US soldiers for hire… for sex
Image by Sister72 via Flickr
A sex panic is brewing and this time it isn’t over women or children, but the manliest of men: soldiers for hire. In this case, young men working for the ArmorGroup at the US Embassy in Kabul say they were forced to get naked and engage in sexual acts by their superiors. The State Department recently renewed its contract with the ArmorGroup despite allegations of sexual misconduct.
The story, which is surfacing in a variety of newspapers, almost always has the words “sexual deviancy” in the title. My personal favorite is the ABC News once that includes a “slide show.”
Kabul U.S. Embassy Guard Says Sexual Deviancy Required for Promotion – ABC News.
Call me a pervert, but I don’t think the issue here is what these men were doing poolside. Who cares if they did shots off each other’s nipples and anuses? And how the hell did perfectly “normal” homoerotic acts get labeled as “sexual deviancy”? Last I checked, homoeroticism is not listed in the DSM as a form of sexual deviancy, and even if it were, that’s only because psychiatrists are as uptight as priests when it comes to sexual pleasure (that’s why you still can’t masturbate onto a shoe without being labeled a deviant). As for whether these men were sexually harassed by their superiors, well, that’s sad, but I’m not really shedding tears over the fact that mercenary armies are not nice places to work.
But what is really and truly upsetting, what is causing me to shed a few tears, is that once again the mainstream media is ignoring the real story: hiring out to private, for profit companies our national defense. Not only is this costing all of us a lot of money since these soldiers for hire don’t work for peanuts and the promise of a college degree and the higher- ups in these companies earn salaries comparable to AIG execs, but more importantly, the US government has very little or even no control over how these mercenaries behave.
A little male bonding and fondling around poolside? Jesus. How about the rape and murder of Iraqi civilians? A recent article by Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, asks why we’re still using companies like the ArmorGroup and Blackwater when Hillary Clinton is Secretary of State and when she was candidate Clinton she promised to end the US’s reliance on mercenaries. Clinton even co-sponsored the Stop Outsourcing Security, or SOS Act, because
“These private security contractors have been reckless and have compromised our mission in Iraq… The time to show these contractors the door is long past due. We need to stop filling the coffers of contractors in Iraq, and make sure that armed personnel in Iraq are fully accountable to the U.S. government and follow the chain of command.”
Perhaps the sex scandal (manly men committing homoerotic acts does make the American heart go aflutter) brewing around the Kabul Embassy soldiers-for-hire will cause Secretary of State Clinton and President Obama to do what should have been done a long time ago: stop putting US defense in the hands of private contractors. As for the mercenaries who will be out of a job, I suppose there’s always the possibility of selling a calender of erotic images in their coconut shell jock straps.
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Prof. Essig,
Agreed- hiring out defense is nothing I salute. But when you write: “As for whether these men were sexually harassed by their superiors, well, that’s sad, but I’m not really shedding tears over the fact that mercenary armies are not nice places to work,” I have to protest. No matter the place of work, sexual harassment should be taken seriously. And if it is true that these soldiers really “were forced to get naked and engage in sexual acts by their superiors,” then that is a hell of a lot more than sexual harassment. Sounds closer to sexual assault/rape to me. And I don’t think such cases should be judged any less because the victims were male. It is incredibly insensitive to joke about these young men’s potentially very traumatic situation as “a little male bonding and fondling around poolside.” When was sexual assault ever “bonding?” And just because they chose a less than great place of work, should we say- you were asking for it? I thought we had gotten over the “tight-jeans leads to rape” argument. And I certainly wasn’t expecting it from you.
- Astri
I appreciate the work you’re doing to get us to think about issues of gender in the workplace, but this is not the core issue here.
These “workers’ are in fact hired guns, many of whom have committed heinous crimes against civilians- especially in Iraq. They are less workers and more criminals whose crimes are committed in the name of American militaristic might.
As for equating what happened to them with sexual assault, I think that too is a dead end since there were no guns to their heads, at least not in the photos, but in fact just some very drunken men engaged in homoerotic acts- not sex, just acts. According to the reports, these men engaged in this behavior for promotions and better shifts. Coercion yes; sexual assault no.
Also, it seems worth noting that the media is describing these acts as “deviant” not because they were coerced but because the were homoerotic.
Finally, this is really not the point. The point is that a huge amount of our tax dollars are being spent to fund what are basically armed gangs of thugs who work to expand America’s military presence in countries that we should not be in.
I apologize if that seems as if I don’t care about workplace gender harassment. I do. But this isn’t the story here.
I am going to agree with work.life on this one. These workers who have chosen a terrible line of work are being forced to eat food out of someone else’s ass and you think it is a joke? If you want more oversight or the outlawing of mercenaries, then belittle the very folks from within these companies that might think that is a good idea?
Would you view the sexual harassment any different if it was done back in the U.S. at ArmorGroup HQ?
Would it be different if it was low level female worker back at HQ who was forced to eat food out of someone else’s ass, despite the fact that her paycheck came from outsourcing military? Or is that no longer the issue at that point?
http://michiganmessenger.com/25918/afghan-incident-raises-questions-wackenhut-armorguard-private-security-at-mich-nuclear-sites