Bring Me Men

Book excerpt: The masculinity of those who serve in the American military would seem to be beyond reproach, yet it is full of contradictions. To become a warrior, one must renounce those things in life that are perceived to be unmasculine. Yet at the same time, the military has encouraged and even mandated warriors to do exactly the opposite. With the expansion of America's overseas ambitions after 1898, warriors have been compelled to cultivate aspects of themselves which under any other circumstances would seem unmasculine. The creation of a masculine armed force therefore has required a surprising degree of engagement with the unmasculine while, at the same time, requiring warriors to maintain a strict disavowal of those very same unmasculine things against which they define themselves. In Bring Me Men, Aaron Belkin explores these contradictions in great detail and shows that their invisibility has been central to the process of concealing American empire's nastiest warts. Maintaining the warrior's heroic image has involved displacing negative aspects of military masculinity's contradictions onto demonized outcasts, especially women, gay men and lesbians, and African Americans. Ironically, these scapegoats of military masculinity have not distanced themselves from the armed forces, but have stabilized the benign facade of empire as they sought to gain admittance to the community of warriors. By examining case studies that expose these contradictions-the phenomenon of male-on-male rape at the U.S. Naval Academy, for example, as well as historical and contemporary attitudes toward cleanliness and filth-Belkin utterly upends our understanding of the relationship between warrior masculinity and American empire and the fragile processes sustaining it.