Lex Anteinternet: Yes, it's bad behavior. Immoral, and criminal. But at what point is it Nature?: And if so, should that be considered in some fashion? Marine Corps poster from 1915 emphasizing that the Marines fight, but placing, ...
This news story regards, as anyone paying attention knows, a story which purported that male Marines (and most Marines are male) were acquiring nude photos of female Marines, most of whom are young, single, women in good physical condition, and "sharing" them.
This shouldn't be a surprise at the same time the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue is on the stands. It features mostly nude young women in good physical condition and is viewed mostly by men, for money. And that's celebrated.
Yes, what the men sharing photos of the female Marines is doing is immoral, and maybe illegal. But what those buying Sports Illustrated are doing is also immoral, if legal.
Anyhow, I've already written about that sorry tale, and have a different focus from what I note here.
On one of the subjects of the photos, it turns out that she is not a Marine, which doesn't make it any better. Anyhow, a news story reports:
While he was away training in California, she sent him lewd photos on SnapChat in private, thinking they would never resurface. Just a few months later, her life would be turned upside.
XXXX says her 25-year old daughter had no idea her former boyfriend saved and shared screenshots of the photos she had sent him while they were together. The pair eventually broke up, but a few months later on Valentine's Day a friend of YYYYY's, who's also a Marine, told her he saw photos of her posted in a secret Facebook group called 'Marines United.'
What do we make of that?
Well, she's a cretin. And he's a creep.
I know that's really harsh, but frankly, in an era in which the complaints allegedly are that this demeans women, maybe there is a point at which you can say, yes the "boyfriend" who did this is a cad, and a really bad person, but the girl who did this was sharing something she shouldn't have been, and in more than one way, probably. This isn't a just deserts argument so much as a warning. People who would decry traditional morality ought to expect that the suspension of it results in the suspension of a lot of additionally morality.
This was pointed out, apparently, by a somewhat controversial site that caters to Marines and which has not been kind, apparently, the recent social experimentation in the Marine Corps, in a rather blunt fashion. Tip Of The Spear, that I'm not familiar with I'd note, commented:
“On the female side of the apparent issue women post risque pictures of themselves or send nudes to other people, they then complain about being harassed. On the male side of the apparent issue, men are collective and sharing nudes and risque pictures like they’re baseball cards and are stupid enough to leave comments in public view promoting stupidity and harassment,” the statement said. “Both sides are equally guilty but in different ways. Guys stop thinking with your d— and girls stop metaphorically burning down cities for attention.”
From a news article (can't remember where I saw it). But that is pretty much on the mark.
On the young woman noted above, some hometown newspaper got hold of her mother and interviewed her. Her comments were as follows.
YYYYY's father is a retired Gunnery Sergeant in the Marine Corps. XXXX says this is not the Corps her daughter was raised to know.
"They were raised with this male figure who is a Marine who they very rarely heard curse, they never saw him be disrespectful, they saw him take care of business and take care of his home," said McGinnis. "This is the image of Marines they have in their head. This is the image YYYYY has in her head of how a Marine should be, especially a non-commissioned officer. Honor and integrity is what the girls were raised with. This has her rethinking the way she views the world."
Well that's all nice and charming but it's also bull if meant to suggest it reflects the whole.
No, I'm not saying every Marine is a lech by any means. I was never a Marine, but I served with plenty of discharged former Marines while a Guardsmen, and I can say that they varied in morals and temperament like any group of men do. At least two of the men I knew who had been combat Marines were very religious men and likely always had been. One former Marine Corps officer I dimly know is a Catholic Priest now. A couple former Marines I know, both also highly religious, are lawyers whom I've never heard say a cross word. So I'm not saying that they all behave like this. All of this would be true of men I knew in the Army as well. But frankly, I'd also be less than candid if I didn't say that the many men who stayed on high moral ground did so in an environment that was less conducive to it than most others. Indeed, they tended to be admired for that, as otherwise all the vices that boys have, and I do mean boys, are accentuated by the fact that its a largely male environment and without the supervision of older people, male and female, like otherwise exists in society, a fact which is actually secretly missed by most servicemen. This has always been the case and is frankly generally worse in a peacetime army than in a wartime one when the service population base is wider. Indeed, even Kipling famously noted this in a stanza of his poem Tommy:
We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too,But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you,An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints,Why single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints;
All of this is not said to excuse the conduct. But its again said to emphasize a point that is seemingly lost in modern American society. These societies are largely male as being a soldier mostly appeals to men for deep reasons of evolutionary biology. Efforts to recruit more women and to incorporate them in combat units are contrary to this basic fact and even damage these units to the extent that they require changes in them away from their real purpose. That purpose is a deadly one and it means the men in the units are trained to do something that people are otherwise taught is deeply immoral. We can expect them to exhibit behavior that's at least as good as that in college dorms, which is also often not all that good, but we're not going to get it. Indeed, at least one famous commander of World War Two noted for his profanity noted this as long ago as the that, although I'll not repeat the quote. Some experiments fail, which is why they're experiments, and that failure needs to be heeded.
Beyond this, there's a lesson that has to do with traditional standards and expectations society wide. . . and Tip Of the Spear likely summarized the tip of that lesson about as well as anyone.
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