If he was referring to philandering or even some forms of harassment, I might have some idea where he was coming from, but sexual assault?
The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto dismissed the epidemic of sexual assault in the military, claiming that efforts to address the growing problem contributed to a “war on men” and an “effort to criminalize male sexuality.”
Too many men commit sexual assaults, it’s true. But it’s nothing like a majority of men. It’s insane to claim that sexual assault is a normal part of male sexuality.
cleek
queue enraged insanity with a pronounced undercurrent of ‘privilege’ in 5..4..3..
JPL
Is James Taranto speaking from experience?
Bobby Thomson
That’s the only way you can get any, Jim? TMI.
Also, please turn yourself in.
KmCO
Well, we already know that his company a). don’t believe that women command respect as human beings, b). do not understand the concept of consent, and c). believe that male desires trump women’s right to personal autonomy, so color me unsurprised by this rape apologia.
Doug Milhous J
@JPL:
My guess is he’s not and part of the problem with this whole debate is that people like Taranto conflate hitting on an intern or some other form of moderate douchebaggery with a violent crime. It’s not the same thing.
Nemo_N
There are people who think that courting, sexual harassment and rape are all somehow part of the same fun happy thing.
oldster
Yeah, as the proud owner of a distinctly non-criminal male sexuality, I have to say that Taranto is full of shit, and making the world a worse place by his continued existence.
Short Bus Bully
“If it wasn’t for date rape I’d never get laid!”
ASSHOLE.
Shakezula
Interestingly, if I were to make the same statement (which I wouldn’t, because if I thought it were true I would be too busy checking the electrified razor wire fence that ran around the perimeter of my man-free compound), it would prompt an epic butthurtgasm from men like Tarantum claiming they were under attack by a mean old feminazi.
But I guess it is OK for a guy to declare the entire gender is a bunch of violent criminals.
scav
Sporting innie genitalia is clearly all the sign of concent required. Especially in contexts where reportedly highly trained men cannot be trusted to obey orders, respect comrades sporting innies or obey social mores generally accepted as civilized.
All hail our protectors, right?
Patricia Kayden
Trying to flip the script and turn fighting sexual harassment into a war against men. Interesting. Way to shift responsibility away from misbehaving men.
reflectionephemeral
The fatal flaw of conservatism is the idea that because things are as they are, that is how they must be.
Women were excluded from military service for a very long time; nonwhites weren’t allowed to vote for a long time. So the conservative inclination is to defend these entrenched practices as moral and inevitable. Right on down to treating physical assault as a manifestation of the Natural Order of Things.
As to the post title, I just found out yesterday that Fiona Apple did “Shabby Doll” with Elvis Costello one time.
Lawrence
This seems like Christian fundamentalists speaking out about and attempting to normalize their belief that rape is what women get for not covering up and for venturing out of the home. It’s really a very similar doctrine to Wahabbi dress and conduct codes for women. Libby Anne at Patheos writes about this well and often.
Doug Milhous J
@reflectionephemeral:
I really like Fiona Apple. Even that first album (the one I’m quoting from), if a little adolescent, was good.
Haydnseek
@oldster: He works for the WSJ. This is what their readers not only expect, but demand. It’s not enough that we’re insanely rich, in order for us to truly experience the ecstasy of wealth, we must experience the pleasure of causing pain and suffering to our inferiors. When called out, they revert to the usual “war on capitalism” or “war on job creators.” I have no doubt that he’s also cruising for a promotion, because look at all those new visitors to our site! No meteor is too big. No fire is too hot.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Two words: Atlas Shrugged. They think it’s a guide.
Jewish Steel
My wife asked me if MRAs ever infested Balloon Juice. I told her that to the best of my knowledge they never have. That’s a credit to this blog because they seem to be virtually everywhere else on the internet.
piratedan
@Patricia Kayden: he’s just following in the path that was trailblazed by Maverick last week where he offered that women should be barred from the military because of the sexual assault/harassment issues.
imho, THIS is how you address the issue:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaqpoeVgr8U
White Trash Liberal
Lol
It’s really simple. Consent. If mutual consent for sexual intercourse is criminalizing men, then I can only imagine the shenanigans in Casa de Taranto.
VividBlueDotty
FTFY. This subhuman has been given space in the WSJ to say insane, misogynist, outrageous things for far too long. This isn’t the worst of it…by far.
White Trash Liberal
@Jewish Steel: T&H is one of them. Or it is just part of his relentless contrarianism.
Doug Milhous J
@Jewish Steel:
What’s an MRA?
VividBlueDotty
Aforementioned subhuman is also responsible for this gem, “I hope the girls whose boyfriends died to save them were worthy of the sacrifice” in re the Aurora movie theater shootings.
