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my birthday is on thursday so i'm using it as an excuse to raise money for my cause.

the 3rd annual san francisco walk against rape is on april 26th and i'm $1465 short of my $2500 goal. if you have a few extra bucks to share, please send it my way. you can donate here.

thank you!!!

Trigger warning. The following videos of two local news stories may be triggering for experiences of sexual assault.

(Via J.H. Huebert @ LewRockwell.com Blog 2008-02-03 and Balloon Juice 2008-02-03.)

Hope Steffey, 47, of Salem, Ohio, is suing for compensation from a gang of men and women who raped her.

In October 2006, in Salem, Ohio, Steffey, 47, was assaulted by one of her cousins in a domestic dispute and knocked unconscious. The family called 911 for help; a sheriff’s deputy named Officer Richard T. Gurlea came out to the house to do some serving and protecting. He asked Hope Steffey for ID, and she mistakenly gave him the wrong driver’s license — one of her late sister’s old licenses, which she kept in her wallet as a memento after her sister died. The cop noticed that it was the wrong license, and, after he got the right one, he refused to give Steffey back her sister’s old license. When she became distraught and pleaded with him to give back the license, Officer Richard T. Gurlea, sanctimoniously instructed her to calm down, ran a criminal check on her real license (which came back completely clean), demanded to search her car, still refused to give her back her keepsake, and finally, public servant that he is, snapped back Shut up about your dead sister. Now treating Steffey, the victim of a violent crime who had called for his help and protection, as if she were herself a criminal, he escalated the confrontation, and, when Hope Steffey dared to point at the pocket where he was holding her keepsake and to shout at him about how important it was to her, Officer Richard T. Gurlea courageously defended himself by grabbing the assault victim he had been dispatched to help, slamming her face-down on the hood of his car, and shouting are you going to stop? Then he threw her down, pinned her to the ground, and handcuffed her. Then he arrested her for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, and took her to the Stark County jail. This is what happened after she was locked up in the jail:

While they were booking her, one of the guards asked her Have you thought about harming yourself? Bewildered and brutalized, Hope Steffey asked for clarification: Now or ever? The purpose of this question is in order to give the jailers an opportunity to label you as crazy for legal purposes, which, in their minds, is reason enough to inflict on you absolutely any kind of cruelty, violence, or invasion of your privacy, and then, to crown all, to turn around and call your torture and humiliation a precaution taken For Your Own Safety. In this case, apparently the jailers figured that Now or ever? was close enough for government work, so what they did was get a gang of male and female guards to surround Hope Steffey and drag her to a cell, then have least two male officers pin her down and hold her arms (she was still handcuffed throughout the ordeal) while female officers stripped her naked and searched her over her screams of protest. After this sadistic sexual assault, they left her locked in her cell, totally naked, without even a blanket to cover herself. She eventually wrapped herself in toilet paper from her cell’s commode, in a desperate effort to keep herself warm and regain a little bit of privacy.

Hope Steffey has filed suit in federal court against the Gurlea, sheriff Tim Swanson, and fifteen unnamed jail guards. Here’s how the sheriff’s office has responded:

In a written response to the lawsuit, Swanson and his deputies deny wrongdoing and maintain the arresting deputy, Richard T. Gurlea Jr., and others at the jail are allowed to use reasonable force to make an arrest and protect prisoners in their custody.

The department does not deny that Steffey was stripped of her clothes and left naked in a cell for six hours.

The defense has asked a judge to dismiss the claims.

—Canton Repository (2008-02-02): Sheriff responds to strip-search video

Tim Swanson’s idea of reasonable force and protecting prisoners may be different from yours. If so, you can share your thoughts with him at his office phone number, (330) 430-3800.

There’s a lot more that I might say about this, if I were able to keep on typing. But honestly I can’t. I first learned about this case yesterday, but to write this post I watched the videos over again and I now am shaking so badly with anger and despair that I just can’t keep banging on with the usual stuff. If you want analysis, it’d be about what I said in Rapists on patrol, Law and Orders #6: Pigs at the trough, and Corrections officers; if you imagine this is Yet Another Isolated Incident, then compare it with the more or less identical treatment of Beryl Wilson, Michael Moran, and Ricardo Montalvo by the Kalamazoo City Police, or, Christ, just google around for a few minutes until you’re satisfied. But I’m not about to dignify the fucking pigs in Stark County, or their hordes of freelance sado-fascist police enablers — fouling any Internet or media outlet they can find with putrefying excuses like She gave him a fake ID! She went psycho! They did what they had to to carry out their policies! She’s just poisoning the well so she can shake them down in court! etc. — by pretending as if there were any need, or any room, for debating this. It’s obvious, and it’s caught on tape, and there is no possible excuse. Those who are willing to stand up, in the name of Law and Order and Official Procedures, for officially-sanctioned gang rape, have already done much more to reveal the absolute depravity of their position than anything I could ever say.

