Читать онлайн "The Second Sexism: Discrimination Against Men and Boys" - Benatar David - RuLit

Once battle begins so do the casualties.14 Millions of men have been killed in combat. They have been clubbed with various instruments, decapitated with swords and cannonballs, hacked with axes, penetrated in every part of the body — the head, chest, abdomen, genitals and limbs — by arrows, bullets and shrapnel — and blown to smithereens.15 They have been poisoned with gas, burned alive, crashed to their deaths in aircraft, drowned and hemorrhaged internally from the pressure of blasts.16 Some die instantly. Others have bled to death, succumbed to infections or otherwise perished from their wounds over periods of varying duration. Some mortally wounded have died slowly on the battlefield because timely evacuation for medical treatment was impossible.

Not all casualties are fatal. Some are relatively mild, but nonetheless a disadvantage relative to women, who were spared such injuries by being exempt from combat. Serious injuries, however, are extremely common.17 Men have lost limbs, jaws, noses, ears and eyes. They have been blinded, deafened, paralyzed and disfigured in innumerable ways. Nor are all the wounds physical. The trauma of combat, being injured, witnessing the gruesome deaths and wounds of comrades, and even inflicting such on enemies, can readily cause psychological trauma.18 Soldiers can be haunted for decades by their combat experiences, impacting negatively on their lives in myriad ways.

The horrors of war are such that many soldiers — even those who volunteered, but more especially conscripts — would much rather leave battle than stay. The pressures against desertion are partially social. Men, if they are to save face, must act bravely and “honorably.” But these pressures are insufficient to keep all men in rank, and thus steep penalties have been imposed for those who seek to hold back or run away. Deserters are regularly imprisoned but other penalties have included branding.19 Deserters have often been executed, either summarily on the spot or following a court martial.20 Among those who were executed for desertion are those who would today, at least in some societies, be recognized as having post-traumatic stress disorder.21 However, there are still cases, even in enlightened societies, where the military is insufficiently attentive to the psychological stresses of combat. In 2003 an American soldier, on his second night in Iraq, saw an Iraqi who had been cut in half by machine-gun fire. The soldier vomited and “shook for hours. His head pounded and his chest hurt.”22 “When he informed his superior that he was having a panic attack and needed to see someone,” he said he “was given two sleeping pills and told to go away.”23 Two days later he was shipped back to the United States and then charged with cowardice. “Coward is a pretty big stigma to carry around,” he said.24 Eventually all charges against him were dropped,25 but not before causing him a great deal of distress.

Other soldiers, wishing to avoid both continued combat or the punishments for deserting, have feigned psychiatric illness, while others have resorted to self-mutilation, rendering themselves unfit for continued service.26 Some are so desperate that they take their own lives.27

Some soldiers become prisoners of war. Although there are now conventions governing the treatment of prisoners, these are relatively new and even now are frequently breached. All prisoners of war are, by definition, prisoners and suffer the hardships that come with imprisonment. Some have been beaten, tortured, starved, put to hard labor. Some are executed.

Having fought, often unwillingly and under threat of severe punishment for refusing, surviving soldiers return home. While a hero’s welcome sometimes awaits them, this does not last as long as the injuries many of them have suffered.28 Their initial reception by civilian society is frequently less glorious. They can be feared because of how war has brutalized them.29 They may even be met with hostility where the war in which they fought has become unpopular.30 Indeed, they are sometimes rejected even before returning from such wars. For example, as the Vietnam War become more unpopular in the United States, “it became increasingly common for girlfriends, fiancées, and even wives to dump the soldiers who depended on them.”31

Not all men who are conscripted see combat, but conscription even in the absence of combat is a significant disadvantage. Careers are interrupted. Conscripts are separated from their families. They are subjected to serious invasions of privacy, restrictions on freedom, demeaning treatment and harsh discipline.32 Even today, in the Russian army for example, an “abusive system of discipline known as dedovshchina” is practiced.33 Thousands of cases are reported every year and a number of soldiers die each year as a result of this discipline.34 Hundreds take their own lives.35

Violence

Combat is by no means the only context in which men are the victims of violence. Indeed, with two exceptions, men are much more likely than women to be the targets of aggression and violence.36

The first exception is sexual assault. Although, as I shall show later, the incidence of sexual assault of males is significantly underestimated and taken insufficiently seriously, it is the case that women are more frequently the victims of sexual assault.

The second exception is one kind of domestic violence, but this is exceptional in an unusual way. In its spousal or “intimate partner” form,37 the phrase “domestic violence” is routinely understood to refer to the violence husbands or boyfriends inflict on wives or girlfriends. The general perception is that spousal violence is almost exclusively the violent treatment of women by their husbands, boyfriends or other male partners. However, this perception is mistaken. Many studies have shown that wives use violence against their husbands at least as much as husbands use violence against their wives,38 Given how unexpected such findings are to many people, at least one well-known author (who shared the prevailing prejudices prior to his quantitative research) examined the data in multiple ways in order to determine whether these could be reconciled with common views.39 On almost every score, women were as violent as men. It was found that half the violence is mutual, and in the remaining half there were an equal number of female and male aggressors.40 When a distinction was drawn between “normal violence” (pushing, shoving, slapping and throwing things) and “severe violence” (kicking, biting, punching, hitting with an object, “beating up” and attacking the spouse with a knife or gun), the rate of mutual violence dropped to a third, the rate of violence by only the husband remained the same but the rate of violence by only the wife increased.41 Wives have been shown to initiate violence as often as husbands do.42 At least some studies have suggested that there is a higher rate of wives assaulting husbands than husbands assaulting wives,43 and most studies of dating violence show higher rates of female-inflicted violence.44 It is thus not the case, as some have suggested, that female violence against intimate partners is usually in self-defense.