If I were capable of feeling any sympathy for him, I would hope for him to get some help with his issues. Alas, I cannot, and only wish he would shut up.
Jewish Steel
@Doug Milhous J:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men's_rights_movement
Bobby Thomson
@Doug Milhous J: I had to go to Urban Dictionary to figure it out.
scav
@Doug Milhous J: Sadly, I could guess (and verify).
Jewish Steel
A post like this, Doug, is total MRA bait. I don’t think this blog is on their radar. LGM gets a few.
@White Trash Liberal: My vote is relentless contrarianism. Whatever you got, he’s agin’ it.
reflectionephemeral
@Doug Milhous J: I haven’t listened to her all that much. I always really liked the song “Extraordinary Machine”, though, as a statement of ambition and determination to confound expectations.
Ash Can
And the fact that Taranto does pretty much tells us all we need to know about him.
Amir Khalid
Sexual assault is, by definition, criminal behaviour. If it were part of normal male sexuality, as Taranto implies it is, then the norm would need to be changed.
And the campaign against male sexuality he claims to have spotted signs of? Come on, man. General Helms gave partial clemency to a man convicted of sexual assault because she said she found his accuser less credible than the jury did. It seems quite legitimate to ask on what basis, and that’s all McCaskill is doing.
Shakezula
@Doug Milhous J: Alas, we can’t demonstrate this to Mr. Taranto by having one person ask him for a dollar and another beat him purple and take his wallet.
Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.)
Does that fucklehead not even know that rape doesn’t have anything to do with sex; it has to do with violence and domination. That’s why there are cases of straight guys raping other guys: sex isn’t the point. “Male sexuality”? More like “male sadism”.
patrick II
@Patricia Kayden:
it is what scalis would call a “perpetuation of feminine entitlement.”
Bobby Thomson
@White Trash Liberal: He’s not into men’s rights so much as he is into rape and pederasty.
ranchandsyrup
Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer argument: Your sexual assault laws frighten me. I’m just a caveman. I see a woman and I drag her by the hair to an open cave for procreation. Ki-rock rests, your honor.
matt
if rape isn’t wrong, then we don’t need a special case for rape babies…
Persia
@KmCO: And don’t forget: They consistently ignore that in terms of sheer numbers, more men in the military are assaulted than women are. Because that would fuck up their whole bullshit narrative.
JPL
@Jewish Steel: Maybe Semantha Bee should interview a MRA member. Last night she interviewed a Christian who feels persecuted. link
Tractarian
I think the real victims here are the perpetrators of sexual assault. Amirite?
catclub
@Doug Milhous J: Everybody else will say Mens Rights Advocate
Man Ready to Assplode!
catclub
@Shakezula: Well, you could, but as the other old Milhous said,
it would be wrong.
El Cid
I’m glad I’ve never encountered any of the freakishly disturbing conversations Taranto has probably had in front of his mirror.
Jewish Steel
@JPL: The poor dears. There’s a scant 100+ churches left in my town of 100,000 people.
scav
Well, GOD didn’t implant the Baby Jebus into the BVM after the PermissionRequestion but went straight to the Annunciation.
FlipYrWhig
Taranto probably means that under a legal regime like this the feminists will use fake rape charges to keep poor widdle men intimidated and docile. It’s a signaling display. “Fake rape” is the men’s rights version of, shall we say, cockadoodledoo.
NonyNony
@reflectionephemeral:
That isn’t so much the “fatal flaw” of conservatism as its definition these days.
Actually the definition of modern American conservatism is that because things were as they were, that is how they must be. So we need to be dragged kicking and screaming back to the 1950s/1850s/1750s/1650s/1350s/pick your century.
MikeJ
@FlipYrWhig:
Last night (or maybe the night before?) CBS had a story on sexual assault in the military in which they repeatedly referred to the victim as “the accuser”.
daveNYC
@Shakezula: That’s just stupid. You’d need at least 20 of each scenario to get a proper sample size.
Let’s start a kickstarter.
Quaker in a Basement
Soldiers raping enemy civilians is a war crime. But this clown wants to excuse soldiers raping their own comrades?
reflectionephemeral
@NonyNony: Yeah, US conservatism has been wholly taken over by its pitfalls these days. Skepticism of change can degenerate into mere suspicion of outsiders, and that’s where we are.
It’s quite a bit more pervasive than the left’s much-cited tribalism and extremism of the 1960s & beyond. Today, it’s our relatively well-off whites who are rejecting the social contract and rational discourse, and they’ve taken over an entire political party. The threat to society is much greater, but the alarm of elites is muted or entirely absent.
