A “myth”, you say?
Take a look at statistics of rape and sexual assault of women in our armed services. It’s not pretty. Also read up on how women contractors working overseas have been continually raped and assaulted by their American male colleagues. Read about Jamie Leigh Jones, a KBR contractor working in Iraq in 2005 who was drugged by her male colleagues and brutally raped by them. When she dragged her beaten body to report the rape the next day, her superiors locked her in a cargo container without food and water and was held there by armed guards. Only when a sympathetic guard allowed her to borrow his cell phone did she finally get through to her dad, who then called his congressional representative to intercede and have her brought home.
To this day, none of the men who raped and beat her have been charged with any crime.
Additionally, this is far from an isolated incident. There are many cases just like this, in which women working overseas for American companies as part of the war effort have been raped and beaten by colleagues, and then intimidated by their supervisors into keeping their mouths shut by threats of losing their job and being blacklisted from the contracting industry.
I know it’s very easy and preferable for some cowards, like the author, to plead ignorance on these issues; to pretend that these inequalities and horrors like the brutal treatment of women just don’t exist or are grossly over exaggerated because the consequence of admitting the existence of these tregedies would compel any human being with a soul and a conscience to take action against the individuals and institutions that perpetrate sadistic violence against women.
A day after a South Carolina conservative Republican has to resign his post for racist e-mails depicting watermelon on the White House lawn, another conservative Republican writes a treatise exhorting women to just shut up, stop being babies about it and take what’s coming to them because “life is tough for everybody, so get used to it.”
Every day the right wing gets that much closer to becoming the American wing of Taliban.
