Toxic Masculinity in the Military
“Militarized masculinity aspires and contributes to the accomplishment of power and violence, while the army is an institution, which produces violence.”-The Psychology of Men and Masculinities Journal
With the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, we are once again hearing the drum beats of war in the United States, with politicians, mainstream media and some parts of the public advocating (although not always explicitly) military action against Russia.
To clarify, I don’t regard Russia’s military action as being justified or legal. I would always advocate diplomacy in conflict situations.
At a personal level, I am all too familiar with the horrors of war, having been born in an Internment Camp as a prisoner of the Japanese in WWII in Hong Kong, where my family spent almost four years in the Camp.
It seems like the prospect of war is ever-present in the American psyche. Which reflects a long tradition of American militarism.
This excerpt from my book, Macho Men: Why Toxic Masculinity Harms Us All and What To Do About It, looks at how toxic masculinity pervades the military.
Because of the movie American Sniper, the story of Navy SEAL Chief Petty Officer Chris Kyle became famous. Known as the “American sniper,” he reportedly had 160 confirmed “kills” over his decade-long career, earning a reputation as a “superhuman” marksman who displayed “unparalleled bravery and skill”, according to his Navy evaluation report from March 2004 to March 2005. Kyle was supposed to exhibit the American ideal of the sniper: Silent and unseen, and deadly lethal, the embodiment of American military power wrapped up in a one-man executioner.
Many in the military and veterans know that Kyle’s story that was popularized was not so simple nor accurate. The autobiography upon which Clint Eastwood’s movie American Sniper, glosses over Kyle’s hypermasculinity. Kyle wrote in his autobiography: “I wondered; how would I feel about killing someone?” he wrote…. Now I know. It’s no big deal.”
A May 2016 report by The Intercept revealed that Kyle had inflated his service record in American Sniper, with “battlefield embellishments.” This was not received well by his fellow Navy SEALs. who saw his boasting as dishonorable. Subsequently the Navy downgraded his medal count.
Vietnam was the first “television war,” where the American public could see first-hand the exploits of their soldiers. And the heroization of the sniper. Snipers like Marine Gunnery Sgt. Carlos Hathcock II, who became the most famous sniper in U.S. military history with 93 confirmed kills and his kill record was widely publicized to promote an American hero.
The American sniper has been portrayed by the media and movies as a quiet, disciplined tough solider waging a heroic covert war against forces of evil. This image was consistent with that of the quiet special operations forces’ community (Navy SEALs in particular).
The media sensationalized the sniper into a symbol of U.S. military prowess. During the ’80s and ’90s, Hollywood churned out sniper movies like Sniper, The Marksman, The American, Enemy at the Gates, to say nothing of Shooter’s Bob Lee “the Nailer” Swagger, based on the legendary Hathcock himself.
Masculinity and War
Toxic masculinity has been a foundation for militarism. Charlotte Hooper in her book Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations, and Gender Politics, discusses how US foreign policy, following the Vietnam War, was seen as a way of bolstering America’s manhood.
American politicians, military leaders and the media often portrayed the Vietcong as “a bunch of women and children”, and emasculated America. “In order to regain its manhood America needed to develop a hyper-masculinized and aggressive breed of foreign policy,” Hooper argues.
Hooper also discusses the idea that since the international sphere is largely composed of men, it may greatly shape both “the production and maintenance of masculinities.” War, then, she says, “exists in a unique feedback loop whereby it is not only perpetuated by hegemonic masculinity, but also legitimates masculinity.”
Hooper talks about how military combat has been fundamental to American notions of masculinity. Men, she suggests, can only be real men if they are willing to charge into war, thereby expressing their “enduring ‘natural aggression.” Furthermore, this perception also explains the traditional exclusion of women from combat, while furthering the myth “that military service is the fullest expression of masculinity,” and the resistance until recently of having women serve in combat.
So many young men have now served and continue to serve in the American military because of its ongoing wars, that military service is a “rite of passage” for young men, Hooper says. As such, “war and the military represent one of the major sites where hegemonic masculinities” are formed and enshrined.
Let’s look at the statistics. America has been at war for 93% of its history: Since the United States was founded in 1776, it has been at war during 214 out of 235 calendar years of existence.
To put this in perspective:
- Pick any year since 1776 and there is about a 91% chance that America was involved in some war during that calendar year.
- No U.S. president truly qualifies as a peacetime president (including Biden who has authorized drone warfare).
- The U.S. has never gone a decade without war.
Sexual Assault in the Military
Rape in the armed forces is a problem that the Pentagon continues to deal with. Nathaniel Penn reports in GQ that nearly 30 sexual assault survivors came forward in 2018 to discuss rape in the military.
