In the military, however, the situation is even worse. Rape is almost twice as frequent as it is among civilians, especially in wartime. Soldiers are taught to regard one another as family, so military rape resembles incest. And most of the soldiers who rape are older and of higher rank than their victims, so are taking advantage of their authority to attack the very people they are supposed to protect.
Department of Defense reports show that nearly 90 percent of rape victims in the Army are junior-ranking women, whose average age is 21, while most of the assailants are non-commissioned officers or junior men, whose average age is 28.
This sexual violence persists in spite of strict laws against rape in the military and a concerted Pentagon effort in 2005 to reform procedures for reporting the crime. Unfortunately, neither the press nor the many teams of psychologists and sociologists who study veterans ever seem to ask why.
The answer appears to lie in a confluence of military culture, the psychology of the assailants and the nature of war.
Two seminal studies have examined military culture and its attitudes toward women: one by Duke University Law Professor Madeline Morris in 1996, which was presented in the paper “By Force of Arms: Rape, War, and Military Culture” and published in Duke Law Journal; and the other by University of California professor and folklorist Carol Burke in 2004 and explained in her book, Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane and the High-And-Tight: Gender, Folklore and Changing Military Culture (Beacon Press). Both authors found that military culture is more misogynistic than even many critics of the military would suspect. Sometimes this misogyny stems from competition and sometimes from resentment, but it lies at the root of why soldiers rape.
...
Having the courage to report a rape is hard enough for civilians, where unsympathetic police, victim-blaming myths, and the fear of reprisal prevent some 60 percent of rapes from being brought to light, according to a 2005 Department of Justice study.
But within the military, reporting is much riskier. Platoons are enclosed, hierarchical societies, riddled with gossip, so any woman who reports a sexual assault has little chance of remaining anonymous. She will probably have to face her assailant day after day and put up with resentment and blame from other soldiers who see her as a snitch. She risks being persecuted by her assailant if he is her superior, and punished by any commanders who consider her a troublemaker. And because military culture demands that all soldiers keep their pain and distress to themselves, reporting an assault will make her look weak and cowardly.
For all these reasons, some 80 percent of military rapes are never reported, as the Pentagon itself acknowledges.
This widespread misogyny in the military actively encourages a rape culture. It sends the message to men that, no matter how they feel about women, they won’t fit in as soldiers unless they prove themselves a “brother” by demeaning and persecuting women at every opportunity. So even though most soldiers are not rapists, and most men do not hate women, in the military even the nicest guys succumb to the pressure to act as if they do.
...
Misogyny has always been at the root of sexual violence in the military, but two other factors contribute to it, as well: the type of man who chooses to enter the all-volunteer force and the nature of the Iraq War.
The economic reasons behind enlistment are well understood. The military is the primary path out of poverty and dead-end jobs for many of the poor in America. What is less discussed is that many soldiers enlist as teenagers to escape troubled or violent homes.
Two studies of Army and Marine recruits, one conducted in 1996 by psychologists L.N. Rosen and L. Martin, and the other in 2005 by Jessica Wolfe and her colleagues of the Boston Veterans Affairs Health Center, both of which were published in the journal Military Medicine, found that half the male enlistees had been physically abused in childhood, one-sixth had been sexually abused, and 11 percent had experienced both. This is significant because, as psychologists have long known, childhood abuse often turns men into abusers.
In the ’70s, when the women’s movement brought general awareness of rape to a peak, three men — criminologist Menachim Amir and psychologists Nicholas Groth and Gene Abel — conducted separate but groundbreaking studies of imprisoned rapists. They found that rapists are not motivated by out-of-control lust, as is widely thought, but by a mix of anger, sexual sadism and the need to dominate — urges that are usually formed in childhood. Therefore, the best way to understand a rapist is to think of him as a torturer who uses sex as a weapon to degrade and destroy his victims. This is just as true of a soldier rapist as it is of a civilian who rapes.
