassment, not for seeking sexual favors but for creating “an intimidating, hostile or offensive environment…”

But, we need to ask, what was there in Hallums’ actions that created “an intimidating, hostile or offensive environment…”? Where was the threat, the hostility, the offense? The man didn’t do anything. He was just walking around in his exercise shorts. And he didn’t threaten to fire Bowers if she refused to touch his biceps, nor was there any other threat reported. The threat, the hostility, the offense must have been felt to be in his attitude. But what was the attitude he was felt to have that was experienced as offensive?

There is only one conclusion that I think can be drawn from this. Hallums appeared to them to experience and affirm himself in his masculinity. That was the attitude crime with which he was charged. It appears that these women felt his experience and self-affirmation of his sexuality as a hostile attack against them. It seems that the crime with which he was charged was masculine sexuality itself[20].

Morris

The criminalization of male sexuality, and the related idea that male sexuality is directed against women, is surely the strangest aspect of the sexual contestation in the military, beginning with the response to Tailhook. It is therefore the one that is most interesting from the standpoint of psychoanalysis. A development of this idea is in a paper that grows out Tailhook, though it is not part of the scandal directly. Written by Madeline Morris (1996), a professor of law and a high-level consultant to Secretary of the Army Togo West, this paper attempts to explain why, although military personnel commit less rape than civilians do, the decline in the incidence of rape is not as substantial as the decline in other crimes. Morris rules out the idea that this may have to do with sexual deprivation, although she is receptive to it at another point in the paper. She argues instead that this is due to a “masculinist” culture within the military.

Part of this masculinist culture is a portrayal of “women as sexual targets and men as sexual consumers.” As an example of this she cites Playboy magazine, which is more likely to be read on military bases than in civilian life, (p. 715). What is of interest to us is her use of the term “sexual target,” as if a combat were being described. This impression is borne out on the next page, when the expression becomes “sexual targets or adversaries” (p. 716). The point is that she could have chosen other words. She could have differentiated between an active and a passive role, or between assertiveness and responsiveness, she could have talked about yang and yin, she could have spoken in any of a number of ways which would have seen both the male and female roles as being constitutive and vital elements of the same sexual act. But she chose to describe them in the language of assault. Trying to explain rape, she assumes it in the words she uses. For her, evidently, the active role in sexuality, the male role, is already rape.

Taking it for granted that that there is no biological basis for sex role differentiation, acknowledging the importance of the soldierly virtues of dominance, aggressiveness, and toughness as long as they can be purged of masculinity, Morris envisions a new military in which the hierarchy has precise control over the norms of the group, even to the point of being able to eliminate sexual desire among the members of a unit, while allowing it to express itself among soldiers of different units[21]. On the basis of this stack of speculations, for the sake of a marginal decrease in the incidence of rape, she is ready to bet the capacity of the nation to defend itself. She thus gives us a picture of the condemnation of male sexuality, lack of proportion, and the criminalization of attitude wrapped up in one small package.

But let us stay with Morris for a moment and consider the underpinnings of her case. Her view, in accordance with the current fashion, is that sexuality is “socially constructed.” It has no roots in biology, and even its roots in deep levels of the personality are constructed by changeable social arrangements. For her, the attitudes of military men toward women are created by the necessity to define themselves against a female other, a relationship obviously fraught with the potential for antagonism. Integrate women fully into the military and such problems will be solved.

But will it? Is there nothing deeper than norms lying underneath sexuality? Is the difference between the sexes simply a matter of the differing circumstances of social groups constituted by anatomy? Thousands of years of history, as well as the evidence of biology, suggest that there is something deeper. But thousands of years of history may have simply served to transmit bias from time to time, and, after all, biology isn’t over yet.

Up until this point, I have been concerned to show that there was something strange, something odd, about the response to Tailhook and its sequelae. My purpose in doing so has been to legitimate the use of psychoanalysis, a mode of analysis which takes the strange as its focus of investigation. If the response to Tailhook had been balanced, reasonable, and proportionate, there would have been nothing for psychoanalysis to explain. It could have been explained in terms of rational, conscious thought. But its weirdness requires that we go beneath the surface , and look for unconscious forces that may have been at play. That is the domain of psychoanalysis.

From a psychoanalytic point of view, the strange characteristics of the response to Tailhook and what has followed have a familiar unity. The key to their unity is the lack of proportion, which suggests the presence of a transference, a response to present circumstances as if they represented the circumstances of an earlier stage of our development. This is the approach I will take here. I will try to develop a theory of the feminists response to Tailhook that will help to explain the features we have discussed. It will also help to explain the power of feminism, why a view deeply rooted in primitive dynamics has had the power to become the dominant view, and why, especially, men have been powerless to resist it.

The Psychodynamics And Power Of Feminism

As we have seen, male activity is ultimately directed at the construction of an identity that can regain fusion with the female on terms which are no longer threatening. Men construct in order to present their product to women. Their wish is that her approval of it will mean acceptance of them as men, a recognition and appreciation of their separate identities, so that they can emotionally come together with them without the fear of being swallowed up, abandoned, and destroyed.

Typically, this motivation is unconscious. To acknowledge it would be to admit the dependency whose threatening nature drives the whole process. But to say that it is unconscious is not to say that it is any less real. Its reality shows up in its effects, and chief among these effects are the compulsive, anxiety-driven, partiality of male striving. “A man’s got to do what he’s got to do,” men say in explaining their behavior. In this way, they make it plain that they cannot provide any better answer for why they do what they do. On the conscious level, they simply do not know.

Even though unconscious, however, this constructive activity has the function of keeping alive the image of the omnipotent, loving female and, indeed, of bringing this fantasy into realization. The meaning of positive male activity, that is to say, is to remove the blockages that limit the power of the female, to expand the sphere of the female’s love and its effects.

As I have argued elsewhere (Schwartz, 1995, 1996) the meaning of economic activity, for men, has been to create material circumstances that would remove the limitations that necessity places on the efficacy of the mother’s love. Its purpose is to increase the distance between indifferent reality and the home, so that the home could be a perfect seat of warmth, love and connection. What I wish to argue in the present paper is that this is also the meaning of war.

It is easy enough to see destructiveness in war. As Richard Koenigsberg (1996) has recently pointed out, however, it is not the image of destructiveness that has colored the picture of war that we have given to ourselves, and that therefore must be seen to represent our real motivation. That image, instead, has been the image of service, and sometimes sacrifice in the name of something higher. The soldier will beat back and vanquish the enemies of the group -- the tribe, the nation, and, most powerfully, the combat unit (e.g. Manchester, 1987). The enemies are seen as responsible for the soldier's separation from the group's goodness. In that way he will find acceptance in the body of the group. If he is killed, his death will realize this connection, marking the end of the separation of his individual existence. What we see here, then, is that war has always been in the name of the primitive, omnipotent mother, represented as the group. Its destructiveness is the destruction only of what is other to her. It dies so that she may be enhanced.

