Short Response to 11/30 Readings

After first reading the two chapters in Enloe's book "The Curious Feminist", in which she describes how militarized rape occurs primarily due to the psychological and social construction of masculinity, I began to think a lot about the motivations and motives for rape. Enloe discusses at length the life of Borislav Herak, who she describes as "an ordinary man" (99) who ended up raping 16 women, some of whom were killed afterward. She describes how he was never actively involved in politics prior to the beginning of war in 1991, when he fled to the mountains of Sarajevo and was taken into one of the semi-autonomous militias that was formed with the goal of pursuing ethnic Serbian territorial control. She describes how the military men were simply trained to perform orders no matter what they were, from rape to murder. Enloe includes the transcript of an interview with Herak in which he describes how he was told to go and rape young women and followed the orders simply because he had been trained to. This interview reminded me of a book I read freshman year called "The Banality of Evil" by Hannah Arendt. In her book on the Holocaust, Arendt argues that the great evils in history were not committed by fanatics or psychopaths but by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated in the actions with the view that they were normal. As she talks about in the second chapter, the US outlaws and looks down upon rape of American soldiers and local women; however the strippers and prostitutes who are paid to sleep with the American soldiers are not "worthy of our sympathy". The fact that our government turns a blind eye to or even supports these forms of prostitution for our male American soldiers shows the underlying social implications of a male dominated society that encourages hyper masculinity overcoming and controlling females.

The two NYTimes articles we read also support many of Enloe's arguments. It is clear that sexual assault and rape are still very common in our troops today since both of these articles were written in 2009. Even though women are proving themselves as soldiers out in the battlefield, they feel safer outside fighting than they do travelling to use the bathroom. The fact that women are more likely to be raped than killed in the armed forces is a clear sign that steps need to be taken to protect them.