Nobody has yet proven that abusive men like this seek out the military — attracted by its violent culture — but several scholars suspect that this is so, including the aforementioned Morris and Rutgers University law professor Elizabeth L. Hillman, author of a forthcoming paper on sexual violence in the military. Hillman writes, “There is … the possibility that the demographics of the all-volunteer force draw more rape-prone men into uniform as compared to civil society.”More
"Come on, ask me a question, you fuck, you fuck, you fuck!" "We Hollywood DJs who are supposed to be the new leaders of the underground, we're pitiful man. We're pitiful."
It must be strange to be Derrick May, the man who, along with schoolmates Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson, started the thing we call techno. Who is still treated with reverence for his intensely spiritual DJing and for some of the most important records ever made. Who sits silent in his Detroit warehouse, releasing nothing, appalled by the drug culture that envelopes the music he created. Derrick May knows the secret of techno, but will he share it? Writer: Tony Marcus
Who knows the secret of techno? Derrick May, the man who, with Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson, started the whole damn thing does. And it's a lot more to do with what's going on in his head than computer love and the soul of the machine.
Photographer: Peter Gabriel
DERRICK May lives in a small warehouse building that covers an entire street corner in one of Detroit's dead zones. There's nowhere to go if you take a walk outside but the apartment's windows run right around the curved street and through them you can see a church, a discount clothes store and a billboard poster of Kate Moss advertising milk. By night they show four lanes of traffic streaking past in a red blur, the nearby steeple glowing with an underwater green.
Inside his space is one large room with a kitchen area, tiny annex with a bed and clothes, large TV, video and games machine in one corner, decks in another, a few pictures propped on easels against a wall (including two Dali lithographs and a painting by US surrealist Richard Williams that cost $100,000) and a handful of keyboards that Carl Craig is helping Derrick wire together. When he's finished it will be the first time in two and a half years that Derrick's studio has been functional. A PlayStation basketball game is running on the box. Derrick's customised one of the players so his name is Mayday. "See Mayday on the court," he beams, "look at the score man. It's not even a game anymore. It's like an ass-whipping. I'll let the computer finish it."
While Carl struggles with the cables Derrick runs a track from an old DAT. "I made this on one of my sadder days, my girl she had left me," he explains as the music begins. "Can you hear the bassline? It's crying." There is something about that b-line, it seems to twist towards feeling while the rest of the track moves like water, quiet spirals of harmony propelled by clear and funky breaks. Like most of his records it seems to have leaked in from a parallel dancefloor where artists, dreamers, lovers, poets, angels and ravers trip across the clouds. "People haven't heard this before," he adds, "it's from the Rhythim Is Rhythim LP that I never released."
...Juan Atkins once remarked that if he, Derrick, and Kevin had been white by now they'd be the biggest thing since sliced bread. May agrees but he insists he's not bitter. He's happy with his life, he travels the world as a DJ and people treat him with respect if not reverence. He compares his situation to Goldie's, pointing out that 'Timeless', was a perfect, beautiful record that failed to sell in the US because the record companies, radio stations and music infrastructure still couldn't deal with a black man producing non-recognisably black music. But the race question troubles him most as it affects the dancefloor. Because techno's black root is so invisible, he argues, it keeps black kids off the floor.
WHEN he started, as a kid dancing in Chicago and later DJing as the resident at Detroit's The Music Institute, he was facing a different dancefloor. "It was a spiritual place for music," he recalls. "If you weren't there you obviously missed something because I think there are only about four clubs in the world that can compare to its power and energy. We had a young, beautiful, black crowd and I mean beautiful in the sense of spirit and mind and soul. We had white kids coming, Spanish kids coming, gay kids coming, straight kids coming. Nobody was on drugs, man, kids smoked a little bit of weed, drank a little liquor, they came, had a ball, went home, made love and felt good feelings all week."
