“From the Burkha to the Thong” – Sunsara Taylor on the military and pornography

This presentation is so biased against the U.S. military. Did she stop to think at all that the prevalance of pornography in the military is largely due to the age demographic? It’s an overwhelmingly male group with an average age of around 22. That’s the same age as young man in college.

Does the military encourage it’s young men to buy it? I don’t think so, I know hardcore pornography is banned for sale and in computer lounges. I know playboy and perfect 10 magazine can be available for purchase, but no one “encourages” them to buy it.

What about bases overseas where there are brothels literally within three miles of many base gates? That’s a case of commanders turning
a blind eye, and it seemed with the cooperation of locals. Perhaps the thinking was that if the soldiers spent more time in “the red light district” which is also patronized by locals, that they would spend less time in other parts of the country.

But with Human Rights being made part of the military’s strategic mission of securing U.S. interests and national security, acceptance of brothels by U.S. military commanders has changed. It is now against the UCMJ for U.S. military personnel to visit places of prostitution while stationed overseas, note that prostitution is not illegal in many of these countries where U.S. troops are stationed.

Videos like this not only have the capacity to inform, but to shape emotional opinion of the military. That’s why she should include comparison’s of the U.S. military’s conduct to foreign militaries and militias. If she was honest she would note the number of reported rapes and assaults by African, Asian, Latin American and European troops, UN peacekeeping troops, NGO workers and other groups.

Also calling it “a cohesive force for the military”

Calling Fallujah a free fire zone where they shot anything that moved is disengage. Fallujah was a GHOST TOWN when the U.S. went into the city for Operation Phantom Fury/Al Fajr. The military claims to have killed around 1500 fighters during that Operation. That’s out of a very densely populated city of over 200k. I remember going in and I was shocked at how empty it was. Even when we consider that the place had been emptying out for months with the U.S. warning it was going to go back into the city. On top of this group, there were women and children killed. How many? I didn’t even see a woman or a child until January 2005 when we began to prepare for elections in Al Anbar. I wonder how many women and children her friend said they killed. But the last part of being dropped off in Thailand to screw anything that moved.

Did her friend tell her that we were supposed to go to Singapore, but a U.S. Navy Attache in Singapore got into a fight with a cabbie while drunk and belligerent and was then arrested? Did he tell Ms. Taylor that it caused a huge stir and so we then set course for Thailand rather than risk making matters worse with another potential incident?That’s what we were told.

Did her friend tell her that there were Marines and Sailors doing “CommRels” community relations tours to things other than bars and brothels. We were all back on that ship every night, not sleeping in hotels. What the military needs to do is spend a little more time expanding these Community Relations tours and maybe consider them mandatory. There are a lot of personnel who get to know a country by it’s bars, those are the folks who would benefit the most.

Also the mention of Abu Ghraib….Is she saying this kind of behavior was common place? It sounds like she is from how she frames the other aspects of her response.

‘Selling pictures of dead Iraqi women who’s clothes have been ripped off’ Are those sold by members of the military? Were their clothes torn off by Americans? She makes a lot of claims without really backing them up.

If anything the best part of the video comes in her initial response. Men DO use rape, humiliation and sexual slavery in war, as an objective of war and as a motivation for troops. It’s been that way forever, and we even see that in chimps as their war parties kill the males of a rival band and rape the female chimps. Control of the reproduction capacity of females seems to be as central to warfare as control over drinking water, metal, timber and arable land. Rape during wartime is considered an aspect of genocide, as this is one way to destroy a people. We see this occurring in Darfur, Bosnia, in sectarian Iraq, Somalia, Palestine/Israel, East Timor, the Amazon, Rwanda, S. Africa, Pakistan and it’s border with India, Afghanistan, Chechnya basically anywhere there is conflict.

It happens here in the U.S. as racial, ethnic, class, gender and religious tensions have seen cases of rape-as-subjugation. The Channon Christian murder, the Wichita Massacre, the Abner Louima case, the Oakland Lesbian rapes, the Baytown Houston rapes and countless others.

There is porn made here in America that is overt in it’s use of ethnic/religious slurs used to degrade not only the female subject but the targeted ethnicity as a whole. All categories of American men produce this, African American, European American, Asian American, Latino even Arab American Muslims have made pornographic films that are made expressly to humiliate a group chosen as “the enemy.” So what I see is the depravity of men, not necessarily a product of the U.S. military as an institution or a specific characteristic of the majority of those drawn to serve in the U.S. military.

It appears like this woman falls into the trap of other anti-war and anti-militarism activists, and that is searching for new ways to criticise the U.S. military to the point that it becomes Anti-Americanism. With the U.S. military held up as the most respected symbol of the American people and their government, her hate is focused there.
Judging from her other videos, she comes across as almost a caricature of the self-hating American, the kind that has a knee-jerk “America Bad” response to every event in the world. Some might say she’s projecting.