Accessed 16th August 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/13/opinion/bruni-tackling-the-roots-of-rape.html?hp&_r=1&
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Tackling the Roots of Rape
By FRANK BRUNI
Published: August 12,
2013 373 Comments
Wrong, Chris Kilmartin told me. It’s not DNA we’re up against;
it’s movies, manners and a set of mores, magnified in the worlds of the
military and sports, that assign different roles and different worth to men and
women. Fix that culture and we can keep women a whole lot safer.
I reached out to Kilmartin, a psychology professor and the author
of the textbook “The Masculine Self,” after learning that the military is
repeatedly reaching out to him. Right now he’s in Colorado
He previously worked on a Naval Academy
Its deepest roots, he said, are the cult of hyper-masculinity,
which tells boys that aggression is natural and sexual conquest enviable, and a
set of laws and language that cast women as inferior, pliable, even disposable.
“We start boys off at a very early age,” Kilmartin told me during
a recent phone conversation. “When the worst thing we say to a boy in sports is
that he throws ‘like a girl,’ we teach boys to disrespect the feminine and
disrespect women. That’s the cultural undercurrent of rape.”
Boys see women objectified in popular entertainment and tossed
around like rag dolls in pornography. They encounter fewer women than men in
positions of leadership. They hear politicians advocate for legislation like
the Virginia
“Before you make a reproductive choice, you are going to be
required to have somebody penetrate you with an object,” he said. “That’s very
paternalistic: we know what’s right. You’re not in control of your own body.”
He noted that discussions of domestic violence more often included
the question of why a battered woman stayed than the question of why a
battering man struck, as if the striking was to be expected. Men will be brute
men, just as boys will be lusty boys.
If Kilmartin’s observations can read at times like humorless
chunks of a politically correct tome, that’s not how he actually comes across.
He’s loose, funny. In fact he’s got a sideline hobby as a stand-up comic. No
joke.
And he’s got a trove of less wonky riffs. He mentions the
University of Iowa, which for decades has painted the locker room used by
opponents pink to put them “in a passive mood” with a “sissy color,” in the
words of a former head football coach, Hayden Fry.
He mentions the bizarre use of the term “sex scandals” for such
incidents as Tailhook decades ago and the recent accusations that Bob Filner,
the mayor of San Diego
The armed services are a special challenge, because they’re all
about aggression, summoning and cultivating Attila the Hun and then asking him
to play Sir Walter Raleigh as well.
But Kilmartin said that that’s a resolvable tension, if men are
conditioned to show the same self-control toward women that they do,
successfully, in following myriad military regulations; if they’re encouraged
to call out sexist behavior; and if, above all, commanders monitor their own
conduct, never signaling that women are second-class citizens.
The integration of women into combat duties will help, bolstering
women’s standing and altering a climate of inequality, Kilmartin said.
But he and the rest of us are taking on fortified traditions and
calcified mind-sets, and that’s evident in the enrollment in the two classes of
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Men and Masculinity that he began teaching on
Friday. Although female cadets are about 20 percent of the Air Force Academy,
they’re more than half of the students who signed up for Kilmartin’s course, he
said.
He said that one of them, during the very first session, recounted
that someone at flight school over the summer had told her that women shouldn’t
fly planes.
“Oh, so do you fly a plane with your penis?” Kilmartin asked the
class.
One of the male cadets responded: “Sounds like you’re issuing a
challenge, sir.”
