Feminist Peace Network

Celina R. DeLeon has an excellent piece on Alternet about the case of Suzanne Swift, a military police officer who was court-martialed for going AWOL instead of returning to a military unit where she was sexually abused. Swift, who suffers from PTSD was released last week after 30 days in jail. In accordance with the deal she made with the military, while she won’t be demoted, Swift will have to serve out the rest of her 19 months of military service and may be sent back to Iraq. She also had to sign a statement saying she wasn’t raped in Iraq.

As DeLeon’s article reports, there were 2374 cases of sexual assault in the military during the last calendar year. As unacceptable as that is, the military’s response to these cases is even more unacceptable. And of course the problem is certainly not limited to the U.S. military, a story in recent days reports 300 cases of sexual assault involving U.N. peacekeepers between January, 2004 and November 2006. We could go on, but the bottom line is, where there is a military, there is sexual assault. The problem of course is that the link between sexual violence and militarism goes back to the beginnings of patriarchy.

As Stan Goff points out, male euphemisms for referring to penises invariably describe what a penis can do to a woman, such as,

“–I’d like to hit that (”hit” as act of aggression, “that” as objectification).

–He shot his load (gun metaphor).I knocked the bottom out of that pussy (penis as an instrument to wreck a “thing,” woman reduced to an instrumental body part).

–Bob added her to his list of conquests (self-explanatory). He made her (”he” is the subject, she is the object to be taken).”

Then Goff asks us to reverse our thinking and look at the sexualized language that we use for war and agression,

“–We’re going to pop it to the enemy.

–Our forces will penetrate here.

–He made that guy his bitch.

–Abu Ghraib.”

Goff offers a number of excellent suggestions for how men can substantively work to change this dynamic, perhaps the best,

“Stop saying clueless shit about sex that makes sex an unmitigated good (in reaction to the theocratic right’s squeamishness about sex). It might sound liberated if you are still trying to shock you aging parents, but it erases women’s experience of sex as often obligatory, manipulative, humiliating, and even frightening — one of the practices in a system where they are on the wrong end of social power. A recent article by Joe Garifoli in the San Francisco Chronicle, called “Anti-war couple conceive new way to generate peace,” is a perfect example.

Living on their houseboat off the Marin County coast, anti-war activists Donna Sheehan and her partner, Paul Reffel, concocted a way for the world to communally create a lot of peaceful vibes.They want everyone to have an orgasm on the same day.

They go on to say, “If you’re experiencing pleasure, you’re not engaging in aggressive, destructive behavior.”

Really? Does that mean, asks my friend De, that the rape of 14-year-old Abeer Qassim, in which three men apparently had their peacemaking orgasms, contributed to world peace?”

The bottom line is that the military will persist in punishing the victims of sexual assault while at the same time sanctimoniously testifying and producing reports to the effect that they plan to institute changes. But as Goff correctly points out, until we change the way in which we value and speak of women’s lives, this will not end because to do so is to challenge the bedrock of our patriarchal system that the military defends.

Please be sure to visit Suzanne Swift’s website for ways in which you can support both her and her family.

Filed under: Uncategorized, Atrocities, Commentary