"You've got black kids in this country who won't come out and dance," he complains, "they don't want to know about dance music. They're not even interested. Half of them don't even know it exists. It's the same shit all over the world, even in Africa man. I been to South Africa and the black folks don't want to know. Nobody has a black audience except for the r n' b and rap crowd. I long for a black audience to hear my music. It hurts me to believe that black people are not down. Because I'm black."
Like most of the artists who've pushed the music further and deeper he was intricately lost inside disco-life. The DJs who took him there were house music's early 80s pioneers like Detroit's Ken Collier and Chicago's Ron Hardy and Frankie Knuckles. "Before I really started making music I got baptised by Ron Hardy. The way he played music and the way people responded to him, I watched those people climb poles in his club, watched them become animals, like fucking wild animals. And nobody in there was on real drugs, you know maybe a few people using MDMA but the gay scene always kept their MDMA to themselves. Most of those kids didn't have no money for shit, so they'd share a joint and pass it around to four or five people until it was about as big as an exclamation point. " That club was unbelievable and that spirit stayed with me and that shit was embedded in me, scared me, it opened up a whole other insight to where I was coming from electronically and all my other backgrounds. So when I had the chance, man, I followed that vision of those people and that club and of the things I've seen in other clubs, Ken's club, Frankie's club. All these things. Everybody gets a dose of it, everyone goes to the same parties but for some reason I had a different feeling about it. I don't know why. I just did. And I felt like I had to do something with those feelings. And I did."
His best known track, 'Strings Of Life' comes from these days, a demo tape he gave Frankie Knuckles to play in his club. It was Frankie who named the song. "It just went crazy," smiles Derrick. "It just exploded. It was like something you can't imagine, the kind of power and energy people got off that record when it was first heard. Mike Dunn says he has no idea how people can accept a record that doesn't have a bassline. It had never dawned on me that 'Strings' didn't have a bassline." Not that it needed one because like a lot of May's productions, in 'Strings' everything from the strings, the blips, the sequences, the keyboards and sounds all move to create rhythm. It's as if the funk has infected every part of the track so the whole thing jiggles and dances like a crazy bag of bones some shaman is waving over the dancefloor. His secret, he claims, is simple - he saves the drums for last. "80% of all my songs have always started with strings, it's like a mood, a frame of mind. I don't always end up using those strings but that's the way I start and from there I just build. I'm a metronome working kind of guy, I make the music to the metronome. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. The last thing I do is add the drums. Too many people use drums as a piece de resistance to their music. That's dumb. Drums are an accent. That's it. You should be able to make a track and not even use drums. You should be able to have so much power that you don't need drums."
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BEIJING (AP) — Far ahead halfway through his 100-meter Olympic quarterfinal, Usain Bolt casually swiveled his head to his right, to his left, then back to his right.
Never hurts to check. No one was nearby — hardly surprising, given how quickly the 6-foot-5 Bolt's long strides carried his golden spikes. So the world record-holder slowed to what for him amounts to a jog.
He still crossed in 9.92 seconds, a time that makes it the fastest dash ever run in China, a time that would have earned a medal at all but two previous Summer Games and a time that fails to reflect how effortless Bolt's performance was.
The Jamaican licked his lips, checked the scoreboard and pumped a fist, his untucked yellow sleeveless shirt rippling. The message, to himself and to rivals Asafa Powell and Tyson Gay, was unmistakable:
Bring on Saturday's 100 semifinals and final.
"I just ran the first 50 meters, then I looked around to make sure I was safe, and I shut it off," Bolt said Friday night. "I'm ready for my best."
Goodness. Remember, this is a guy who said as recently as last week that he wasn't sure whether he would race the 100 — an event he only began pursuing seriously this year — in addition to his specialty, the 200, at these Olympics.
"He's a phenomenal athlete," said Darvis Patton of the United States, who also advanced to the semifinals.
Bolt, his Jamaican teammate Powell and U.S. record-holder Gay — the reigning world champion who hadn't raced in 1 1/2 months because of a left leg injury — all advanced without a hitch through two 100 heats Friday, when the 10-day track and field competition opened.More
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