According to Pentagon reports 38 military men are sexually assaulted daily. And the majority of the victims’ stories involve a highly ranked perpetrator and a young soldier (female and male).
Psychologist James Asbrand, who specializes in post-traumatic stress disorder, explains, “The rape of a male soldier has a particular symbolism. In a hyper masculine culture, what’s the worst thing you can do to another man? Force him into what the culture perceives as a feminine role. Completely dominate and rape him.”
Asbrand says the military is a hypermasculine environment, which is consistent with its media portrayal. Joining the army is considered a noble act for men, which military movies, advertisements, and video games reinforce.
War — that most violent and decisive of human acts is a uniquely and virtually exclusively masculine enterprise. Military service is a rite of manhood; and war also can create a national identity — a sense that the nation is strong, determined, decisive, brave, proud, and so on, Ashbrand says.
Moreover, war also defines masculine identities of those individuals who plan and orchestrate military engagements, assuring that, although younger, poorer, browner, and blacker soldiers do much of the actual fighting, and the top brass still is white and male.
In her study of a “war games” exercise for security affairs analysts conducted by the RAND Corporation, Carol Cohn observed that participants in the exercise equated masculinity with the willingness to use force and to sacrifice the lives of one’s own country’s citizens.
In contrast, participants in the exercise saw non-violent solutions, such as negotiation, as signs of weakness and inadequate masculinity. Cohn noted that participants suggesting such options immediately lost legitimacy in the game and lost their legitimacy with others from that point forward. A similar dynamic occurred among soldiers during the Vietnam War.
Susan Jeffords, in her famous study, The Remasculinization of America, found that Vietnam imagery in films and books of the 1980s conveyed the message that the Vietnam War was lost because long-haired protestors back home caused the military to take an insufficiently aggressive stance in Vietnam.
Lynda E. Boose, in her more recent study “Techno-Muscularity and the ‘Boy Eternal’: From the Quagmire to the Gulf,” expands on Jeffords’ analysis, arguing that Vietnam produced a great deal of national anxiety about inadequate masculinity during the 1980s, with the resultant rise of what Boose and others call “hypermasculinity.”
Even doll manufacturers took the cue. G.I. Joe bulked up in the ’80s, too. Today the doll’s physique is as unrealistic for men as Barbie’s is for women.
Boose argues that the Gulf War was, for both President George Bush Sr. and the public at large, a chance for the nation to redeem itself — to regain its lost masculinity after Vietnam.
Masculinity and the “Enemy”
What is fascinating is that the masculine ideal to which men and nations are expected to aspire is a white ideal. Ironically, even though close to 50% the enlisted men and women today in the US military are people of color, the glorified symbol of military hyper masculinity is still a white man. From John Wayne to Sylvester Stallone to Josh Hartnett (Black Hawk Down), most of our celluloid war heroes are white.
In contrast, the image of the enemy that occupies the national psyche (and often animates the American film industry) is both non-white and feminized. Fittingly, of course, most of the “real life” wars the United States has seen fit to fight since World War II have been against nations of color: Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria.
Joanne Nagel says in her article in Ethnic and Racial Studies that President Theodore Roosevelt’s concept of masculinity involved “adventurous but civilized white men [who] tame or defeat savage men of color.”
Providing a modern illustration of the same attitude, George Bush Jr. repeatedly contrasted the nonwhite “rogue states” he wanted to attack with the “civilized world.” In treating Arab and Asian nations (his “axis of evil”) as “uncivilized,” Bush suggested that they are barbarians, and that U.S. military force is needed to protect the world from their savage destructiveness.
In addition to seeing American enemies as “nonwhite savages,” America’s national consciousness feminizes them as well. Thus, Jeffords finds that in Vietnam imagery the enemy is often associated with feminine qualities.
Given the way in which gender categories associate weakness and defeat with the feminine, it’s not surprising that, just as sports opponents are disparaged with feminizing imagery, so military enemies are feminized as well.
In a striking example, a flyer that was circulated in New York City shows Osama Bin Laden being sodomized by the World Trade Center, with the caption, “You like skyscrapers, bitch?”
In essence American masculinity is not only defined as violent, but also as violent towards types of people. Author Toni Morrison has argued that immigrants to the United States become “Americans” by subordinating people of color — that dominating racial minorities is part of how one attains legitimate membership in American society. Not only do individuals become American by subordinating people of color; they become masculine as well.
This racing and gendering of military opponents help to explain why American violence by attacking Iraq in response to the September 11 attacks was seen by Americans as brave, rational, principled, justified, and noble, while the 9/11 attackers’ violence is seen as cowardly, irrational, unprincipled, unjustified, and unadulterated evil. Atrocious as the attacks in New York, D.C., and Pennsylvania were, they certainly weren’t cowardly.
