Friday, November 13, 2015

Nude Soldiers Tell of an Undercurrent of Homoerotic Behavior in the Military

In the excellent Bring Me Men (which deserves its own dedicated review), Aaron Belkin identifies a more complex relation. In becoming military men, there is a need not only to disavow femininity, but also to become intimate with the ‘unmasculine’ and the ‘queer’. Rather than identifying a direct alignment of the masculine with the military, or seeing gender norms as accidental in their

intersection with the military, there is instead a constitutive tension between the masculine and the unmasculine (or, we might say, between the strongly heteronormative and the homosexual). Basic training relies on a traumatic ambiguity, continually casting initiates as by turns masculine and unmasculine, so that no soldier can ever be sure that they were sufficiently on the ‘right side’ of the line. As one Marine put it: “The opposite of feminine? No. To me, what is masculine? I don’t know. [pause] And I’ve worked so hard at being it”. The continual ambiguity – what Belkin calls discipline as collapse – interacts with surveillance and punishment to produce the soldier-subject.

Above is an excerpt taken from:

Fratriarchy, Homoeroticism and Military Culture, NOVEMBER 1, 2012 / PABLO K

HTTP://THEDISORDEROFTHINGS.COM/2012/11/01/FRATRIARCHY-HOMOEROTICISM-AND-MILITARY-CULTURE/

QUORA USER, CH-53D WEAPONS AND TACTICS CREW CHIEF

QUOTED FROM https://www.quora.com/In-which-branch-of-the-US-military-is-homoerotic-behavior-perceived-to-be-most-prevalent

Absolutely the Marine Corps. While we are the most bad ass and make fun of the other branches for being less "manly," there is a lot of "gay" behavior. There's an old joke about the Marine Corps being a department of the Navy, and any Marine will respond, including every female I've known in the MC, "Yeah, the men's department." We are however all brothers and sisters and this is more of a competition and shit talking among siblings than actual dislike. But I digress.

There's a game a lot of people would play that had to do with being the most "gay" without doing something "gay" like touching each others junk. If you leave your camera unattended, prepare to have nothing but pics of balls on it when you find it again. Most of the branches do stuff like that, but from what I've seen it's more prevalent in the Marine Corps. While it's not exactly homoerotic, it's probably the closest you will get to it.

And there are plenty of homophobes in all the branches, but that doesn't make the military hate gay people, it means assholes that are in the military hate gay people. One of my best friends in the MC was gay (he was only out to a few people, still during DADT) and it sucked that he couldn't be himself. Luckily we are past that, although I'm sure there is still discrimination in some units. Civil rights violations are treated very harshly in the military and can be grounds for discharge.

Few peoples have ever been as well informed on the topic of military discipline as the Spartans, and their incredible success in fighting much larger rivals, such as Athens, to a stalemate, speaks to their morale.

How did they do it? According to Bertrand Russell (2004, pp 106-107), the key to their military organization was a mentor relationship between skilled warriors and their apprentices:

The Spartans were not alone in their institutionalization of homosexuality in the military. TheHomosexual love, male if not female, was a recognized custom in Sparta and had an acknowledged part in the education of adolescent boys. A boy's lover suffered credit, or discredit, by the boy's actions. Plutarch states that once when a boy cried out because he was hurt in fighting, his lover was fined for the boy's cowardice.

SAME PHENOMENON OCCURRED AMONG THE JAPANESE SAMURAI. ACCORDING TO R. C. KIRKPATRICK (2000, P. 394): "SAME SEX SEXUAL PARTNERS OF THE JAPANESE SAMURAI GAINED BOTH MARTIAL TRAINING AND LAND."

Kirkpatrick (p. 394) also points to the central role of homosexual ties in the military discipline of the Sambia tribe from Melanesia:

Among the Sambia, homosexual behavior occurs among initiates in a regional cohort of loosely-joined militias. The Sambia are headhunters, often at war with neighboring groups; Herdt argues that their homosexual behavior solidifies bonds that are vital for mutual defense.

This general principle was articulated by Plato in The Symposium:

And if there were only some way of contriving that a state or an army should be made up of lovers and their loves, they would be the very best governors of their own city . . . and when fighting at one another's side, although merely a handful, they would overcome all men.

Such assertions are strikingly out of tune with our own society and times where homosexuality is feared by the military as a threat to discipline and homophobic attitudes have ruined thousands of careers.