General shocked at the “sexually demeaning and gender-based language” used by USMC drill sergeants

Did you just use the wrong pronoun, recruit?!?

R. Lee Ermey is rolling over in his grave. Sorry, Gunny, but your beloved Corps is apparently going woke.

Marine Corps Times has the story of a general who was shocked by offensive language being used by drills and recruits in boot camp. It’s so…so…awful. I just can’t believe the unprofessionalism. They actually tell these soon-to-be Marines that their rifle is your bitch and to slap it as hard as you like. I’m literally shaking right now. /s

Get your blood pressure meds before you read further;

When Lt. Gen. Kevin Iiams, commander of Marine Corps Training and Education Command, opened a draft version of a Marine Corps-commissioned report on boot camp gender integration in spring 2021, he was incensed at what he found.

Inside the University of Pittsburgh report ? which ultimately would stretch to more than 700 pages and cover topics ranging from recruits’ injury rates to boot camp staffing challenges ? one annex grabbed Iiams’ attention. It detailed all the “sexually demeaning and gender-based language” described by drill instructors and recruits in focus groups the university had run.

Within days, Iiams hit the road, making back-to-back trips to Marine Corps Recruit Depots Parris Island, South Carolina, and San Diego to address staff and drill instructors directly.

“My assessment at that point was, this is not something that could actually wait,” Iiams told Marine Corps Times in an end of September interview. “There was no way that we could have let this go on, if this was actually still festering.”

The independent study was commissioned in 2020 as the Marine Corps faced a directive from Congress to make boot camp training fully coed at both Marine Corps recruit depots within eight years.

…

During the two-year period that University of Pittsburgh investigators spent at the two recruit depots, unnamed interviewees described how sexually derogatory and explicit language was used by drill instructors to build rapport with recruits ? an approach specific to the all-male training environment the Corps is increasingly leaving behind.

“The way I loosen them up, I sometimes say like sexual stuff ‘cause we’re all males, just to break the ice,” a San Diego-based male senior drill instructor told an interviewer.

When teaching recruits how to drill, he said he instructed them to face forward, but use peripheral vision to remain aware of their surroundings. He described giving recruits the example of going to the mall with their girlfriend and watching another woman with large breasts walk by.

“You don’t want to get caught,” the senior drill instructor said. “You’re not going to turn your head, right? You use your fricking (we call it) titty vision. ‘Ahh, yes, sir!’ They get all excited.”

The senior drill instructor went on to describe sexual ditties used at boot camp and at Weapons and Field Training Battalion that had to be amended when women joined the unit.

Despite acknowledgements in the interview that he wasn’t supposed to be using this kind of language around recruits, the drill instructor appeared to defend the practice as a way to create a closer bond with recruits.

“They got to giggle and get excited when you walk about stuff like that,” he said. “And it’s just the way for you to buy into them.”

Other examples of demeaning and sexual language highlighted in the report included recruits being instructed to “reach up the skirt” and “smack that whore” or “smack that bitch” in rifle drills.

“They say that the M-16 is your bitch, and to slap it as hard as you like,” a recently graduated new Marine told University of Pittsburgh interviewers. “I was in a working party … and they asked us what we named our rifles, and one recruit named it after a porn star. Everyone thought that was awesome.”

For female drill instructors and recruits, anecdotes of demeaning language took other forms.

A newly graduated female Marine told investigators that her female drill instructors had warned her that if she talked to male recruits, the drill instructors “are going to call you a slut.”

Female drill instructors and staff members talked about the way their mindset had been influenced by being told by instructors during their own early training that they’d be seen as either “a bitch, a slut or a lesbian” in the fleet, and they should choose which stereotype they wanted to confirm to.

Much more at the source.

Category: "The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves", "Your Tax Dollars At Work", Marines, YGBSM!!