At the level of the personal, the mythology here is of the soldier who battles the enemy, making the world safe for his woman and children, and then comes home again to their love. Of course, all of this is mythology. Yet in an activity that has as few rewards for the individual as war has, the importance of mythology cannot be overstated. And we now may note that we have arrived at the explanation of the “stone age attitudes about warriors returning from the sea” toward which Secretary Howard devoted such scorn. This indicates that we are almost ready to begin our explanation of what we need to explain, but first we need to consider the way in which sex fits into all of this.

Sex

For classic psychoanalysis, sex is part of the given, a basic drive (trieb), not subject to further psychoanalytic explanation. Nonetheless, drives have “vicissitudes,” and are subject to being transformed in various ways by culture and conditioning. To ask where one draws the line between what is biologically determined and what is culturally configured is, of course, to enter into a great dispute. It may be, however, to try to answer a fundamentally wrong-headed question (Foucault, 1980). One never sees sex without cultural configuration, any more than one sees content without form. Our concern here is primarily with these cultural configurations. It is, in other words, not so much with sex as such, as with the meaning of sex.

For Freud, the primary sexual object, both for men and for women, is the primordial mother, and the fantasy of fusion with her underlies all sexual desire. As we have seen, however, Chasseguet-Smirgel (1986), sees the difference between the sexes as rooted in their relations to the mother, with whom the child will or will not be able to identify. This difference is represented in the fantasy of fusion with this primordial figure, which for the male and the female take on quite different meanings. For the female, this fantasy is much more self-contained. Her capacity to identify with the primitive mother means that she can imagine this fusion in the image of being herself, with her child, who is part of herself, and through whom she incorporates the male as part of herself. For Chasseguet-Smirgel, this conditions the meaning of her sexuality:

Motherhood is consubstantial with female psychosexuality whether or not it results in the birth of a child…. It seems to me, then, that her capacity for motherhood enables the woman to realize in fantasy her dual incestuous wish: to recover the state of primary fusion with the mother by means of the union established with the fetus during pregnancy, and to keep the love object, the father or his penis, inside herself. Thanks to the fusion with the fetus inside her, the woman has the possibility of recovering access to the mother’s body in a more complete, more profound and more lasting way than the man. (pp. 30-31)

For the man, the matter is not so straightforward. As we have seen, the mother is the focus of male desire, but the idea of satisfying that desire is the source of a terrible fear, since it brings with it the threat of dissolution. So he must achieve something; and in that way create a self for himself that is substantial and valued, in order that sex with this loved but terrifying figure can be managed with safety. In the classic case, he will identify with and learn from his father, his model of valued achievement, and then, achieving something based on that model, be able to start his own family.

But having said that, we see that to the contemporary ear, this seems like strange material. The idea of the female as prize for his labor, does this not devalue her, the feminist might say. And rooting female sexuality in relation to men, our feminist would continue, is that not seeing her as tied to a social role within an oppressive structure? Have we not, our feminist continues, simply reasserted sexism. Is there not sex beyond that?

Well, yes, Chasseguet-Smirgel (1985, 1986) observes, there certainly is. Sex as it has been described here is genital, Oedipal. But, for psychoanalysis, there is sex before the Oedipus complex, before the place of the traditional heterosexual sexual relations has been established. And that is where we will now turn. It will turn out to be the very heart of our understanding.

Before we go to that, a bit of terminology may be useful. In Freudian terms, the sexuality we will now discuss is called “pre-Oedipal,” or “pre-genital.” But, our feminist critic will observe, this has the effect of normalizing and legitimating the Oedipal process, heterosexuality, and the role of the father. She will tell us that these are all matters that should be challenged, since they inevitably lead to patriarchy and its system of domination. For the purpose of our argument, I will adopt terminology that will avoid her objection. Rather than referring to this alternative sexuality as “pre-Oedipal,” I will call it non-Oedipal, meaning here that the internalization of the father, characteristic of the Oedipal phase, has not happened, rather then saying that it has not happened yet. This terminology contains no judgment about what sort of sexuality should be normative. My business now is to explore, rather than evaluate.

Non-Oedipal Sexuality

Chasseguet-Smirgel’s interest in sexuality grew out of her study of perversions. Whether one wants to call such practices “perverse” is, perhaps, a matter of judgment. Let us put it aside for the moment, however, and attempt to be purely descriptive.

Characteristic of the male perverts she studied was that they were under the control of a fantasy she called the denial of difference (1985, 1986). This is a fantasy that the mother has a penis, and is therefore sexually complete. The meaning of this fantasy, for the little boy, is that it means that he is, even with his immature sexual apparatus, a suitable partner for his mother. He thus avoids the inferiority that would come from comparing himself with his father and can maintain the fantasy that he can supplant his father in her life. Reinforced in this view by his mother, who typically does prefer him to his father, he thus denies the difference in the generations. As well, he denies the difference between true adult endeavor and the kind of pretended endeavor that a child can manage, which then comes to be the specific perversion. In this way, he can maintain his narcissism.

I have discussed the consequences of this male development in earlier papers (Schwartz, 1995, 1996). For the present, what is more important is the course of non-Oedipal sexuality in the girl. For Chasseguet-Smirgel, this again represents a fusion with the primordial mother. But there is a difference. For the boy, the fantasy of fusion involves taking the place of the father. For the girl, the controlling fantasy is not of a partnership with the primordial mother, but of establishment as the primordial mother herself. The omnipotence, then, which is the defining characteristic of the primordial mother, will be hers. But omnipotence has the corollary that the father is a usurper who may be gotten rid of. In her fantasy, then, she can have children, with which she also identifies, by herself, and without male participation:

The companion to the boy’s perverse deception regarding the difference between the sexes and between the generations, which installs him as mother’s partner, would be, in the girl’s case, the denial that the child needs to have a father. (Chasseguet-Smirgel: 1985: p.35)

And she continues:

Indeed, the bearing of children without the male playing any role is written into the S.C.U.M (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto: “Reproduction of the species is technically possible without any need for a man. Women could henceforth reproduce only women” (Valerie Solanas, S.C.U.M Manifesto). (Chasseguet-Smirgel: 1985: p.35)

And what does that tell us about her sexuality? If she identifies with the omnipotent, primordial mother, and if the aim in sexuality is fusion with the primordial mother, whom does she have sex with? The answer can only be that she has sex with herself. To the extent that she can make sense of having sex with others, they will have to be those with whom she identifies completely. These may be other women, into whom she has projected herself completely and without reservation; or they may be men, if she can strip them of their masculine difference and identify them with herself. Alternatively, she can have sex with men but not make sense of it. She may experience this sex as an act of abuse by a person whom she resents and despises, but whom she continues seeing as a result of a part of her personality for which she assumes no responsibility. In either case, the basic psychodynamic fact remains. The central figure in her psyche is herself, identified with the primordial mother. Under this identification, there is no one else that it would possibly make sense to have sex with. Perfect is perfect, and who could ask for anything more? In fact, to the extent that sex implies a connection with an other, she does not have sex at all. She is not sexual, but erotic. More precisely, she is autoerotic. As we shall see, this is an important key to our puzzle.

The idea that she is having sex with herself, that she is autoerotic, and that this underlies her basic approach to the world, may seem strange, but it is in fact a mainstay of feminist writing. It reaches, perhaps, its most explicit formulation in the work of Luce Irigaray.

