VIRGINIA MESSICK was an Air Force recruit in training at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas in April 2011 when Staff Sgt. Luis Walker instructed her to meet him in a dorm room during a cleaning detail. He then “proceeded to rape me,” according to Messick, who tells her story in this New York Times video, a consummate work of propaganda, complete with a close-up shot of Messick’s engagement ring.

Let’s get this story straight.

Messick was in training to be a soldier. She was in the military. And yet she did nothing to defend herself in a safe and secure building in friendly territory against a man who demanded she engage in sexual intercourse. According to her own account, she did not scream out. She did not punch him and run away. She did not push him to the ground. She did not even tell anyone for months. She was psychologically intimidated because Walker was her superior. But why would someone with as little assertiveness as Messick be of value to the military, except perhaps to clean toilets, make beds or answer phones?

Walker is now serving a 20-year sentence for assaults against ten women recruits, none of whom apparently possessed the ability to defend themselves. It is perfectly normal for women to lack the ability to defend themselves against men. But if that perfectly normal state of affairs were recognized for what it is we would not have women in harm’s way in the military and we would not have a public outcry against sexual assault in the military. Certainly Walker’s behavior was a disgrace, but he is not the only one guilty of wrongdoing here. Our military leaders are accomplices for their utter failure to resist the feminization of the military. For every year Walker spends in jail, the commanders who have smoothed the way for people like Messick to be in training, and who believe that men and women will work in intimate quarters and never interact as men and women, should serve two years. And Messick herself is guilty for viewing the military as a place simply to get ahead and establish a career and for her failure to refuse to obey Walker’s orders. Shame on her. I don’t have an ounce of sympathy for her. As I have said before, women join the military not to defend their country but to destroy it.

Get a load of some of the photos of Messick in the video. Someone who poses in this way sheds serious doubt on her innocence. But then the entire Lackland assault case is an exercise in un-reality. Only by disregarding the obvious can we view the publicity surrounding this series of assaults as anything but a manifestation of mass delusion.

— Comments —-

Terry Morris writes:

I don’t have a lot of sympathy for such women either.

Somewhat off-topic, toward the end of my stint in Basic Training at Lackland, a fellow Airman and I were tasked with pulling dorm-guard for a female flight in their second or third week of training. At one point in our guard duty, their training instructor summoned them all into the conference room where he proceeded to verbally “rip their heads off” for something they had done. Apparently he had affectionately dubbed them “Jerry’s Kids” because of their collective inability to learn to march correctly in spite of his best efforts to train them. In response they (democratically, I’m sure) chose a few in their number to take their issue to the unit commander, ignoring the chain of command. Calling them “Jerry’s Kids” so insulted their sensibilities, you see, that they determined that this was one case in which they could justifiably ignore the chain of command, taking their complaint straight to the top.

Anyway, just a few seconds into his intense scolding of them they began to fall apart, one by one, until, at length, the entire group was sobbing uncontrollably and babbling profusely. In the end there were six dry eyes in the house, so to speak. And they all belonged to myself, my male cohort, and the training instructor.

A reader writes:

Thank you for dispeling any delusion I may have had that Christian conservatism is a culture of compassion. I have never seen such a vile sentiment expressed anywhere; until you yourself have been raped, you are in no position whatsoever to deem Ms. Messick guilty for being assaulted. Shame on you for perpetuating a rape culture that blames the victim while writing off the rapist’s actions as merely a “disgrace.”

Shame on you.

Laura writes:

The video interview with Messick destroyed my sympathy for her. She makes no mention of resistance. She takes too much pleasure in publicizing the details. And in her photographs, she has posed suggestively.

The reader continues:

I suggest you watch the video again. Her poses were no more suggestive than the average high school senior photos. She also stated explicitly that she felt uncomfortable describing details, and actually downplayed the event so much that her rapist wasn’t charged with rape in her case. Regardless, not a single person on Earth ever deserves to be raped, and no one should ever be blamed for the violent actions of another person. Do not fall into the trap of being so anti-feminist that you lose your compassion for anyone who doesn’t conform to your beliefs of women’s role in society; do not become so far gone that you would side with a rapist over a victim and portray the victim as an assailant. If something as terrible rape cannot even compel us to compassion and sympathy, then we live in a ugly, rotten world.

Laura writes:

I disagree about the photos. And, she did not strike me as uncomfortable describing the details at all.

I do not believe Messick deserved to be raped and I did not dispute the punishment for Walker.

By the way, after reading over my initial entry, I made a few word changes, though not to the part to which you most objected. I had referred to the Lackland case as a “package of lies.” I did not mean that Messick was lying. I meant that the root cause of sexual assault in the military is obscured in a package of lies. To clarify that, I changed the wording. I also added the point that it is normal for a woman such as Messick to be unable to defend herself against a much stronger man. But given that this is normal, it is absurd to have women in the military. Their defenselessness against men, whether it be the enemy or their fellow soldiers, is a given.

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