"Ihr habt mich zu einer hilflosen Hure gemacht"

"You disgust me."

You turned me into a helpless whore."

Those are just some of the scathing words allegedly written by a female Air Force airman who had to sit through mandatory sexual harassment training recently.

The letter, posted on the blog John Q. Public under the pen name Kayce Hagen, excoriates the idea behind the training (known as the Sexual Assault Response Coordination program): "You made me a victim today, and I am nobody’s victim. I am an American Airman in the most powerful Air Force in the world, and you made me into a helpless whore."

Hier geht es kraftvoll weiter.

Nicht nur in den USA stellt sich aktuell eine Soldatin der Opfer-Kultur entgegen, die sie als schädlich für Frauen empfindet. Auch in Kanada gab es kürzlich einen womöglich überzogenen Bericht über eine Art Rape Culture im Militär; dort verwahrt sich eine Soldatin dagegen, dafür instrumentalisiert zu werden. Obwohl der Bericht ein Foto von ihr zeige, habe sie keine der darin geschilderten Erfahrungen je gemacht:

I do admit that crude jokes and swear words are spoken regularly in the military, yet I have never felt offended by them. In my experience, jokes that degrade women are not made any more often than jokes that degrade other groups of people — and, in fact, though the article mentions "references to female genitalia" as a particularly offensive example of such a joke, I can assure you that references to male genitalia are far, far more common. What I find much more offensive and misogynistic than any joke I have heard in the military is the notion that females, but not males, are somehow ill-equipped to handle this manner of conversing. The joking I have experienced has almost always been good-natured, and when the time has come to get the job done I have never found myself to be treated any less fairly than anyone else, or to be any less accepted by my peers as a result of my gender.