NPR has a new brutal but important story about rape in the military. "Dozens" of women told NPR "about a culture where men act entitled to sex with female troops." One woman, repeatedly assaulted by her superior officer, recalled:
"I finally asked his secretary that when he called me and closed the door, [to] please knock on the door. And she said, 'Sabina, it happens to everybody.'"
This story comes after this week's conviction of two football players from Steubenville, Ohio High School for raping an intoxicated 16-year-old girl.
One connection between these two stores is obvious: High school football and the U.S. military are two venerable male-dominated sub-cultures that prize conformity, places where boys will be boys, where male supervisors break in young male recruits, helping them become cogs in the machine.
But what struck me further about both NPR's story and the Steubenville rape case is the casual assumption of entitlement to women's dehumanized bodies. There seemed to be no soul-searching or empathy in either setting, just the taken-for-granted notion that, when presented with the opportunity to use women's bodies sexually, well, what else would one do?
That was the shocker of Steubenville, but it shouldn't have been. If we really grasp this, we put the lie to the facile declarations of women's parity with men. For me, this dehumanization of women underscores the importance of such seemingly banal statistical measures as occupational gender segregation, the separation of men and women into different jobs.