Further reading:

• GT 2007-12-21: Rapists on patrol
• GT 2007-12-02: Men in Uniform
• GT 2007-10-28: Corrections officers
• GT 2007-10-02: Public schooling

Because as usual, I can’t get through the Typekey gauntlet. So here’s the question I want to ask about this post:

What is the empirical foundation for the claim that “creating a culture which values genuine female sexual pleasure can help stop rape”?

Every study on rape that I’m aware of links it to male dominance and low female status. It’s an expression of misogyny and control, not a case of crossed signals about sexual enjoyment.

Anthropological analysis shows that levels of rape and other male violence on women are strongly correlated to the level of male dominance in a society (Sanday 1976, for example). Repression of women’s sexuality is also a symptom of male dominance, of course, but any correlation between that and rape is second-hand. Counter-examples prove the point. The Minangkabau, for example, are quite restrictive of women’s sexuality, but rape is virtually unknown because women in their society have extremely high status (they traditionally refer to their culture as a matriarchy). On the other hand, there have been male-dominated societies where female sexual pleasure was assumed to be normal and good (no puritanical body anxiety at all), but rape was still common because women’s status was very low.

Valuing female sexual pleasure is a good thing. But how is it going to stop rape? The corollary to your thesis would seem to be that men commit rape because female sexual pleasure isn’t valued. And I would really like to know what the evidence is for that.

From the story about Huckabee’s parole of rapist Wayne DuMond:

It has all the markings of salacious, tabloidian detail that can haunt a candidate, a lawmaker, an elected official, who walks and stalks the halls of criminal justice, who has, as he has said, weighed decisions on whether to impose capital punishment, and has ordered death.

Salacious?

Main Entry: sa·la·cious
Function: adjective
1 : arousing or appealing to sexual desire or imagination : lascivious
2 : lecherous, lustful

DuMond was convicted of raping a 17-year old girl. After he was paroled he went on to rape and murder two more women.

I’m not feeling turned on, are you?

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UPDATE: The magic of the tubes. The Times has removed the word “salacious” from the article. Poof!

Somewhere in Alabama, an all-male gang of elite cops from New Jersey spent some down-time from protecting and serving by getting off on sexy drunken displays of power and violence.

HOBOKEN, N.J. — The Hoboken Police Department’s SWAT team has been disbanded, just days after officials learned of racy photos showing the unit’s commander and other officers cavorting with waitresses from a Hooters restaurant in Alabama.

Judging from the selection from the photo slide show, it seems that these photos involve more than just a trip to Hooters, and include some that are more explicit than just racy.

On the same day Hoboken’s new public safety director was sworn in, he gave the city’s police chief orders to disband the SWAT team and to order the lieutenant at the center of the controversy to desk duty.

After seeing the photos of Lt. Angelo Andriani and other members of the Hoboken police SWAT, newly appointed Public Safety Director Bill Bergin said he had to act decisively.

Bergin listed his reasons for disbanding the SWAT team in a phone interview with Newschannel 4’s Pei-Sze Cheng: The brazenness of the whole situation, because everything in the photographs, which I was shocked at, had Hoboken all over it, from the uniforms, to the police car, the bus that was involved.

Bergin ordered the police chief to disband the SWAT team and to have Andriani return from his extended vacation and assign him to desk duty immediately.

The photos were taken last year on a return trip from Louisiana, where the Hoboken officers helped with the Hurricane Katrina relief effort.

They show the waitresses holding shotguns and other weapons belonging to officers under Andriani’s command.

—WNBC (2007-11-16): N.J. SWAT Team Disbanded After Racy Hooters Photos Emerge

Elsewhere in New Jersey, another man in uniform, Anthony Senatore, used his power as a professional narc to extort sexual favors from a woman he’d pressured into becoming a drug informant. Then, after she tried to put a stop to it, he stalked her, forced his way into her house, and raped her. After his victim filed a lawsuit, Senatore was reassigned to a desk job. Although the boss cops and everybody else do concede that Senatore repeatedly exploited his position to coerce sex from the woman, the state A.G. has decided to sweep it under the rug and declined to prosecute on the rape charge. This, apparently, is what passes for having found no wrongdoing on the officer’s part in the eyes of the (male) mayor and the (male) police chief.