Irigaray

Irigaray (1985) takes sexuality as the core of all human relations, and takes autoeroticism as the model of sexuality. She looks there for the difference between male and female sexuality. She maintains that the phallic sexuality of the male, which has until this point dominated Western culture, has given woman only a subordinate, instrumental function, replacing the hand in male masturbation:

Female sexuality has always been conceptualized on the basis of male parameters… For the clitoris is conceived as a little penis pleasant to masturbate so long as castration anxiety does not exist (for the boy child), and the vagina is valued for the “lodging” it offers the male organ when the forbidden hand has to find a replacement for pleasure-giving.

In these terms, woman’s erogenous zones never amount to anything but a clitoris-sex that is not comparable to the noble phallic organ, or a hole-envelope that serves to sheathe and massage the penis in intercourse: a non-sex, or a masculine organ turned back upon itself, self-embracing.(p. 23)

Woman, in this sexual imaginary, is only a more or less obliging prop for the enactment of man’s fantasies. That she may find pleasure in that role, by proxy, is possible, even certain. But such pleasure is above all a masochistic prostitution of her body to a desire that is not her own, and it leaves her in a familiar state of dependency upon man. (p. 25)

The loathsomeness of this phallic sexuality, as Irigaray experiences it, is apparent in the way it plays out in culture.

The more or less exclusive – and highly anxious – attention paid to erection in Western sexuality proves to what extent the imaginary that governs it is foreign to the feminine. For the most part, this sexuality offers nothing but imperatives dictated by male rivalry: the “strongest” being the one who has the best “hard-on,” the longest, the biggest, the stiffest penis, or even the one who “pees the farthest” (as in little boys’ contests). Or else one finds imperatives dictated by the enactment of sadomasochistic fantasies, these in turn governed by man’s relation to his mother: the desire to force entry, to penetrate, to appropriate for himself the mystery of this womb where he has been conceived, the secret of his begetting, of his “origin.” (pp. 24-5)

She contrasts this contemptible stuff with female sexuality, evidently a higher type:

woman’s autoeroticism is very different from man’s. In order to touch himself, man needs an instrument: his hand, a woman’s body, language … And this self-caressing requires at least a minimum of activity. As for woman, she touches herself in and of herself without any need for mediation, and before there is any way to distinguish activity from passivity. Woman “touches herself” all the time, and moreover no one can forbid her to do so, for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact. Thus, within herself, she is already two – but not divisible into one(s) – that caress each other.

Her model of relationships follows along with this. Male relationships, characterized by possessiveness and modeled on property ownership, are based on the singularity of the penis. Woman, however, understood in her own right, resists objectification. She is diffuse, fluid, several.

Woman always remains several, but she is kept from dispersion because the other is already within her and is autoerotically familiar to her. Which is not to say that she appropriates the other for herself, that she reduces it to her own property. Ownership and property are doubtless quite foreign to the feminine. At least sexually. But not nearness. Nearness is so pronounced that it makes all discrimination of identity, and thus all forms of property, impossible. Woman derives pleasure from what is so near that she cannot have it, nor have herself. She herself enters into a ceaseless exchange of herself with the other without any possibility of identifying either.(p.31)

But what can it be with which she can be so near, with which she can be autoerotically bound, which is within her, but which is not her, and with which her whole world, consisting of her and her relationships, can be made? What can this student of Lacan[22][21] be referring to other than her reflection? We have here the story of Narcissus, the story of the way in which one’s self and one’s own self-admiration can constitute the whole world for oneself. This, according to Irigaray, is the pure feminine perspective. It is the perspective of the virgin.

And how does male sexuality look from this virginal perspective:

This autoeroticism is disrupted by a violent break-in: the brutal separation of the two lips by a violating penis, an intrusion that distracts and deflects the woman from this “self-caressing” she needs if she is not to incur the disappearance of her own pleasure in sexual relations. (p. 24)

Now we are ready to return to Tailhook.

Tailhook Revisited: The Power of the Virgin

I want to look at the response to Tailhook with the benefit of the perspective we have uncovered. My claim is that the feminist perspective which informed and determined the way the events of Tailhook were interpreted, and which carry forward in the issue of women in combat, resulted from an identification with the primordial mother. This was an identification made, more or less completely, by some feminists. But if we are to fully understand its effects, we need to understand that that identification was accepted by men as well as women. Looking for the reason why men are so helpless before the power of feminism, in other words, we have to see that the power this identification brings is one that affects men as much as it does women, and that is, ultimately, the reason why the idea of women in combat seems as inexorable as it seems.

Reflecting on this matter, we can easily see why this image is experienced as so powerful by men. It is experienced in this way because it is not a woman’s image of the female; it is an infant’s image of the female. We all have mothers, whether we are male or female, and she is experienced as omnipotent and self-sufficient by all of us. Indeed, her diffuse autoeroticism, in which as infants we are included, is the perfect complement of the unfocused polymorphous perversity of the infant. None of these matters were discovered by women because they have some secret access to a female essence, located somewhere inside of them that men don’t have. Rather, women are simply bringing to consciousness the idea that all of us had toward our mother when we were totally dependent on her and not differentiated from her.

The difference is, as we have seen, that because the mother is a woman and because the girl child is a woman, she can identify with her; while for the boy, she is far more terrifying and he has to have a project which will make him safe if he is to fuse with her. In the absence of that project, should that project be undermined, her power reduces the male to infantile dependence and helplessness. No longer capable of uniting as an adult with an adult female he is, for all intents and purposes, castrated. The female, by contrast, is made powerful through it, and powerful, especially, over the dependent, helpless, castrated male. There you have the power of feminism. It is the power of the virgin.

For the explanation of Tailhook, it is easy enough to start at the point where we left Irigaray, with the image of the “violent break-in: the brutal separation of the two lips by a violating penis.” What we can see here, without any difficulty, is the way in which male sexuality itself, and not just the physical abusiveness that no one denies, became a crime. For, continuing with Irigaray, not only is it violent, it is “an intrusion that distracts and deflects the woman from this ‘self-caressing’ she needs if she is not to incur the disappearance of her own pleasure in sexual relations.”

The point here is that the auto-eroticism of this virginal, primordial mother is sufficient for all the purposes of life. It is perfect in its own right and lacks nothing. Male sexuality is an intrusion into it, an interference with it, a disruption of it. It subordinates the sublime to the base, the sacred to the profane. It cannot be anything but defilement, rape (e.g. MacKinnon, 1989; Dworkin, 1993)[23][22].

As I have said, tied to this image themselves, requiring its approval for the very integrity of their very personality, men must be very sensitive to such feelings. Around their sexuality must cluster, consciously or unconsciously, a sense of shame and guilt. Toward it, they must have a sensitivity and sense of vulnerability that will keep them in motion all their lives. Out of this may easily arise a compulsive zealousness in the defense of the sexual purity of the virginal primordial mother, a defense that psychoanalysis calls a reaction formation: an affirmation of the opposite of these base impulses for the purpose of denying their presence in oneself. This zealousness, which permeates and provides much of the meaning of the response to Tailhook, is likely to be strongest among men whose sexuality is strongest, and therefore hardest for them deny.

