Violent masculinity and the military

Senior US officer and former NATO commander General John Sheehan has sparked outrage in the Netherlands after he suggested that the Srebrenica massacre was allowed to occur because of a culture within European military forces that has become "socialise[d]" by unionisation and open homosexuality, which apparently leads to a soft army that can't fight.

While queer rights bloggers can obviously dissect this issue far better than I can, something struck me about General Sheehan's comments that displayed very clearly just how ingrained the link is between female sexual subordination and dominant masculinity.

To put it in a nutshell: If you don't stick it in a woman then you are a woman, and you fight like a girl.

(Erm, this is the first time I've blogged on heteronormative attitudes relating specifically to gay men, and far be it from me to take this issue away from them and make it all about women or feminism, but I see the two as intrinsically linked, and that's what I'm commenting on.)

Sheehan is betraying a particularly violent idea about masculinity, one that says men fuck up the enemy and fuck women; while women "socialise" society and are fucked by men. You can't simultaneously be fucked by a man and fuck up the enemy, you pussy boy, it just don't work that way. Apparently.

I find this sort of thing problematic for the general reasons that it promotes a link between violence and acceptable masculinity, and subordinates women, linking in particular dominating/penetrative/violent sexual subordination of women with the perceived survival of the nation state via military success.

However, Sheehan is suggesting that a feminised military culture (socialised, unionised, open) is not as capable of winning battles, and in some sense I think he could be right. While I have no doubt individual women and gay men can be just as violently driven towards a military objective as their heterosexual male peers, the whole military establishment is built on foundations of violent masculinity; subverting that regimented tradition is necessarily going to change things. Not that this would be a bad thing!!


Ok, quick post, just to help me get back in the swing of things, after prompting from The God of Dishes! Thanks babe x