JACKSON — The state Attorney General has decided not to prosecute a police detective who is accused, in a civil lawsuit, of raping a drug informant in 2005 and impregnating her with a son who was born eight months later, township officials confirmed Wednesday. Advertisement

The lawsuit filed last year by the informant, identified only as Jane Doe, still is pending in federal court. However, Mayor Mark A. Seda said Wednesday that the attorney general’s decision exonerates Officer Anthony Senatore.

Apparently they found no wrongdoing on the officer’s part, Seda said, adding that Senatore remains on the Jackson force but is no longer a detective.

… According to the lawsuit, Senatore enlisted Jane Doe in April 2005 as a drug informant, in exchange for money and prosecutorial considerations for her children and estranged husband, all of whom have been investigated by the Jackson police.

But soon after Jane Doe became an informant, the detective’s behavior changed, according to the suit.

By means of intimidation, threat, harassment, coercion and/or promises of judicial and prosecutorial consideration for plaintiff and her family, Senatore repeatedly propositioned and solicited plaintiff for sexual relations from late April through July 2005, the suit alleges.

During that time, he had sex with her in her home, in police vehicles and in wooded locations in and around Jackson, according to the suit.

When Jane Doe tried to break off the relationship, Senatore’s deviant, predatory behavior intensified, culminating in a savagely brutal rape in her home on July 25, 2005, according to the suit. As a result of that rape, the plaintiff became pregnant and gave birth to a son March 26, 2006, according to the suit.

The suit accuses the township, the police department and then-Public Safety Director Samuel DiPasquale of permitting and encouraging police officers, including Senatore, to sexually harass and have sex with female informants, female defendants and other women they encountered while on duty.

In case you were curious, this is how seriously the boys in blue take their job of protecting you and me from all the weirdoes and creeps running around out there:

Shortly after the suit was filed, Senatore was removed from the detective bureau and placed on administrative duty where his only responsibilities included paperwork, the mayor said.

… Senatore is now back in circulation as a patrolman, though, because the police department is short staffed, Seda said. He did not know whether the officer will be reinstated to the detective bureau.

But don’t worry. They are seriously concerned about how this predator’s pattern of bullying, sexual harassment, sexual coercion, and rape against a woman substantially under his legally-backed power — which they dignify as a relationship with an informant — will adversely affect their P.R., and maybe a court case. Senatore may be back patrolling the streets, but hey, they might consider adding a couple of clauses to their internal policies.

When an officer’s character is in question, it puts us at risk, Seda said. We didn’t want to give any criminal a loophole to get out of charges.

… With the Attorney General’s investigation complete, the town and the police department are looking into how Senatore was able to take advantage of his job and engage in a relationship with an informant [sic], Seda said.

That’s certainly something we wouldn’t want to see happen again, the mayor said. We’re looking at our policy internally to see what we can do to prevent that.

—Fraidy Reiss, Asbury Park Press (2007-11-08): Detective won’t be prosecuted; Detective won’t be prosecuted

(Stories via Lindsay Beyerstein 2007-11-17 and ACLU Blog 2007-11-17.)

I saw this in the news a few days ago, but didn’t post on it because it upset me too much. It upset me so much, in fact, that I had to spend two hours googling dolphin pictures in order to calm down.

But Shakespeare’s Sister is a better woman than I, and so she’s posted on the story of the prostitute who was gang-raped at gunpoint, and of the evil judge who reduced the charges to “theft of services”:

So there’s this judge. Her name—her name—is Teresa Carr Deni, and she’s a municipal judge in the Philadelphia Municipal Court. And recently, a defendant in her courtroom was accused of raping a prostitute at gunpoint—and inviting three of his friends to rape her, too. It might even have been more, except that when a fifth man arrived and was offered a turn, he asked why the girl was crying and declined to rape her while she wept and his friend pointed a gun at her, instead deciding to help her get dressed and leave.

The thing is, Judge Deni dropped all sex and assault charges at alleged gun-wielding gang-rapist Dominique Gindraw’s preliminary hearing. She decided he should be held on armed robbery for “theft of services.” Not only can prostitutes not be raped, according to Judge Deni, but calling what happened to the 20-year-old victim rape “minimizes true rape cases and demeans women who are really raped.”