Symbolically and for many Americans, realistically, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon — icons of U.S. economic and military power — registered as a symbolic emasculation of the (white) United States by (nonwhite) foreigners. The collapse of the World Trade Center towers posed a fundamental challenge to America’s national sense of identity as the superpower of the world.
Of course, the only way to escape such a humiliating, victimized role is to respond with violence — to recapture the nation’s masculinity using massive military force.
Thus, America’s association of masculinity with violence, and femininity with defeat, helps to feed a revenge mentality that justifies reacting with extreme and disproportionate violence to any experience of victimization.
A warrior culture is imbedded in American society — from the military flyovers at major sporting and other public events to the video games Americans play, to the movies and TV shows they watch. A warrior mentality has also affected the vocabulary of the political life, where “war chests” finance “campaigns” by “foot soldiers” in “battleground” states directed by top “lieutenants”. Less militarily, there is the obligatory singing of the national anthem before sports competitions, which started after WWI. And even medical and humanitarian causes are characterized as the “war against [pick your cause]”
Today, Americans seem to trust ONLY the military. In June 2016, for instance, a Gallup poll found that 73% of Americans had “quite a lot” of confidence in the military, versus 36% for the presidency and 6% for Congress.
Both liberal and conservative media regularly extol the virtues and character of military leaders in interviews and their opinions are highly valued on issues that range far beyond military matters. Rarely do we see military leaders questioned or criticized in the manner that politicians and business leaders are.
America’s leaders still seem obsessed with proving their national (and their personal?) masculinity to the world. And empathy with America’s attackers has been labeled unpatriotic in post-September 11 discourse. Any effort to explain or understand the terrorists, or the regions of the world from which they come, is seen as condoning their behavior. Empathy is dismissed as treason.
Masculinity and Guns
It is almost been a cultural norm to think of men and guns going together, a view which seems to be corroborated by empirical evidence.
We find it everywhere, to right-wing extremist groups’ revolutionary posters, clothing, and symbols, and from war memorials and statues. Weapons systems are designed mostly by men, marketed mostly for men, and used mostly by men.
Boys are given guns to play with or they make them for themselves. War memorials depict muscular men clutching their guns or hurling grenades with flexed, oversized pectoral muscles bulging out of the opened shirts of their uniforms.
And as a footnote to the victims of war being remembered, there are few war memorials devoted to civilians killed in wars, even though they far outnumbered the military personnel lost.
Boys now brandish realistic replica handguns and assault rifles produced by the toy industry. In fact, a major gun manufacturer has recently produced a smaller sized assault weapon, advertised as ideal for young boys to learn on,
Guns figure prominently in literature, movies and video games aimed towards a mainly adolescent male audience. The display of a man’s weapon in public becomes a way in which the man displays his masculinity and defines his role in society as shown by the many images of self-styled militia standing on the steps of state capital buildings or marching in protest.
The sexual imagery of men and their guns is obvious. The phallic image of weapons — and the corresponding notion of violent masculinity — is often reinforced by the entertainment industry.
The resurgence of militarized masculinity during the Reagan-era was a reaction both to a crisis of masculinity and foreign policy setbacks as well as its reflection in popular culture according to authors Lynda E. Boose, author of Daughters and Fathers, and Susan Jeffords, author of Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era.
In the view of these authors, the ‘emasculating’ experience of Viet Nam was a more aggressive foreign policy, mirrored by a cultural shift away from a perceived “softer” masculinity of the late 1960s and 1970s (linked with a “defeatist” home front during the Viet Nam War) towards an aggressive masculinity.
An indicator of this shift is seen in the male role models conveyed by action movies — the previous suave and gentlemanly James Bond starring Roger Moore with a small handgun and relatively refined manners is replaced by John Rambo by an aggressive and violent Daniel Craig, using many larger and more powerful weapons.
The “warrior” masculinity is clearly visible in western mass culture. The urban professional warriors of today, engage in “warfare” in Silicon Valley or Wall Street. In their time off they wear military-style designer clothes and drive luxury versions of military vehicles such as Land Rovers or Humvees.
News reporters reporting on conflicts and the staff of relief organizations, even when they are far removed from the actual fighting, are looking increasingly like combatants, wearing toned-down military style clothing, flak vests, helmets and driving oversized all-terrain vehicles.
The militarized imagery and the use of military accessories can be seen as manifestations of a militarized concept of masculinity, an aggressive hyper-individualism that is also dominant in movies and TV shows with their oversized weapons and muscles.
