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It's What Straight Men Do to Each Other |
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When the Clinton administration oversaw the official codification of the US military policy of "Don't ask, don't tell," it was really making explicit what's been in sync with the real intentions of military policy toward gay men and lesbians. Everyone knew that there had always been gay men doing their duty competently, and even heroically, but the Pentagon and its supporters didn't want to show publicly that there were any soldiers who didn't fit their picture of masculinized, fully-male-gender-conditioned men.
In a militaristic, war based society such as ours, the military is the measure of what it is to be a real man. So what the Marines want is just "a few good men." That masculine role begins with boyhood's message of "beat or be beaten," and continues with the training that a true win in life can only come at another man's expense. There's no hope for the boy or man who would ever show his vulnerability to another man. Competition for competence, strength, prowess, and the other marks of grown manhood gets desperate, if not ruthless. Men bond together in teams to beat, defeat, or kill another group of men. There's no "win-win" solution in manhood. Beating a "girl" doesn't count as manly. Men want admiration from others. And there's no better way to "get" another man than to shame his manhood. What starts with "cry baby" and "girly boy" continues as "fag" and "queer." The only counterpunch in conditioned masculinity for having one's manhood shamed is to shame back, to restore one's manly honor by escalating the payback. An eye for an eye is just not enough in the struggle for manhood's respect. And apologies and asking for forgiveness are signs of weakness (read that effeminacy). The long history of conditioned masculinity in patriarchal societies is filled with military examples where it wasn't enough to wipe out a people or defeat another army. The real men had to humiliate the other men in order to maintain a manly status. They had to pay back a threat of shame these enemies represented.
So it continues today with the good ole USA as the photos and videos come out of Iraq. Manhood and its military solution still include the shaming of the enemy's manhood to shore up one's own. The official response is that these acts represent the actions of a few bad apples, while the evidence widens - pictures of men naked, in poses considered unmanly (read gay), on leashes, masturbating, even exposed in front of a woman. One after another, the actions and souvenir pictures to remember the acts are meant to humiliate the prisoners' manhood. The International Committee of the Red Cross reports that the abuse is widespread and has continued for months, maybe a year. Defenders of the prisoner abuse say too much is made of this when "our soldiers" are being killed and tortured (read, their, and our country's, manhood have been shamed worse). So, in order to pay back the shaming, Iraqi dissidents, caught also in the manhood code, must restore their honor. What could be worse than such humiliations? Maybe public executions. Or who knows? The escalation continues as "We can't let them get away with that" seeks to restore manhood's honor on both sides. And it can't end until all are dead, unable to revenge manhood's honor. "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," Gandhi said, "and the whole world's blind and toothless." But were it only "an eye for an eye" equality. This isn't about equal pay back. This is about restoring manly honor. The manly military can no longer ignore what's been going on. It's public now, and the public is asking where this has come from. So the military moves into damage control, denying that this represents a "written policy." At first, don't ask or don't tell about the abuse worked. But no longer. This is manhood trying to cure a problem that's deeper than any written policy. But conditioned manhood itself is guilty. It's about how we raise young human babies to turn them into cultural warriors, how we force them to value this manhood code. This is about the nature of our inhuman core values, which once again have come home to roost. This is about an institution that represents everything we mean by a manhood that is desperately straight-acting, straight-looking, straight-feeling, straight-thinking. It's not about who male humans are, or how they would be if they weren't trained from pre-school to beat or be beaten. And it's so much about conditioned manhood that even women who want the military's manly affirmation can be turned into conditioned men. Ultimately, women learn that if they want to get ahead in any of our institutions, they'll have to out-masculine the males. Gay men, if they want to remain in such a sick institution, can't challenge the image of manhood. They must be straight-acting. And gay men and lesbians, along with bisexual and transgender people have the right to every sick institution heterosexual people have. But gay men and lesbians in the military won't help change this institution, if they too don't challenge its view of what it takes to be a man. Heterosexuals themselves are too afraid to do it. Right now they feel it's too daunting a task. Anyone who even criticizes the manly Pentagon will be dismissed, marginalized, and treated to the same treatment LGBT people get regularly in the USA for asking, telling, and openly breaking out of the straight-acting mold. But what is learned can be unlearned. Fear can be faced. And it must be done if there's to be hope for any of us. 
Robert N. Minor, Ph.D., is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas. His Gay & Healthy in a Sick Society (HumanityWorks, 2003), was named one of the "Best Gay Books of 2003" and his Scared Straight (HumanityWorks!, 2001) was a finalist for the Lambda Literary and Independent Publisher Book Awards. He may be reached at www.fairnessproject.org .
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So, they paraded them naked, urinated or defecated on them, raped them, and mutilated them - often targeting body parts which most represented their virility. Since real men can protect "their women," those masculine winners shamed the losers by raping their wives, mothers, and daughters. It was all about power, and manhood, and who's the true king of the mountain, not sex.