Vistica (1995) provides a nice enough image of this. In this case, Senator John McCain, who was leading an attack on Naval Secretary Lawrence Garrett for not responding more quickly to the incidents at Tailhook, was seen as something of a puzzle by some:

Some officers on Garrett’s staff… were surprised by McCain’s ambush and stricken by the irony that he would have the nerve to speak out on Tailhook. Several of the old aviators were aware of McCain’s past reputation. “He would fuck a pile of rocks if he thought a snake was in it,” said one former Vietnam POW who had served in the Navy with McCain. (p. 337)

What comes into focus as well, given this line of reasoning, is the lack of proportion in the response to Tailhook. This is so with regard to a number of perspectives. For one thing, we can understand the extraordinary fact that the feminist critics of the Navy were ready to subordinate all other considerations to the matter of sexual harassment. The point is that if you take the perspective of the primordial mother, no other considerations are important.

She is, to begin with, sexual, even if that sexuality is autoerotic, and the world in which she operates is suffused with that sexuality. Moreover, that sexuality is sufficient. Nothing else is required in that perfect world, whose very perfection is expressed through that sexuality. Given that world, and her place in it, the activities that navies, and navy men, engage in are second-rate and inferior, the expressions of a debased nature. They are, as Irigaray puts it:

nothing but imperatives dictated by male rivalry: the “strongest” being the one who has the best “hard-on,” the longest, the biggest, the stiffest penis, or even the one who “pees the farthest” (as in little boys’ contests).(pp. 24-5)

What we can see happening here, and this is the root of all of the disproportion that we saw, is that the identification with the omnipotent, virginal, primordial mother has rendered, for the feminists, a disdain for the male activity that would otherwise have allowed Tailhook to be kept in perspective. If she is omnipotent, her simple existence and the expression of its sexual essence is all that is necessary for anything. Violation of her auto-eroticism is not a crime among others. Rupturing the perfect circle in which her omnipotence guarantees perfection is the root of all criminality, the very meaning of criminality. Nothing else can approach it in importance.

Here it may be worthwhile to pause for a second and reflect upon what may seem to be the exaggerated role of sexuality that we have brought with us from Irigaray. Irigaray tends to be a bit sensationalistic, but on the whole, here, she is following Freud in identifying Eros and sexuality. What may seem strange here may seem more familiar if one substitutes the idea of love for the idea of sexuality. Then, with the female as the caring, nurturing mother, who but for the influence of men, could make everything well by her simple loving presence, one finds oneself in the precise center of feminist theory.

This observation is of no small importance, since it casts light on another aspect of our material that might otherwise seem peculiar. It is the extreme reaction, the rage, that some women have felt in the face of attitudes that they considered to be demeaning, and the way they interpret these “demeaning” attitudes with offenses against them. The point here again is that the image of the world in which the primordial mother is the central figure is one which is suffused with love for her, with adoration. “Demeaning” attitudes toward her, which may involve no more than seeing her as a human being, are experienced as a violation of the very depths of meaning.

We do well to see, in fact, that what is at issue here is essentially a master of religion. The primordial mother is the deepest god whom we can know. Having identified herself with this divinity, our feminist naturally responds to criticism as if it were blasphemy. We gain insight into the bitterness of our current sexual conflicts if we realize that they are, in a sense, religious wars.

At any rate, from all of these considerations, we can also understand why her feelings, insofar as they arise from this primitive identification, have such power over men. Under identification with the omnipotent primordial mother, she denies the place of chivalric behavior in the relationship between the sexes. Recall that the meaning of male activity is to make himself suitable for the female. He understands her as omnipotent. Indeed, the meaning of his deeds is that he is her agent in realizing her omnipotence. He will vanquish the foe, kill the dragon, and then, having proved himself to her, she will accept him as her lover. But notice that she has to go along with bargain, and in order to go along with bargain she has to acknowledge that it is important that he vanquish the foe or kill the dragon. She must know, in other words, that there are limits to her omnipotence, that the fantasy of her omnipotence is a fantasy.

What we see in this case however, is that she is not accepting this. She stands by her omnipotence, and therefore she doesn’t need him. Vanquishing the enemy, killing the dragon, she sees behind these and understands that these are merely strategies he is using to get into her bed. But this holds no value for her. She does not need him sexually any more than she needs his deeds. She is perfect sexually all by herself. All that he can do is impose himself.

But now look at what this must do for the man. His activities made sense to him because they made sense to her. They were indeed ways to get into her bed, a project which provided the foundation not only of his behavioral agenda, but of his very feeling of existence. Have that withdrawn and his life falls apart; the meaning of all that he does evaporates. If his activities do not make sense to her, they cannot make sense to him. He is left only with infantile dependence. He understands that he can only be with her under her sufferance, and that he is subject to abandonment at her whim. Being a man having been made impossible, he must content himself with being a little boy. He understands that he must do what his mother tells him to do.

The alternative, of course, is to respond to this dependence with counterdependent hatred and violence. As Irigaray puts it:

Or else one finds imperatives dictated by the enactment of sadomasochistic fantasies, these in turn governed by man’s relation to his mother: the desire to force entry, to penetrate, to appropriate for himself the mystery of this womb where he has been conceived, the secret of his begetting, of his “origin.” (p. 25)

In this, ironically, he moves the very agenda that the feminist program, ostensibly, was intended to prevent.

There is another point about the response to Tailhook that I wish to get at from this perspective. A form of lack of proportion, it deserves mention in its own right. It is the fact, as we saw in the case of Colonel Hallums, that the positive valuation of male sexuality and of the male role that goes along it were seen as criminal, even in the absence of concrete acts of sexual abuse. It was as if the very idea of male sexual activity was seen in the same way as a physical sexual attack. How could that be?

The answer may be revealed if we invert the terms. The idea that male sexuality was felt as a physical attack is not what we need for our explanation. Rather, what we need to understand is that physical attack, at least in the extremely mild instances which concern us here, was seen as significant because it was an attack on the idea of female sexuality. It was felt as an attack, not so much because there was physical brutalization involved, but because it threatened the idea of the omnipotence and completeness of female sexuality.

This suggests that what took place at Tailhook was not a physical clash between men and women. It was a clash between ideas of sexuality. What was felt to be under attack was itself an idea, the idea of the power of the virgin, and it could be felt to be attacked by another idea. This is no small thing, of course. We live by our ideas, and the violence of an attack upon our ideas of ourselves is very real.

At the same time, we can now see what the feminists had in mind when they said that the problem in the Navy was a cultural problem, and that the solution would have to be a cultural change. But looking at the matter at this point shows us that when we are thinking about cultural change, when we are thinking about substituting one fundamental idea for another, we need to look directly at the meaning of these ideas, and keep in mind the full train of consequences that may ensue.

Previously, the two “cultures,” the two ideas of sexuality, could be kept apart because the sexes were not integrated in the military. It is also true that they did not need to be kept apart so much, since both men and women, in the course of their development, have been able to integrate the two. In the present case, however, a regressive identification among females was able to establish a drunken, childish, regressive identification among males as being definitive of the Navy, and set itself up as an exclusionary alternative.