Folks, you know my theory. Pretty soon they’ll start purging the dictionaries. Take the word “rape” right out.

One thing Shakes didn’t mention, but I will: Jill Porter, the Philly columnist who reported this business, isn’t exactly a paragon of enlightenment herself. In her original column she wrote:

Certainly the victims don’t inspire much sympathy. Why waste taxpayers’ money for what some people consider an occupational hazard? There are enough sympathetic victims without wasting time on prostitutes who ask for trouble, right?

But crimes are prosecuted not out of sympathy for victims, but to maintain the rule of law in a civilized society, to punish a criminal and prevent further crime.

Has feminism not made it to Pennyslvania yet? What the hell is going on up there? It’s bad enough that Judge Asswipe thinks prostitutes are sexual vending machines; now we’ve got the Voice of Conscience saying, why yes, prostitutes are unsympathic sluts who are just asking for trouble, but still, we need to hold the line on rape prosecutions in order to maintain the rule of law for the greater good.

Are people in Philadelphia walking around in bustle gowns and tailcoats and shit? Is it like 1889 up there? Horse-drawn carriages? Little boys in short pants? Is Dave Lennox standing on the corner in pair of overalls?

Dolphin pictures. Dolphin pictures.

I’ve written before about how the rape of women is an indissoluble part of war, but Professor Shortell makes the same point in about one-twentieth of the space. He quotes from this article in the New York Times about the war in Congo:

Every day, 10 new women and girls who have been raped show up at his hospital. Many have been so sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair.

As Prof. Shortell says: “Rape and torture aren’t accidents that happen on the fringes of war; they are the essence of war.”

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It is a conservative myth that men pay the price for war; that our brave boys are the ones who bear the burden of defending our whatever the fuck. I’m going to quote myself here, from a piece I wrote in February 2006 about Iraq:

Of course, the bigger point to be made here is that war exerts a profound and particular violence on women. Civilian females raped by maruading troops, female soldiers raped by their own comrades, military wives at home killed by their returning husbands — war and militarism hit women hard. This runs contrary to conventional wisdom, which holds that war is the special burden of men, the great sacrifice that males give for their country. Anti-feminists make a sort of fetish of this, claiming that war casualties are overwhelmingly male. That is, to put it politely, bullshit.

Despite the glorification of “our brave boys in uniform,” soldiers are not the main casualties of war. Civilian populations are. In the 20th century, 90 percent of all war deaths were unarmed women, children, and men.

I put that statement in bold because I think it needs to become a permanent fixture of everyone’s mental furniture. When we think about war, we need to think about its real effects. Forget John Wayne and Rambo; remember, instead, the citizens of Dresden, the women of Bosnia, the ash heaps/former humans of Hiroshima. Let’s say it one more time: soldiers are not the main casualties of war. Innocent civilians are.

Let us add now to that roster of raped and maimed civilians; let us add the Congo women lying in hospital beds with colostomy bags — colostomy bags, I tell you, because they have been so brutally raped their plumbing doesn’t even work anymore.

That’s what war is.

I haven’t been watching the Ken Burns documentary “The War,” but this post over at Heart’s got my attention:

Where in the name of all that is holy are the comfort women?

And it’s not just the “comfort” women; it’s all the enslaved and prostituted and raped women in that global apocalypse, that furnace of souls.

Heart includes the open letter to Ken Burns from Dr. Suki Falconberg, and I’m reproducing it here because I’d like you to read it in its entirety. I’d like you to read it and think about these women, think about what happens to women in war, think about what war means. What it really means.

By Dr. Suki Falconberg

9/28/07

‘The War,’ Mr. Burns, is the Yokosuka rape queues in August 1945, with GI’s lined up for blocks, two abreast, to get at the Japanese girls enslaved in ‘comfort stations’ for them—with the full cooperation of the American and Japanese authorities. Destitute, vulnerable girls were raped into unconsciousness as the men joked and laughed and jostled in line, waiting their turn. Some girls bled to death. Some committed suicide—that is, the lucky ones who could escape. Not one ‘comfort girl’ has told her story—due to shame. Why did you not tell this particular ‘intimate history’ of ‘The War,’ Mr. Burns? Especially since ‘usage’ of the girls was almost 100%. Why has the small detail that almost every GI in Japan, 1945, was a rapist escaped you? Why has this big ‘dirty secret’ of war never been covered?

