Anti-masculinity in the military lecture at Vassar featuring former West Point prof

STARRS

We catch up with a former left-wing West Point professor who had fretted, “I am reminded of the tragic connection between masculinity and war.” He had studied “male gender norms” at the US Military Academy during the woke years.

After resigning in a huff from West Point because wokeness got kicked out of the Academy, it wasn’t too surprising he landed as a professor at a former girls school, Vassar College, where he seems far more suited.

The campus “newspaper of record” at Vassar recently had an article about a lecture by an author of an upcoming book, “God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood.” The author writes for Mother Jones and and other left-wing sites so you can take a guess at where he stands.

The campus newspaper said of the book,

“God Forgives, Brothers Don’t” expands on Craven’s previous reporting on the military’s role in forming American conceptions of masculinity. The book focuses on how military academies, such as the United States Military Academy at West Point, uphold and strengthen these cultural values. (Our emphasis in bold)

They don’t mean that in a good way. Masculinity, which exists and has existed since the beginning at a WAR academy, is seen as problematic.

Also not a surprise that the former West Point professor fretting about masculinity there, Graham Parsons, was part of the lecture because, it was stated, he was a major source for the author’s book.

At the lecture, Parsons said of the book,

“It’s a chilling portrayal of how the vast military-educational complex, which includes the military service academies, private military colleges and prep schools, ROTC and JROTC programs and college fraternities, came to be, and the consequences of the violent, dominative, misogynistic vision of masculinity it fosters.”

Rather amusing is the author noted the “complex dynamic” connection between West Point and Vassar in that during the 20th century, Vassar students would visit West Point for social events on weekends which resulted in many marriages. Commenting on this, the author said,

“This is obviously a very heteronormative, old-school, patriarchal idea of courtship and partnership and all of the rest.”

Something that’s been around since the dawn of humanity is “old-school”. Okay Marxist.

But then Vassar became a “hotbed of activism against Vietnam” and some of the girls went to protest West Point. He reads from his book,

“In October 1969, 200 Vassar students congregated at West Point’s gates, where they handed out flowers to cadets and urged them to abandon their commissions. Some cadets snatched their flowers and ate them. Another sarcastically told a protester that he couldn’t speak because he was on his way to ‘poison gas class.’”

Salute to all those grads who were at West Point in the fall of 1969, dealing with future AWFL’s who can’t take a joke.

Skipping ahead 50 years, six members of the Military Academy joined Vassar students and faculty for a briefing on the Physics and Astronomy Department’s quantum computer. But leftists on the campus were horrified,

“These college-sponsored academic exchanges between Vassar and West Point enable WP to develop technology that can threaten personal privacy, advance war profiteering, and automate genocide.”

Where are those daisies?

Then the author and Parsons condemn SecWar Hegseth for “articulating a very aggressive, violent, domineering type of masculinity that he wants to inculcate in the military.” All because Hegseth said he needs the military to be lethal warfighters operating on standards, merit and excellence — in order to fight and win our nation’s wars. (Gen. MacArthur said that too, go figure.)

But more hand-wringing from Parsons whether “this presentation of masculinity can be salvaged.”

“I’m torn. I wonder if we’re in a moment where there’s a lot of potential. I keep thinking that the gender identity that this administration so overtly displays and conspicuously displays, it seems to me to be based in a kind of insecurity, like it needs to assert itself in this really grotesque, aggressive way… So that’s why I wondered if we’re in a moment with potential for, you know, new gender dynamics, new gender identities. Because it seems like they recognize they have to scream at you to get you to comply.”

Heaven help us: New gender dynamics and gender identities in the military and at West Point. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and others will just be smiling.

Interestingly, a member of the audience who was a military doctor in the Vietnam War pushed back on their narrative,

“I found my patients to be extraordinarily commendable. And, to be perfectly honest with you, I wish we had more of that in medicine. Because what you guys are seeing as conforming, I see as commitment to a cause, rather than to money.”

But a female Vassar student wasting her time doing a research project on “conceptions of gender and sexuality during the world wars” shows the results of severe brainwashing of students:

“Disturbingly, West Point seems to me to be an institution in many ways set in the past, and the ongoing relationship between Vassar and West Point is troubling in that it reinforces a history of gender hierarchies… This information was enlightening, and it colored my perspective regarding Vassar’s ties with West Point given their concerning history of abusing cadets—sexual and otherwise—and the gender-essentialist views which have been perpetuated by the military and West Point by proxy.”

Good luck with getting a date at the Point.