At this point, though, we can see some of the implications of what the feminists have in mind when they speak about a cultural change within the Navy. The culture of sexuality traditional to the Navy was one that supported the activity of the Navy. By holding up the idea of fusion, the ego ideal of men having earned the right to express their sexuality, men could experience their military activities with pride, and could accomplish them with courage and élan. The culture that the feminists seek to replace this with is one that undermines the activity of the Navy. It reduces it to imposture, to a peeing contest, to a subterfuge for rape. It deprives military activity of the meaning it has in the heterosexual matrix and leaves men with the shame and guilt that surrounds their sexuality in the absence of the possibility of its legitimation.

Men cannot do their military work under this premise. In defense of the value of this work, it would be optimal if they could fight it. But on the basis of these considerations, we can understand why they have such difficulty in doing so. It is because the whole premise upon which men fight is the omnipotence of the female. It is up to women to see through this fantasy of their omnipotence. Men cannot do it without the greatest degree of upheaval. But if women will not do it, men will find it very difficult to oppose them.

This leaves open the possibility of mischievous activity, through the manipulation of the image of the virgin, that can have the most far-reaching consequences. Interestingly, it is a possibility that this is what happened in the scandal of Tailhook and especially concerning the story of Paula Coughlin.

The Wild Ride of Lieutenant Coughlin

According to the standard view, Coughlin wandered into the Tailhook gauntlet as an innocent, and there met with sexual assault for which she was entirely unprepared. As Vistica put it:

Shortly before midnight, Coughlin entered the third-floor hallway at the Hilton and began searching through the fighter bubbas, looking for Trusty Steed. She made one lap around the floor but couldn't find him. She was now standing at the beginning of the hallway, looking down the dark tunnel at the men lining both sides. They were the clean-cut aviators she had been with since she herself became a naval aviator years ago. Although the hallway reeked of booze and sweat, Coughlin stepped forward. (p. 329)

Whereupon, in the standard account, followed the defilement of the virgin.

But, on close inspection, even on the basis of Vistica's sympathetic account, the image of Coughlin as a wide-eyed naif simply doesn't hold up. The fact is that Coughlin was a pretty tough cookie:

As a sophomore at Old Dominion University, Coughlin enrolled in the ROTC program, graduating in 1984 and entering the Navy as a commissioned officer. By this time she had developed a hard edge and was determined not to take any guff from anybody. During her summer months home from college, she got a job as the first female lifeguard ever hired in Virginia Beach. When her supervisor said it would cost her a blow job if she wanted to break for lunch, Coughlin shot back: "Sorry, pal, I'm on a diet." And when another lifeguard called her a slut, "I clocked him." (p. 323)

Nor was she a sexual innocent:

Naval aviators took out their anger by spreading rumors about her promiscuity, about her being a second-rate naval officer, and about her willingly taking part in the activities at Tailhook. Coughlin did not run from the attacks. And she told her media handlers, who at first tried to persuade her from going public, not to paint her as a lily-white Virgin, which she said she was not. If there were doubters, a member of Frank Kelso's public affairs staff had passed on a report from her boyfriend, who flew helicopters with Coughlin. According to the report, she had showed up at a Navy dining-in party wearing black fishnet panty hose, high heels, a short black miniskirt, and a black tuxedo jacket and carrying a large rubber dildo. (p. 356)

Now, of course, as Vistica points out:

What kind of personal life Coughlin enjoyed, whether she was a party girl or not, did not justify the criminal sexual assault on her or the other victims. (p.356)

But there is one point about this that Vistica simply does not get, despite the fact that the evidence for it, which he himself adduces, is overwhelming. It is that Paula Coughlin must have known exactly what would happen to her if she walked into the gauntlet. Certainly Tailhook was not new to her. In fact, she had been to Tailhooks before, including the 1987 affair, which was widely known within the Navy to have been the most raucous ever. But, more important than that, the gauntlet was a hallowed tradition. It was known, including its precise location and its schedule, throughout the entire aviation wing of the Navy. The only way an experienced Naval aviation officer could have not known about it would have been if she were incredibly innocent and naïve, but Coughlin was neither. She was a savvy political operator who made a point of knowing everything that was going on and didn't shrink from any of it.

Let me make it plain that I don’t see anything wrong with that. It only becomes a problem in this case because it contrasts with the image of innocence that Coughlin, whom Vistica shows to have been a masterful and fully purposeful manipulator of the press, put on. It was that image which drove the entire purge of the Navy. Within it, Coughlin simply wandered into the gauntlet, unaware of what would happen to her. But that image is impossible to maintain. The only reasonable alternative is that she was aware of what would happen to her. And that was why she did it.

But why would she do it? There is no doubt that she was shaken by the experience. Why would she consciously and deliberately put herself in this position? An answer is not difficult to come by.

Coughlin, Vistica tells us, was a person of considerable ambition, and one not to be satisfied by the ordinary career progression of the helicopter pilot:

she was ambitious and wanted more out of the Navy. She yearned to put her career on a fast track, to be close to the movers and shakers in Washington. So she applied to be an aide to Donald Boecker, the rear admiral in charge of Pax River, Maryland. After getting the job, she became close to Boecker, an attack pilot "who without a doubt was the finest officer and gentleman I have ever met in my life," she later said. I worked my ass off for the admiral twelve hours a day, writing his schedule, getting him wherever he was going on time, making him look good, watching the nuances that count." (p.323)

For a while, this worked perfectly:

The most distinguishing mark of an aide was the gold loop aiguillette, which signaled that the wearer had a place of importance in the Navy. Coughlin wore hers like a badge of honor. It was prestigious. And she was now a cut above her peers. More important, she was in close proximity to senior people, admirals and the like, who would notice her abilities to get the job done. A good flag aide could ride an admiral's coattails a long way in the Navy. And one who performed "properly," always showing sincerity and deference to the admiral, would be remembered when the best jobs came around. Access was always granted to the aide, even after the admiral moved up the chain of command to some other post. (pp. 323-4)

But then there came a problem:

nine months after becoming Boecker's aide, Coughlin sensed that her career had hit a setback. Boecker, her ticket to advancement, the man she nearly gave up dating for so she could give him 110 percent of her time and effort, was now leaving. His replacement was Jack Snyder, the former head of Tailhook who had recently been selected for promotion to the rank of rear admiral. Coughlin was beside herself. She told her mother and other close confidants that she was troubled about Snyder. He was a fighter jock, a new admiral, and not a man to rely on a woman to be his aide.

Coughlin described Snyder as a man who "came from an environment where you did everything yourself. The concept of having a staff to do things for him, along with a hard-charging female telling him what to do, challenged our relationship." After a month working with Snyder, Coughlin, a young lieutenant with less than seven years' experience, told her mother that she found it difficult "breaking him in as an admiral.' (p. 324)

Her apprehension turned out to be justified. Snyder did not rely on her and did not involve her in his professional activities. Her career, which had been flying so high, appeared to have come to a dead-end. Coughlin did not like Snyder (p. 340).

