War Sex

This is the introduction to my up coming paper entitled War Sex: The Cultural Implications of the Sporadic and Intentional acts of Sexual Violence Committed by the United States Military Since World War I. I plan to have the paper written by the end of April to coincide with National Violence Against Women Awareness Month.

Sexual violence has had a part to play in every war that the United States has conducted since World War I and probably most conflicts before that. Culturally, it is an extremely painful realization. The U.S. military is often trumpeted as the vaunted legion of democracy and the guardian of the ideals that which democracies represent. Most recently, the prima facia pornography of the photos at Abu Gharib changed that popular understanding to a certain extent. However, this episode was not the United States military’s first foray into the world of sexual violence. There have been accounts of the sporadic commission of rape on the battle since World War I. In fact, the first execution of a U.S. Army soldier on foreign soil was for rape in 1917.World War II, Vietnam, and the recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq have all been littered with accounts of sporadic as well as planned sexual violence. More important than chronicling each individual act of sexual violence, this paper seeks to explain how sexual violence perpetrated by the U.S. military has affected art, literature, and film in the western world. The exploration of how cultural output of the United States and other western countries has played a role in enhancing the level of sexual violence in the U.S. military will also be explored. In this way, the feedback loop regarding sexual violence that plays out between culture of the United States and its military can be understood. The review of several works of art, literature, and film from each era provides a glimpse at how cultural understandings regarding sexual violence in combat have changed over the last hundred years and how images from one era affect another in sometimes surprising ways.

---