‘The War,’ Mr. Burns, is the men who lined up to use the prostitutes on Hotel Street in Honolulu: women were raped 100 times a day—a different man entered the girl every three minutes. Why should I mourn these rapists when they were killed in the attack at Pearl Harbor? They slaughtered the bodies of these women in a fashion far more brutal than any bombing could ever be.

‘The War,’ Mr. Burns, is the widespread rape of French girls by GI’s after they ‘liberated’ Paris. Rape by American soldiers was so common that Eisenhower actually had to acknowledge it was happening, although he did nothing to stop it.

‘The War’ is the public parks in Palermo, where pimps considerately laid out mattresses so the GI’s could fuck starving Italian girls comfortably, for a dollar or two a turn.

‘The War’ is homeless, prostituted girls in Berlin doing it in the rubble for a few cents and agreeing to ‘share’ a GI bed so they would simply have a place to sleep that night. This, after they had already had the insides raped out of them by the invading Russian army and then were labeled ‘whores’ since it was a convenient way for the authorities to deal with these ‘ruined’ women.

The War’ is the village in Okinawa where GI’s raped every woman, girl, and child—the victims were too sick and starving to even try to run from their attackers.

‘The War,’ Mr. Burns, is the starvation prostitution forced upon tens of thousands of European and Japanese girls (some barely into their teens) by the ridiculous conflicts men create to display their phallic brutality. It is also the brothel attached to a military base in Arizona stocked with ‘worn-out whores’ and reserved exclusively for black solders, so that the white GI’s would not have to ‘contaminate’ their penises by raping the same prostitutes. Thousands of black GI’s passed through this brothel daily, and who knows what insane, pathetic creatures they left dead of rape and misery.

‘The War,’ Mr. Burns, is not your blind, masculine-centric vision of it, full of all these lies about valor and sacrifice and courage and nobility. There is little that is noble about the raping, war-making brute we call a soldier.

I was raped and prostituted by the U.S. Military. Why don’t you tell my story, Mr. Burns? It is far more ‘colorful’ than that of these soldiers who raped their way through Europe and Asia. Don’t you want to know what it’s like to be mounted by a line of soldiers? It is a hell beyond any possible imagining. It has happened to me.

My PTSD, as it is so fashionably called, is far more intense than that of the men who raped the life and dignity and beauty out of me. The emotional damage to the soldier does not compare to the suffering he inflicts on the women he ravages. War is never good for women. War sexually enslaves women. Men gain by war. They have the pleasure of rape: they mount starving women, ‘cheap whores,’ and take their pleasure, and the woman is silenced forever by her shame.

What a male abomination is not just your grandiose seven-part, tidy version of ‘The War,’ but PBS as well. You pretend to be enlightened but you are as blind and callous and cruel as the soldier rapists who destroyed the lives and bodies of so many women.

I looked at your so-called ‘companion volume’ to the series. The index carries not one reference to rape, prostitution, military brothels, or the sexual suffering of millions of woman. How can you overlook, ignore, dismiss a ‘fact’ so enormous? As if these women simply never existed.

What a betrayal of our raped bodies is your grand, masculine-centric version of ‘The War.’ Even your title indicates that you own this territory, this war, your war. It is, indeed, your war—since all wars are the product of your male phallic cruelty.

War never ‘liberates’ women. War sexually destroys us. It has never been otherwise. Briseis had no say in her fate as a ‘captive’ woman. No one asked her what she thought of the arrangement. No one has asked the Filipina women trafficked onto the fifty U.S. bases in Iraq what they think of their lot as the GI’s line up for their five-minute shot inside them.

Men make war because they love war. Don’t ask me to feel sorry for the way they ‘suffer.’

Dr. Suki Falconberg, Rape/Prostitution Survivor

Fifteen hours plus a companion volume and there’s not a single mention? Not a single one?

Now why would that be?

Polygamist leader convicted in Utah

The leader of a polygamous Mormon splinter group was convicted Tuesday of being an accomplice to rape for performing a wedding between a 19-year-old man and a 14-year-old girl.

Warren Jeffs, 51, could get life in prison...

He deserves no less.

LaVena Johnson, Private First Class, died near Balad, Iraq, on July 19, 2005. She was 19 years old.

According to the Army, her death was a suicide, the result of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Uh huh.

Here’s the evidence in the case:

• Two loose front teeth and a “busted lip” that had to be reconstructed by the funeral home, though these were not mentioned in the Army autopsy.
• A dislocated shoulder, though this apparently wasn’t mentioned in the Army autopsy either.
• Severe bruising on her body, ditto.
• The absence of psychological indicators of suicidal thoughts; indeed, testimony that LaVena was happy and healthy prior to her death.
• Indications, via residue tests, that LaVena may not even have handled the weapon that killed her.
• A blood trail outside the tent where Lavena’s body was found .
• Indications that someone attempted to set LaVena’s body on fire.