Uncle Ebeneezer
I really wish these Taranto-types could be forced into an A Few Good Men-esque cross-examination. They praise soldiers as being near perfect heroes who can’t be criticized under ANY circumstances. If you went through a list of increasingly difficult tasks and asked them whether a soldier could perform them ie- could a soldier go 2 days without water? run 50 miles in a day? etc. etc., they would probably respond with indignation that you would even QUESTION that soldiers can do anything they are ordered to do. And yet…if the order is to simply not commit sexual-assault, suddenly their heroes are powerless to comply. It’s a strange logic, to say the least.
Also, When the Pawn is a fantastic album. Killer drum grooves by Matt Chamberlain, creative mixing/production by Jon Brion and some fantastic songs. I still listen to it regularly. Fiona is very talented.
David Koch
There is a War on Men.
There once was a time when you could joke around the office about Long Dong Silver and pubic hairs in Coke cans, but no more.
What has happened to this country? You can’t even pinch a woman in the ass anymore without getting sued.
Cassidy
So, just got home and haven’t read the thread, but I do want to point out something. Rape in the military is about to be a self-correcting problem. Sexual assault happens a lot and too much. Fortunately, the new normal is going to be women in combat arms. Right now, combat arms units are very protective of their female search team members and medics. Once the new normal of female comrades in combat arms happens, I do not want to be the guy who tries to sexuall assault a female Infantryman. If she doesn’t beat his ass, their will be a 9 member goon squad to do it later. Things are about to get violent and self-correcting.
Nerull
@VividBlueDotty: I really dislike the term subhuman, mostly because I’ve primarily seen it used by objectivists to justify slavery/murder of those who are “unworthy” of rights.
aimai
@Cassidy: Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so? But I don’t. Sexual assault will continue to be a top down affair with men in unassailable positions of power (and, later, perhaps women) using their power to assault and humiliate junior members of the team. Either it will continue to be part of early hazing and happen before the junior person has a “team” they are considered to be on or it will continue to happen to selected members of the team who are scapegoats for the others.
aimai
@Uncle Ebeneezer: Oh, by the way, this bears repeating over and over again.
But of course, secretely, they think what is being constrained is not male nature as such but the recreation of the warrior, his just due.
Arclite
In case anyone is actually wondering if the military has a sexual assault problem or not, I recommend this documentary, The Invisible War, currently streaming on Netflix.
Cassidy
@aimai: You’ll never get rid of men in positions of power using that to sexually abuse subordinates. But, to be fair, those men will do that in the military or civilian sector. Those aren’t the only incidents of sexual assault in the military.
ETA: So yes, it’s about to get ugly. When PVT Smith goes to her Team Leader and he tells the Squad Leader, 99% of these males in power are going to do something about it. If it’s a higher ranking person, they will report it. If it’s not, it will get violent. Why don’t they do it now? They do, but they have very few women who are “one of them”. That’s about to change. Combat Arms is very tribal. Women are also going to start trying out for Special Operations. How do you think their teams are going to handle that?
Patricia Kayden
@piratedan: Good for the Australian army. The American military needs to learn from them.
Uncle Ebeneezer
Thanks Amai. It’s really baffling. It’s like we tell our boys “Son, you can do anything you set your mind to doing…unless it’s treating women with respect, in which case: how dare anyone even suggest setting your mind to doing THAT?!!”
aimai
@Cassidy: Actually, I know a woman whose mother , in the military, was assaulted by two drill sargeants, after she’d been trained to kill. According to the daughter her mother fucked them up so badly that they ended up discharging her and just paying her to go away. But I don’t romanticize the notion that there is an in group and an outgroup and that women are going to be part of it any time soon. Women have been “inside” lots of groups and still gotten raped and assaulted by members in good standing. Its always about power and power is always differentially distributed. Its far, far, easier to assault someone and get away with it than to kill a superior officer or even another soldier in cold blood or retaliation. You are kidding yourself if you think that there’s going to be some sweet “band of brothers” moment more than once in a while. Or that the same guys who “defend” their sisters in one incident won’t also turn out to be rapists in another instance.
Soonergrunt
@Arclite: If it was an actual documentary, it would be useful. It’s a polemical piece, less concerned with accuracy than it would be if it were a documentary.
