Secretary Denis McDonough defends a photo showing a woman being sexually assaulted.
The man was a drunk sailor on leave. The woman was a dental assistant, and a complete stranger.
First off, he’s got the wrong photo. There were two photos published. The one published by the NYT , above, was by Victor Jorgansen, taken while he was on duty, and is in the public domain. The other, the one in the staffer’s memo, with Times Square in the background, was taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt and published by Life magazine.
In the Jorgansen photo you can begin to see her clenched hand, but when you look at the Eisenstaedt photo, the whole thing starts to look rapey.
Here the Eisenstaedt photo has had color added. You can better see the headlock and the strength of his grip.
It was said she either slapped him or punched him in the face, which has been caught in another photo. Here are the other three photos taken by Eisenstaedt.
This must be it.
Looks like a fist.
It is still a stunning photo, just like the napalm girl picture is still stunning after you find out it was friendly fire. But it isn’t quite the same, is it.
The internal VA memo was leaked by Congress critter Tim Burchett, R-Tennessee, who believes flying saucers are real because, as he says in this interview with Steve Bannon, they are “in the Bible”, and by an anonymous account “end wokeness”. I will leave it as an exercise by the reader to discover the rest of Burchett’s views on anti-vax, J6 insurrection, and the sexual peccadilloes of his fellow congress critters like Matt Gaetz.
Here is the text of the leaked memo:
The memo begins “PURPOSE: this memorandum requests…”, but by the time it gets into the military press, the “request” has become an “order”, the “assistant under secretary for health for operations” has become a “top officer”, and ‘non-consensual’ is in scare quotes. You might even guess that the memo was written by an uppity woman, one who doesn’t buy into the military’s rape culture.
Remember the winter carnival Vulcan Crewe, the anonymous Minnesota bunch who ran around in a mob groping women? Mothers would keep a watch out for them in order to protect their girls and keep them back in the crowd. Until people started objecting.
Maybe, just maybe the Veterans administration needs an appointee that does not take his marching orders from Republican kooks, anti-vaxers, and J6 insurrectionists, and listens to his own people who are being paid to understand these things, and trying to take care of our veterans.
The Tailhook incident is not an outlier, there is a whole Wikipedia article about sexual assault in the military. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_assault_in_the_United_States_military. A woman serving in the military has a higher chance of being raped by her own people than being killed by the enemy. For someone with PTSD being treated in a VA hospital, this photo might be an all-too-grim reminder. On the other hand, maybe a guy who gets drunk and grabs random women off the street and puts them in a headlock is exactly what our military is all about.
In the real life situation, everyone made nice and smoothed things over so the public could have their feel-good moment and the press could sell some newspapers. That is how power works. But maybe this would have been a more satisfying response, “Eww, knock it off”.
The world needs more Lisas. And fewer Denis McDonoughs.
Gender Desk 