The Johnson family and their supporters have been petitioning the Army to re-open its investigation, but so far the Army is distinctly uninterested in doing so. “Suicide,” says the Army. Open-and-shut case.

Uh huh.

Dr. John Johnson believes that his daughter’s murder (and surely that’s what it was) occurred in connection with a sexual assault. Either LaVena was raped and murdered in one attack, or she was raped and then later murdered in retribution for reporting it.

Here’s Dr. Johnson talking about his daughter:

What Dr. Johnson doesn’t say in that clip is why he thinks sexual assault was involved, so I’ll tell you why: because our female soldiers in Iraq are getting abused and raped in astounding numbers.

Sexual assault in the military isn’t new: studies of female veterans from Vietnam to the first Gulf War found that 30% had been raped and 90% sexually assaulted. And every indication is that it’s even worse in Iraq. Women make up a bigger percentage of our forces over there than they have in any previous war; something like 1 out of 7 American soldiers in Iraq is female. These women are right there in combat alongside the guys, riding in the tanks, doing the searches, facing the same dangers. But the shared risks don’t mean that the male soldiers are inspired to treat their female comrades as comrades. “Meat” is more like it:

Spc. Mickiela Montoya, 21, who was in Iraq with the National Guard in 2005, took to carrying a knife with her at all times. “The knife wasn’t for the Iraqis,” she told me. “It was for the guys on my own side.”

“There are only three kinds of female the men let you be in the military: a bitch, a ho or a dyke,” said Montoya, the soldier who carried a knife for protection. “This guy out there, he told me he thinks the military sends women over to give the guys eye candy to keep them sane. He said in Vietnam they had prostitutes to keep them from going crazy, but they don’t have those in Iraq. So they have women soldiers instead.”

In the current Iraq war, which Pickett spent refueling and driving trucks over the bomb-ridden roads, she was one of 19 women in a 160-troop unit. She said the men imported cases of porn, and talked such filth at the women all the time that she became worn down by it. “We shouldn’t have to think every day, ‘How am I going to go out there and deal with being harassed?’” she said. “We should just have to think about going out and doing our job.”

Women soldiers in Iraq are in so much danger from rape by their own male colleagues that they are routinely instructed never to go the latrines or showers without a female buddy (or several). And it’s not just the so-called bad apples who commit these crimes. Commanding officers, team leaders, sergeants, lowly GIs — they all get in on the rape action. The obstacles to even reporting these assaults are so high that the vast majority of perpetrators get off scot free. Meanwhile the victims — those who have the courage to report what happened to them — are routinely ostracized and penalized for being “traitors.”

Given all that, it’s no surprise that the Army isn’t even remotely interested in justice for LaVena Johnson.

Well, screw that.

Here’s the petition you can sign demanding that the Army re-open the case. And here’s the website devoted to the case, where you can find a list of suggested further actions. And here, once again, is the post at Shakespeare’s Sister, which is how I learned about the story.

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One more thing here, which I’m putting below the fold, as it were, so as not to get my rant poo all over the LaVena Johnson story and thus distract readers from their God-given duty to go sign the fucking petition. And that’s this: every time somebody suggests that all the raping of our female soldiers in Iraq is the result of the stress of combat and the way war turns people into predators, I wanna get up out of this blog and whack that somebody upside the head. Cause dig it: our male soldiers aren’t assaulting each other, aren’t expressing their angst by attacking each other, are they? And our female soldiers aren’t assaulting male soldiers, aren’t ganging up to attack male soldiers. The stress of combat applies to everybody over there, but the rape violence is unidirectional and specific in its target: male soldiers assaulting female soldiers. And that’s because hatred of women, violence towards women, is interwoven into the fucking DNA of Western machismo and Western military culture. Women are the “other,” they are the despicable thing, the non-masculine thing, the thing to be used and abused, conquered and destroyed. I’m not a veteran but I grew up on military bases, and there is no more misogynistic culture on earth.

And that’s why, to be honest, whenever I hear the usual pablum about “supporting our brave men and women in uniform,” etc., I do a little virtual puke. I respect the women over there and some of the men, but I know damn well that a large percentage of the male soldiers in our military are pure grade-A asshats.