House of Eratosthenes

It is the answer consistently provided by the weak-minded, in response to just about every problem under the sun. In this case, the sexual-assault arrest of the Chief of the Air Force’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response branch, which makes it clear at least to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel that the military needs “cultural change” or something…hmmmm…

Well, when the officer in charge of sexual assault prevention is arrested for sexual assault, yes something is heap-big busted. With all respect to the brave men and women who attend to sexual-assault-prevention for a living, both within & outside of the military, the first thought in my head is — spin it however you want, the job is to pester people about things that may or may not be consequential, now what kind of personality do you think that’s going to attract? In other words, in my view, the haranguing is what leads to the problem. You’ve got people who are there to do whatever the organization exists to do, in this case, military stuff. “Kill people and break things,” as they say. And then you have other people who are there to do something else, namely, to create problems for the people who are there to attend to the primary goal. Okay, let’s say to “monitor and educate” them. To put up some barricades. Hoops for them to jump through. Which is not to say the entire exercise is illegitimate; the point is, the arrest is a tip-off to me that things have gone too far.

Which I guess is why I’m not running the military. Hagel sees what happened, and his answer is to double-down.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has ordered a close-up and comprehensive inspection of all military offices and workplaces worldwide to root out any “materials that create a degrading or offensive work environment.”

The extraordinary searches will be similar to those the Air Force conducted last year and prompted officers to scour troops’ desks and cubicles in search of photos, calendars, magazines, screen-savers, computer files and other items that might be considered degrading toward women.

The inspections will now target soldiers, sailors and Marines. They come amid heightened concern about sexual assault in the military and a new Defense Department report that suggests more than 70 troops every day experience some type of sexual assault.

I find this infuriating in so many ways. I’ll confine my remarks to the most obvious objection: If I’m in the military and using a computer, it’s very unlikely that a picture of my wife in a swimsuit on one of our vacations as my desktop background, is going to inspire me to sexually assault someone. If it does happen, the vacation-picture is probably not what caused it. Real men don’t assault women.

And there’s the rub, you see. Implicit in a message of “bring sexual assaults to a stop by restricting images,” is another message logically derived from the first, that all men must be sexual aggressors, ticking time bombs just waiting to be set off like a bull seeing a red cloth. It’s the old feminist trope about all men being potential rapists.

Make-women-wear-more-clothes, in real life and in images, comic books, cartoons, film — someone should compile statistics on this little plan-from-idiots that keeps bobbling to the surface. It’s tried a whole lot, and it never seems to yield good results. No, that doesn’t mean you can have good results whenever the nice looking women are stripped down to nearly-naked. Although I wouldn’t mind trying that, but in general, there are no shortcuts to good results. That’s why they’re valued. But whether the goal is to bring sexual harassment/assault to a stop, or to get more people to watch a movie, or to make feminists stop complaining (!) — I can’t help but notice whenever the answer is “women wear more clothes,” the achievement always falls short. Naturally, I have to wonder why the solution continues to be proposed, especially when we deal with problems that have nothing to do with it.

But Hagel is SECDEF and I’m not. Going to make those military work environments G-rated. And, the pinups have to come down. This creates issues: What if Rosie the Riveter’s image was still affixed to everything? That’s a pinup. Whether it’s “degrading” seems at first like a no-go, but it’s really a subjective matter of judgment, and those are always hazardous during these all-or-nothing sweeps.

What if the guy making the first round of audits says an image can stay, and the second one says something different? Or vice-versa?

So time will have to be spent on this. And I’m going to go ahead and assume, some tiny, petty questions are going to become sinkholes for rather massive amounts of this time.

Somehow, though, I’m sure it all boils down to my country being safer, in ways I can’t quite understand…

Seriously, I don’t want to make a new rule that all the women have to be running around in skimpy underthings. “All” means “all,” however easy that may be to forget sometimes, and there are some women I just don’t want to see that way. But I’m getting excessively tired of the reverse, the pinhead-solution that “they should all wear more.” Yeah, it does remind me of the Taliban. That’s the thinking. “If men can see her cleavage, earthquakes might happen” and what-not. So that’s annoying, because I think of it as anti-American, and rather twelfth-century. But also, it’s annoying because it seems to be associated rather permanently with failure.

It’s deteriorated into a “red flag,” of sorts, that imbeciles are in charge.

It’s the old feminist trope about all men being potential rapists.

Which is the even older Marxist trope about one’s consciousness deriving from one’s social being.

I suppose this is why I just can’t understand liberalism. I “get it” well enough, I suppose, on an intellectual level — I can understand the reasoning behind such of their positions as are reasoned — but I just can’t get in their headspace. Guys like Chuck Hagel truly believe that only guys like Chuck Hagel have impulse control. Or the ability to reason and make judgments. Only he and guys like him — liberals — have “agency,” as the academic jargon goes.

The rest of us? Conscious automata. Or, really, just automata — stimulus, response; input, output. They assume that non-liberals see only objects, and that an object, once seen, must be compulsively used.

Which actually sounds a lot like the liberal worldview, come to think of it….
- Severian | 05/09/2013 @ 06:37
Thanks for writing on this.
I started up a few times and couldn’t figure out how to write it.

That’s the point I meant to make though. Looking at pretty girls is normal. It’s not a sign of a sexual assaulter. Yet, THAT’s the answer to the problem?

Take down the posters! Hide the magazines! And they wonder why people protested having women in the military to start with. Military folks didn’t want to have to deal with this crap.
- tgoon | 05/09/2013 @ 11:26
Turning the military into a grade school playground.

Yep.

You’re going to attract warriors with that approach.
.
- TMI | 05/09/2013 @ 14:32
Sexual assaults are up the last….what…couple years? I say, take down the pictures of the Commander in Chief. There is obviously a correlation.

Hozabout we add pictures of say…Janet Napolitano, Hillary Clinton…just about every Democrat female member of Congress…I know what kind of effect that would have on me.
- tim | 05/10/2013 @ 05:04
The solution is clear: an all-female military.

War is a man’s game, and as noted, men are bad. Therefor, war is bad.

If the military is all-female, not only will sexual assault in the ranks cease to be a problem, but wars will be fought more humanely, if at all.
- djmoore | 05/11/2013 @ 07:43
[…] House Of Eratosthenes wonders about sexual assaults in the military […]
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[…] Something else I’d like to get out of the way before we go further. I can’t prove it, but I’ve got a feeling Katy Brand doesn’t look as good in her underwear as Alice Eve looks in her underwear. And, let me go out even further on the limb and speculate: That’s what we’re really arguing about here. That, and one other thing: When it’s thought of as a solution to any & all problems to simply require the good-looking women to cover up all their…. […]
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