I have no access to Coughlin's mind and cannot say what was going on in it. I can say that whatever else it did, walking the gauntlet gave Coughlin the means to get rid of Snyder. On the basis of a string of allegations that, as Vistica shows, are not supported by the facts, she accused him of not responding quickly enough to her complaints. He was demoted and fired from his command as a result. But that was, perhaps, only the least of it:

And that Friday night Bush and his wife, Barbara, had tea with Paula Coughlin in the White House. He assured her that justice would be done and the culprits who assaulted her and the other women at Tailhook would be punished. With her appearance on ABC and her visit to the White House, Coughlin was now the poster girl for ending sexual harassment and abuse of women in the military. (p.355)

As I have said, I have no access to what was going on in Coughlin's mind. All I can do is speculate and infer. But, if my inferences are correct, one has to say, with even a bit of admiration, not bad for a night's work.

Still, one cannot leave the consideration of Coughlin without reflecting on the irony that it was a move to protect the frail and helpless Coughlin that gave the critical impetus to the move to place women among the warriors whose courage and indomitability would protect the nation.

The Issue of Women in Combat

In most of this paper, we have not directly engaged the issue with which we began, the issue of women in combat, and specifically the question of what forces are pushing that issue. The implications of our reasoning are clear enough in this regard, however. Male chivalry and the deeds it inspires represent men’s weakness before the image of female omnipotence. Serving female omnipotence, after all, is what chivalry is all about. But this observation illuminates a stunning paradox. It is that chivalry, which has as its aim the expansion of the sphere of the maternal, the project of making the word a safer place for the maternal expression of love, makes it impossible for men to resist the idea of putting women in combat. But war is hell, as General Sherman observed, and the power that the virgin wields in fantasy may well result in the slaughter of women in reality. Even if there were no other considerations involved, men’s understanding of their impotence in this regard would be felt as castration.

The consequences for the nation of having a castrated military, a military that looks like a military but no longer sees meaning in the fight, can only be guessed at. But the fact is that it is precisely a castrated military, a military in which male sexuality is experienced with shame and guilt, that is the aim of the idea of women in combat. If the women who were pushing this idea were the women who it would apply to, and who understood what it would involve, that would be one thing. If the women in the armed forces wanted to, or felt that they ought to, assume the burden of combat, there would be nothing castrative about the idea. It might not be a good idea, but it would not put the motivational underpinning of the military at serious risk. This would be because it would be based on a sober assumption of risk that understood that it was risk, that represented an appreciation of the risks men have traditionally taken, and that valued the victories that they have won. It would have represented a validation of the male role and a desire to make themselves more whole by expanding their masculinity. Among such women, the question of lowering standards so that they could “succeed” would not arise, since they would understand the reason for high standards. The same would be true of other serious questions that would arise, which would then be subject to rational resolution on their merits. Men would, I believe, respect the motivation of such women because implicit in it is respect for the task that they have themselves respected. But Miller’s research has shown that these women do not want to be in combat.

The women who want them to be in combat are women who do not understand what combat means, nor do they value it. Their view is not one that recognizes the seriousness of combat. This is shown in their willingness to subordinate all military considerations to the issue of female participation, and in their disdain for the men who have distinguished themselves in these terms. In the absence of a sense of its seriousness, their vision of what combat involves is empty of the basis upon which respect is given. But if they do not value military efforts, why do they want women to participate? My reasoning leads to the view that it is because, unless women do it also, and on their own terms, it will be a way that men consolidate their identity as men, earn the right to express their sexuality, and demonstrate the limits of the power of the virgin.

If the analysis developed here is sound, the prognosis for the U.S. military is exceedingly grim. The psychodynamic forces pressing for women in combat roles are aimed at undermining the mission of the military. If that happens, the capacity of the military to fight the enemies of the nation will be lost. In order to see this, it is only necessary to realize that, as I have argued, the feminists who are pushing this issue are not concerned with making the nation safe from enemies outside of the nation. For them, the enemy is men. Their effect will be to create a fault line, not at the nation’s boundaries, but within the military itself. This will make mobilizing against a common enemy impossible.

It is easy to miss this conclusion if one supposes that the conflict we see today is only a temporary one that will resolve itself into a new, stable framework to which everyone will adhere. But, if my analysis is correct, a proper understanding of the dynamics involved will reveal that there cannot be any such stable framework.

The problem is that the image of the omnipotent maternal figure is a fantasy. No woman can be omnipotent any more than any man can. We all have our limits. The fantasy cannot be realized. But commitment to the fantasy, total identification with it, must take the fact of limitation as an enemy and subject it to attack. Since this fantasy is an idea of the perfection of women, it necessarily follows, even without any other considerations, that the enemy will be seen as those who are not women, which is to say those who are men. Antagonism toward men, therefore, is built into this feminist psychodynamic as a permanent feature, not subject to alleviation by any transformation of roles. Whatever changes are made will be seen as insufficient and will simply constitute a new state of affairs that needs to be overcome.

This is a manifestation of what I have referred to elsewhere (Schwartz, 1997) as the drive to the extreme, and it is a characteristic of all politics at this primitive level. The sexual component in this case, however, gives this situation an aspect that is interesting in its own right. Let us glance at this through another look at the case of Colonel Hallums.

Hallums, as we saw, was charged with sexual harassment for, among other things, walking across the room in his exercise shorts. In analyzing this at the time, we assumed that there was something that he had done that was experienced as offensive. Since there was no behavior, we assumed that what was problematic was his mental state. And the only mental state that would fit was his experience of his own masculinity.

But looking back over this matter, it appears that we have assumed too much. The point was that it was Hallums’ masculinity that was the problem, but this did not necessarily have to have a representation in Hallums’ mind. It could have served just as well if it were only in the minds of the women who saw him walk across the room. The idea of Hallums’ masculinity would have been present in the mind of anyone who experienced Hallums as masculine, whether there was any corresponding representation in Hallums’ mind or not. But the experience of Hallums’ masculinity is just the experience of him as a sexy guy. Anyone who was sexually attracted to Hallums would experience his masculinity. And anyone committed to the idea of female sexual sufficiency would be disturbed, and hence offended by it.

And now we can see where the problem is. Taking the experience of masculinity as offensive turns female sexual desire for men into a crime. And since the whole premise here is the perfection of the female, it cannot be a female crime, but must be committed by a male. In this we can see the possible scope of male activity that could be considered criminal in this way. It does not require that they do anything, or say anything, or think anything at all. It does not even require that they be physically present. Their presence in the past would suffice, as we see in countless cases of “recovered memories” of sexual abuse. In fact, we can push the matter even farther than that. Their offensiveness is in the idea that women have of them, and women can have that idea entirely by themselves. His presence in the idea, his spiritual presence, would be presence enough. What we see here is the generation of the idea of the devil. And this devil could take the form of any man at any time. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to imagine putting together an effective mixed gender military force with that as the underlying psychodynamic.