Among the things that it gets wrong multiple times are the raw numbers several times,
I don’t like linking here to the CAAFLOG site because I don’t want to be responsible for a bunch of crazed ideologues trampling through their comments sections and disrupting their normal operations as happened with the US v Lakin court-martial, but these guys are all members of the military bar. They all have experience in defending military accused in courts-martial, and most of them also have experience prosecuting as well. Many of them are in civilian practice and so also take civilian criminal courts cases at the state and federal level. At least two of them have been Judges.
http://www.caaflog.com/2012/07/11/invisible-war-uninformed-dishonest-or-both/
http://www.caaflog.com/2012/08/16/the-invisible-war-uninformed-dishonest-or-both-part-ii-2/
http://www.caaflog.com/2012/08/18/more-on-the-invisible-war-2/
http://www.caaflog.com/2012/09/30/hastings-symposium-on-military-sexual-assaults/
Cassidy
@aimai: Eh. You think. I’ve been there. Pretty sure my experience trumps your…guessing or whatever you want to call it.
But thanks for trying to be dismissive. That’s very condescending of you. This tends to be your usual mode, so I’m finished talking to you.
Soonergrunt
@Patricia Kayden: Ah, yes, by creating a clear-cut case of Unlawful Command Influence and thereby rendering these potential crimes un-proscutable or un-punishable.
In Australia, accusations of criminal activity against the military are investigated and prosecuted by civilian authorities. That is not the case in the US.
As a matter of fact, that just came up. A Military Judge in Pearl Harbor just issued a ruling forbidding a Court-Martial that he is overseeing from sentencing a punitive discharge in the case the members panel reaches a guilty verdict because the President stated recently that “people who commit these crimes must be fired and dishonorably discharged.”
Link to the ruling here.
gelfling545
One of the things people inclined to hand wringing were wringing their hands over in the prelude to repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was “What will happen to the epsrit de corps? How will the troops deal with the idea that a fellow soldier is lusting after him in his heart?” Oddly, nobody among that crowd seems particularly worried that the esprit de corps might be slightly dented by the fact that a member of your unit has sexually assaulted you.
VividBlueDotty
@Nerull: Fair enough; we all have contexts that stay in our heads for certain words. I DID indeed mean that he has more in common with animals than humans. It seems that every time I come across some egregiously misogynistic quote or tweet, it issued forth from Taranto. The first time I saw one of his bon mots, I (and many others)engaged in a letter writing campaign to the WSJ, to get him fired. He issued a non-apology and that was the best we could hope for. Now I try to just ignore what he says, and I never ever click through to WSJ, but if I come across it unintentionally it tends to make my blood boil.
YellowJournalism
“Save me from these evil deeds before I get them done…”
Sorry, I just really love that song.
Omnes Omnibus
What the fuck is wrong with Taranto? I mean, seriously, what kind of person can write shit like that and have the gall to look at himself in the mirror afterward?
Soonergrunt
@Omnes Omnibus: somebody with a seriously crippled sense of his own manhood and masculinity.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Sounds like a blatant confession from Mr Taranto over being an asshole.
Ruckus
@catclub:
I got male republican asshole.
Of course there is a small amount of redundancy in there.
e.a.f.
Women beware of Taranto.
If he thinks rape is o.k. and prosecution of rape is an “assault on male sexuality” the guy is shy about 3/4 of a deck. He is also, in my opinion, dangerous.
Military personnel ought to be subject to the same laws as civilians and military personnel ought to be given the same protection of the law as civilians.
The U.S.A. might want to adopt the Australian system.
A woman’s body belongs to herself and no one else. No man has a right to touch her without her consent. What goes on in the American military is not so different from how women are treated in Afghanistan. The irony of it all.
Tehanu
@piratedan:
Yes, General David Morrison, a real soldier explaining with anger that “No one has ever explained to me how the exploitation or degradation of others enhances capability or honors the traditions of the Australian army.” Taranto ought to be cleaning the general’s toilet, preferably with his tongue.
MosesZD
Fuck, but you’re an idiot. The average percentage of men that commit sexual assault in the general population is under one percent.
And yet you’re acting like it’s some ‘giant number’ but ‘not the majority.’
And, FWIW, all crime, including sexual assault, has been going down for decades and is, in your adult lifetime, at an all-time low. Despite the fear-mongers who constantly scream about crime and punishment and danger and all the rest of the Chicken Little The Sky Is Falling Horseshit.
TTT
56% of the victims of sexual assault in the military ARE men. 10,700 male service members REPORTED their sexual assaults just in 2012; obviously there were more unreported, stretching back to, probably, forever.
So, what, raped-men deserve to have a war against them but rapist-men don’t?
(This is why that Invisible War docu is badly skewed and incomplete. It features two male victims, for a total of less than 5 minutes. This is primarily a male problem; if a docu about breast cancer had male patients outnumber females it would cause an uproar.)
lovable liberal
@Doug Milhous J: Just guessing, but misogynist right-wing asshole seems apt.