Uh oh...Bruce Fleming weighed in on this issue a while back...
http://www.military.com/opinion/0,15202,91379,00.html
Policy Won't Solve Sex Problem
Bruce Fleming | March 17, 2006Several recent cases of alleged sexual aggression at the Naval Academy have raised serious issues about the broader problems associated with sexuality and gender integration in the armed forces. National news outlets reported that the football team's quarterback was accused of rape. More recent articles have detailed the case of a member of the crew team who was forced out after what he claims was consensual sex; the woman involved has not been forced to resign. Is this sudden push to clean house by the powers-that-be (who apparently are “shocked, shocked ”) only a big act to please critics who demand we do something? Is it long-overdue reform? Or is it perhaps merely the inevitable result of putting a minority of women into a boiling pot of testosterone-charged young men at a place like the Naval Academy -- or the military as a whole? What frosts my behind (my father-in-law uses a shorter word here) is that we set up an impossible situation and somehow still manage to be surprised when we get problems.
Eighty-three percent of our midshipmen are male. We can assume that our students have at least the normal level of sexual energy, if not more. (We skew our whole admissions system to allow entrance to show-team members, but that's another story, perhaps.) We're sending mixed messages: We say, “Be hard-charging!” and then are shocked, shocked, when this is expressed in sexual ways.
Here's our recipe for problems: We put powder kegs of libido in a single huge building, Bancroft Hall, and add a respectable minority of women to spark things off. And then (it gets better) we make sex in the hall illegal, as well as sex anywhere between members of the same company, with anyone in your chain of command, and a thousand other rules.
So the problem is, at least for administrative purposes, solved. We've outlawed sex, so it isn't happening. (Hah.) But that also means, we can't discuss the complexity of human sexuality, or responsible expression of that sexuality. All we do is zap them when they screw things up. Make sense to you? Not to me.
There's that Fleming at it again, my critics will say, voices dripping with sarcasm that means: He's a civilian. He just doesn't get it. And the ever-so-sarcastic tone of voice continues (I hear it often): Sex in the Hall is illegal because sex on a boat is illegal. If they can't keep it in their pants at the Academy, how do you expect them to do so on a boat?
Let's consider this. First, they don't keep it in their pants on boats. An astonishing number of women come back pregnant from every deployment, not to speak of sex acts that don't end in pregnancy, either because somebody has the elementary good sense to use or demand a condom, or because the sex in question couldn't lead to pregnancy. (You figure it out.)
Second, the Naval Academy isn't a ship, and their time here isn't a deployment measured in months. It's four years of college at a time when their hormones are raging and they're not focused on a single Mission, because it's not a Mission, it's their life, which for many of them leads to marriage. (Most of these marriages end in divorce: go figure.)
Third, this is a problem we're creating for ourselves: no other college in the U.S. except the military ones has, since the l960s, tried to act in loco parentis, limiting the gender of visitors to dorm rooms, policing sex. If they do it, they have to work out with the roommates that it doesn't disturb things. Besides, who cares if they do their assigned chores and show up for work on time?
I've written a whole book on society's attempt to stamp out sex, called Sexual Ethics. The more social the situation, I suggested, the stronger the impulse to stamp out the private relationships created by sex. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud suggested that all societies repressed sex because they needed to harness the steam from repressing sex into their institutions. I think he's wrong: it's not all societies, only those situations that need full-time access to people, and so deny them personal lives. That's the military in a nutshell, and I can certainly see the point of putting off sexual expression for short-term deployment. Anybody can go without for a limited number of months. It's when the months stretch to years and the “ship” isn't going anywhere that things get problematic.
I think of the highway billboard that says: “Talk to your kids about sex before somebody else does.” At the Naval Academy, we're failing to talk to them about responsible sex. And this is at an institution so dedicated to the body. Do they think they can have healthy young men and women without sexuality? Nice try, I suppose. To me it just looks suicidal, and destructive to all concerned. And I'm sure this dynamic isn't limited to Annapolis, it military-wide.
So talk about it, give the guidelines for educated choices. Tell the men it isn't studly to force themselves on women, only cowardly. Tell the women they have to know what's happening and take steps to prevent it, if that's what they want to happen. Acknowledge the element of aggression in sex, and of power play, and talk above all about how extremely complex it is, and yet at the same time such an integral part of life.
All this requires acknowledging that it's going to happen, whether or not we talk about it. Only if you can talk about it, you can educate them. If you don't, you can't. Nobody's talking to our mids about sex, until we punish them for screwing up. And whose fault, under the circumstances, is that?