Conclusion: The end of the U.S. military

Michael Diamond (1993) has introduced the useful concept of organizational identity. Analogous to Erikson's concept of individual identity, it represents the sameness and continuity of the organization in the face of change. Organizational identity, says Diamond:

is a product of organizational culture and history, member psychology, and the psychology of past and present leaders and followers. It consists of repetitive structures of intersubjectivity found in relationships between superiors and subordinates, which are primarily driven by unconscious assumptions and expectations that influence organizational decisions and actions. (p. 79)

But Erikson observes that:

strange as it may seem, it takes a well-established identity to tolerate radical change, for the well-established identity has arranged itself around basic values which cultures have in common. (cited in Diamond, 1993: p.79)

Given Diamond's point that the roots of organizational identity are unconscious, and given the fact that the changes we have described are attempts at replacing precisely these unconscious underpinnings, the question must arise whether the U.S. that comes out of this process of transformation will recognize itself as the same organization that went into it. Given the radical nature of this change, it seems to me that there is every reason to believe that it will not. In that case, the organization that emerges will be something, but it will not, in some very important sense, be the U.S. military. And if that is so, what possible reason will there be for the U.S to be able to depend on it to fight the enemies of the country?

For the fact is that the virgin does not march against the enemies of the country. She marches against men and what men represent.

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Notes

[1] This issue attains its sharpest focus with ground combat roles.

[2] Recommendation: The sense of the Commission is that women should be excluded from direct land combat units and positions. Further, the Commission recommends that the existing service policies concerning direct land combat exclusions be codified. (Presidential Commission, 1993: p. 24) The vote on this issue was 10 Yes, 0 against, 2 abstentions. For a thorough discussion of the issues, the report of this bipartisan group is to be recommended.

[3] In her survey of attitudes, Miller found that among white military men, from 42% (enlisted) to 68% (officers) endorsed the statement “I am satisfied with the present Army regulations that exclude women from direct combat roles.” From 19% (enlisted) to 14% (officers) chose instead to endorse the statement “I think that women should be treated exactly like men and serve in the combat arms just like men.” However, she added:

Interview data…reveal that most of the men who favor opening combat roles to women on the same terms as men do so only because they are confident that women will fail in those roles… I term this group “hostile proponents” of women in combat. Such hostile proponents reason that the issue of women in the combat arms will not be put to rest until women have been given the opportunity to prove their incompetence….virtually the entire 20 percent of the men who selected the “same as men” combat option for women fell into this category. (pp. 43-44)

For men of other races, only 34% were satisfied with the current policy, but 18% chose the “same as men” option.

Note that almost 20% of military men favor adopting a policy that, if they are correct, might put their lives in danger, because its demonstrated failure is the only way they see to have the issue “put to rest.” The desperation this represents is worthy of remark. It is also important to add that the idea that these men object to women in combat because they believe women are “incompetent” is Miller’s interpretation and does not adequately represent the much more complex picture that her own data suggest.

[4] The women in Miller’s survey are not satisfied with the regulations that exclude women from combat roles. From 70% (officers) to 78% (enlisted), they prefer the option “I think that women who want to volunteer for the combat arms should be allowed to do so.” They generally reject the idea that men and women should be treated the same. When asked, in an earlier phase of the research (Miller, 1995), whether they would volunteer for the combat arms, however, only 11 (enlisted) to 14% (officers) said they would do so. In fact, in one wave of the survey, Miller eliminated the voluntary response category, and asked her female respondents to choose between the status quo and the compulsory options. 65% chose the status quo and only 24 % chose the compulsory option, the rest indicating that it did not matter to them.

It is important to note that the Presidential Commission (1993) rejected the voluntary option for women.

Men can be involuntarily assigned to any position in the Service, and women can be involuntarily assigned to any position open to them based on the needs of the Services. The Armed Forces have never had a “voluntary assignment policy.” Such a concept would hinder combat readiness and effectiveness, especially in an era which necessitates a readily deployable force... Commissioners believed that if women were assigned to positions on a voluntary basis and men were assigned involuntarily, animosity between the genders would occur and cohesion could suffer as a result. (p. 3)

[5] Support for this comes from an interesting source:

B[rigadier] G[eneral] Pat Foote has long been one of Washington D.C.’s most outspoken advocates of women in combat. When she testified before the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces on June 25, 1992, Foote said that “the services should move now to strike down every gender barrier to service which remains in place.”

BG Sam Cockerman, USA (Ret.) a member of the Commission, asked Gen. Foote whether she thought her views on combat were representative of enlisted women. Foote replied, In all honesty, Commissioner, I cannot think of a single occasion when an enlisted woman assigned to any unit that I commanded or at Fort Belvoir brought this issue out as a major concern… It is an issue which has never been a concern to the enlisted women I know.” (Center for Military Readiness: February, 1997)

[6] The Soviet Union, Germany and Israel have each, to a different degree, utilized women in close combat situations, but did so only when a serious threat to their national survival existed. After the crisis passed, each of the nations adopted policies which excluded women from combat. (Presidential Commission, 1993: C-211)

[7] My account here will draw heavily on the book Fall from Glory by military reporter Gregory Vistica. Vistica evidently had been working on this book for some time before the Tailhook scandal developed. Its original focus was the deterioration in the Navy brought about Reagan’s Navy Secretary John Lehman. In large part, Vistica appears to support the feminist perspective on Tailhook. Nonetheless, he is first and foremost a reporter, and lets his material speak for itself. It is his material that I will be using, though often I will differ from his interpretation of it.

[8] The Executive Summary of the Department of Defense’s Inspector General’s Report noted that “Many attendees viewed the annual conference as a type of “free fire zone” wherein they could act indiscriminately and without fear of censure or retribution in matters of sexual conduct and drunkenness.” The Report substantiates these charges beyond the possibility of doubt. Specifically they substantiate charges of (1) indecent assault, (2) indecent exposure, (3) conduct unbecoming an officer, (4) dereliction of duty, as well as failure to act in a proper leadership capacity. (Vander Schaaf, 1993: II-1) as well as alcohol abuse (V-3).

[9] Here again, Laura Miller’s (1995) research indicates that this is not a view widely held by Army women:

When activists discuss sexual harassment and the combat exclusion policy, they usually argue that harassment would decrease if women had the same policy as men because women would then be viewed as equal contributors. Because I detected that women rejected this reasoning, I added a question to a later wave of surveys asking: “ How would opening combat roles to women affect the amount of sexual harassment in the military?” Of the 472 responses from women, 61 percent said sexual harassment would increase, 28 percent said it would make little difference, 2 percent said sexual harassment would decrease, and 9 percent were unsure. (Men’s responses were virtually identical.) (Miller, 1994:31 -- emphasis in the original)

[10] There is an aspect of this that is worthy of mention. U.S. Military pilots are officers, but they follow a different career path than other officers. While other officers command units from the outset and progress through their careers by commanding larger units, pilots generally do not have command responsibility for the first ten years of their careers (Vander Schaff, 1993: X: 1). The necessity to act as figures of authority is therefore reduced in their case. The necessity to act as figures of authority is therefore reduced in their case. This may somewhat serve to mitigate the severity of the charge of "conduct unbecoming an officer."

