At about the time I was headed to Parris Island, our first four-star female general, Ann Dunwoody, came out with a book: A Higher Standard, about her time in the Army. Sounds right up my alley, right?
In some ways, it was. She writes about being able to run fast, which meant that she kept up with her commanders, which meant she was invited to participate in physical-fitness sessions, which meant that they got to know her, which meant that she got lots of good advice.
The women in the rear? Not so much. After all, this was the Ann show.
She talked about taking risks to deploy to Kuwait during Desert Storm when she didn't have orders to go. She talked about being one of the first female officers to go to the US Army Airborne School. She talked about reworking the Army's supply system so that the soup-sandwich approach that took place in the 1991 war didn't happen again during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Pretty badass, right?
She went to Airborne School in 1975, which was when female officers were first allowed to attend. She said the first thing she saw was a poster that said, “Paratrooper: The Last Step to Becoming a Man.” She also talked about the first time she jumped out of an airplane, saying one of the Black Hats, or Airborne School instructors, slapped her hard on the butt. “That was the only time that happened to me, and I never saw them do that to anyone else,” she wrote.1 She was a stick leader, which meant she would jump first, because the Black Hats figured if she went first, the men would be too embarrassed to chicken out.
When she arrived at her new duty station of Fort Bragg, she wrote that she felt pushed away, and that the leadership didn't know what to do with her because she was a woman. She was given a job she was overqualified for, and she said that would never have happened to her male friends.
She wrote about the hazing that every officer went through who went to an airborne unit, which included being shocked by officers who used a car battery and two wires, and having to tell an extraordinarily dirty joke to get into “the club.” She was angry when people assumed she got a position because she was a woman, rather than because she was qualified for a job.
She dealt with a division commander who refused to allow women to jump out of the same aircraft he was on.
She said in the 1990s, as gender-integrated training began, that it was time to overcome “long-held prejudices and sexist views,” especially after the scandal at Aberdeen in 1996, when twelve drill instructors were charged with sex crimes involving female recruits.2
“I had been in the service for twenty-one years and had never encountered any direct form of sexual harassment or assault,” she wrote. “Although in my early years, I was exposed to questionable language, inappropriate comments and jokes, these were a reflection of the Army in the 1970s. I did believe, in this case, that our junior enlisted women had become the easy targets because they were young and less experienced.”3
I think of this as willful blindness.
And, yeah, I was exactly there.
Until I wasn't.
It's so hard to get into “the club” if you speak out against it.
Listen: I can and do swear like a sailor (apparently, they're worse than Marines). But should a woman who swears be perceived differently from a man who swears?
Absolutely not.
Should I be okay with someone slapping my ass on the way out of a plane, because I don't want to make a fuss?
Nope.
Should I be afraid to tell my female boss, because I don't think she'll believe me that my co-worker is harassing me?
No.
In fact, my female boss should be mentoring me about sexual harassment and gender-integration and how to move up and how to deal with nonsense. My female boss—and all of the other women within my company or command—should be supporting each other to ensure we're all successful.
It should be the norm. We shouldn't have to be “one of the guys.” We should be ourselves.
I recently wrote a piece for the San Diego Union-Tribune about the issue of senior women refusing to speak out about sexism in the military. It makes sense that the problem can be ignored by senior women. It's an ugly problem—one that is not commensurate with our values system—so to acknowledge it means having to question other fundamental aspects of our service. It would require these senior women to acknowledge that maybe they really aren't part of the club, despite years of trying to fit in.
But even as senior women like Dunwoody are able to explain away harassment and assault they may have experienced, there is no way to deny that their subordinates are being mistreated daily. As many as one in four female veterans report being sexually harassed or assaulted while in the military.
Have you heard about Marines United? Male Marines and Marine Corps veterans posted to social media pictures of female Marines that they believed would embarrass the women. There were nude shots. There were compromising-position shots. There were unattractive shots. Do you know how many Marines participated? As many as thirty thousand. That was in 2016.
In my case, when I was a junior officer, I heard male Marines talk about women in a derogatory way early in my career, and I did nothing. Barracks whore. WM, meaning “Walking Mattress.” If I had spoken up, I would have been “other.” Somehow, I believed that they thought of me differently—that I was extraordinary.
Certainly they didn't talk that way about me.
As you move up the chain of command, there's even more pressure to conform and be part of the