[11] With regard to the connection between sexuality and the motivation of naval aviators, with specific reference to a ribald songbook, Vistica said this:

The songbook may not have been issued as part of every sailor’s ditty bag, but it made its way through the officers corps and became something of a collector’s item four years later at the height of the Tailhook scandal. Naval aviators thought the title, Bull’s Brigade, was fitting. They believed Bull truly understood what made them tick and why they had such an attraction to heavy drinking and unusual sexual fantasies. They felt that each time they went aloft they were cheating death. And they were proud of the fact that they lived dangerously. It was the glue of their camaraderie and the main reason for their lust. Bull was one of them and understood how real their fears could be and how difficult it was for male aviators to express them. Navy psychiatrists had even tried to explain the emotional makeup of a flier in an internal study titled “Sex and the Naval Aviator.” It was so provocative that the Navy decided not to release it. (p. 266)

[12] It is interesting in this regard to contrast their case with the more recent case of Lieutenant Kelly Flinn, accused of adultery and disobeying an order. One of the main features in the discussion of Flinn’s case was the investment the Air Force had made in her training. This was in noticeable contrast to the lack of discussion of the Navy’s investment in the training of the individuals condemned at Tailhook, a group made up not of low ranking officers, but of personnel up to the very top of the uniformed hierarchy

[13] There is reason to believe that Tailhook and its aftermath have, indeed, damaged the capacity of the Navy to fulfill its mission. For example, in the aforementioned speech, James Webb said that

I was recently shown a most disturbing statistic., Last year, 53 percent of the post-command Commanders in naval aviation left the Navy rather than continue their careers. In no other year, ever, has that number reached even 25 percent. These were the cream, the very future of the Navy, officers who had performed for two decades in a manner that marked them as potential admirals. They took their commands, they saw how the Navy is being led, and they walked.

Again, this is Vistica reporting on the state of morale after Tailhook:

As the events of that summer rocked the Navy’s boat, Commander David Tyler, a squadron commander at Miramar [Naval Air Station] whose reputation for honesty and integrity did indeed epitomize the words “officer and a gentleman,” said, “We were willing to fly into combat against insurmountable odds. Even if the pilots knew there was no helicopter to rescue them when they were shot down, they would do it with a cheery ‘Aye, aye, yes sir.’ Right now, if their admiral asks them to do the same mission, they would say, ‘Why? You lead the way, Admiral.’” (p. 361)

[14] That day he [Sean O’Keefe, “the Pentagon’s thirty-eight-year-old bean counter” and Secretary of the Navy after Howard] pulled back the promotions of two popular admirals: Jerry Tuttle, who was nominated to be the Navy’s top aviator, and Joe Prueher, who was slated to get three stars and command of the Third Fleet in San Diego. Tuttle had signed off on a newsletter that his staff put out on electronic warfare that contained an innocuous joke comparing been and women. He apologized for this insensitivity, but it was too late. A short while later, the man who had been the brains behind some of the most unorthodox naval operations during the Lehman era retired. (p. 357)

[15] This is from the testimony of U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. (ret.) Jeanne M. Holm before a congressional committee investigating sexual harassment in the military:

As gross as the conduct of the men in the third floor [Tailhook convention] gauntlet was, the behavior of the admiral on the symposium panel was even more egregious. When asked by a female pilot when women would be allowed to fly combat missions, the male fliers jeered. Instead of taking the situation in hand and giving her the answer she deserved, the admiral apparently ducked his responsibilities by ducking under the table, treating the question as a joke. (Holm, 1992)

[16] In fact, they have been lowered throughout the armed services, especially in the area of physical conditioning. For example, to meet the Army minimum requirement for the 2-mile run, a man aged 17-21 has to finish in 15 minutes, 54 seconds. To get a perfect score of 100, he has to finish in 11:54. To meet the minimum, a woman that age has to finish in only 18:54. For a perfect score, she only has to finish in 14:54. In other words, her "perfect" score is only one minute less than the bare minimum for men. The only physical conditioning standard which is the same for men and women is sit-ups. (USA Today: September 26, 1997).

Lowering physical conditioning standards is an inevitable consequences of bringing women in large numbers into the military. They simply are not as strong as men. This is from testimony before the Presidential Commission:

Robertson and Trent reported the overlap in dynamic strength scores between Navy men and women was seven percent (i.e., 17 of 239 women had higher strength scores than the lowest scoring men). (C-4)

Perhaps more important, these differences are not amenable to reduction by training and conditioning, since the capacity to build muscle is dependent on the level of androgens, which are much lower among women. (C-5) Requiring women to meet the high physical demands of the Academy would have reduced their numbers to extremely low levels.

[17] Frequencies of “unwanted sexual advances” were 4% at the Naval Academy, 5% at the Air Force Academy, and 14% at West Point. These are frequencies of women indicating such events at least a couple of times a month.

[18] This is from the web site of the American Psychological Association (http://www.apa.org/pubinfo/harass.html):

According to the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission:

Harassment on the basis of sex is a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and Title IX of the Education Amendment. Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature constitute sexual harassment when:

· Submission to such conduct is made either explicitly or implicitly a term or condition of an individual's employment;

· submission to or rejection of such conduct by an individual is used as the basis for employment decisions affecting such individual; or

· such conduct has the purpose or effect of substantial interfering with an individual's work performance or creating an intimidating, hostile or offensive work environment.

(American Psychological Association: 1997)

[19] To be sure, the idea that women do not belong in combat was not entirely due to the idea that men should protect women. Vistica’s account leaves little doubt that it was also due to such ideas as that women were seen as threatening the male possession of jobs. But these are not necessarily exclusive. These jobs were not emotionally neutral sources of income. They were deeply tied in with these men’s conceptions of their worth, as I shall show, and their sense of their worth was intimately connected with their need to protect women. The fact that men thought they could do this work better than women, and that the presence of women was causing a deterioration in standards and effectiveness were serious issues. The fact that they were blended together as “antiwoman,” and seen as the equivalent of sexual assault, is a phenomenon that stands in sore need of explanation.

[20] For a similar view, see Patai (1998)

[21] Doing justice to Morris’ involved and complex argument will have to wait for another occasion. I cannot let this one go by without noting, however, that this powerful adviser on military matters holds up the Peruvian Shining Path Communist Party as a model of gender integration in the military, noting a report that these guerrillas commit less rape among civilians than the Peruvian military. Whether there is any connection between gender integration and the notorious capacity of this group to commit murder is not a matter that she addresses, though her argument that a fighting group may be energized by seeing itself as a force of good against evil may be related.

[22]See Lacan’s (1977) essay The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience, where he argues that the child’s experience of seeing itself in a mirror creates a fundamental element of the structure of its personality.

[23] The idea that male sexuality is the equivalent of rape takes perhaps its purest for in the work of Andrea Dworkin. For example, she says: "The fact is that the process of killing - both rape and battery are steps in that process- is the prime sexual act for men in reality and/or in imagination," (Dworkin, 1993: p.22).

It would be easy to think of writers like Dworkin as aberrations, but in fact she is not far from the main stream, as was indicated by a review essay in which University of Chicago philosophy professor Martha Nussbaum (1997) in The New Republic, hailing her as a prophet. To be sure, the view that male sexuality is rape is often embedded in the idea that under "patriarchy" women are so subjugated that they cannot give meaningful consent. This is an idea, of course, that the whole argument of this paper is directed against. The premise of the argument, moreover, is that women get so little from sex with men that they do it only because of coercion. This by itself is tantamount to the idea that male sexuality borders on rape in any circumstance.