Reform the Navy? Fine. Humanity? No.

A quarter-century ago, as the final American combat units staggered and straggled out of Vietnam and the monthly draft quotas hit zero, the United States Army launched a new recruiting campaign. The slogan: Today’s Army Wants to Join You.

On May 22, 1996, in an editorial entitled, “The Death of an Admiral,” the New York Times assessed Jeremiah Boorda’s contribution to the national defense. The piece noted that, although Adm. Boorda could not change the Navy’s “sexist culture” in two years, he nonetheless “dealt swiftly with sailors and officers who sexually harassed women colleagues, and watched over the integration of women on combat ships. It was enlightened leadership.” The editorial cautioned, however, that “the Navy needs to be more sensitive to the emotional psychological state of its senior officers.”

These two events are not entirely unrelated. Indeed, they fairly scream that the problem with the military is not that it has grown too different from the people. The problem is that it has grown too similar. If anything, the military’s current travails over matters of gender provide a metaphor for what this civilization — this unlovely place of metastasizing rights unrelated to obligations, emotional self-obsession, cultural anarcho-banality and spiritual exhaustion — has become. To begin to see this, all you have to do is apply the appropriate contemporary terminologies.

The U.S. military and the more feral elements of the feminist movement are engaged in an abusive, codependent relationship. The feminists, who want the military to join them, are the abusers. Indeed, their behavior patterns are textbook.

Their overriding interest is themselves. They manufacture endless demands, claim rights where none exist and elevate their feelings — especially of victimization — to the status of absolutes.

They show no interest in either the well-being of their partner or the health of the relationship. They’re endlessly angry, always on the alert for new incidents and affronts to justify their rage. Anything will do. When present grievances fail to satisfy, they draw upon the past — or the future. Their rage, once activated, demands extreme punishment, regardless of the severity of the “offense” or the innocence of the “perpetrator.”

When criticized or questioned, they attack. They demand submission for the sake of submission. And finally, they appear willfully oblivious to the harm they do. In the end, they just don’t care.

But why should the military remain in this abusive relationship?

Again, the answers are textbook. First, they have a legitimate need for women. They have for a long time. Second, in the past, they have indeed been guilty of insensitivity and worse, although they seem unable or unwilling to place such transgressions in proper perspective. The abusing partner knows it and uses it. Third, they’re trapped in a difficult family situation. The rich uncle who supports them seems more interested in advancing the feral feminist cause than in providing for the common defense. Fourth, they keep hoping that things will change. They believe that trying harder, or making more concessions, or just waiting, will amend the abuser’s ways.

Finally, they suffer from impaired self-esteem, itself the result of submission to abuse. This prevents them from taking the decisive step: looking the abuser in the eye and saying, quietly but firmly, “This relationship is over. Forever.”

Of course, analogy is not analysis. Neither is metaphor exact. But the military’s ordeal points, and more than metaphorically, to a civilization in decadence. Literary critic Robert Adams once defined decadence as “the deliberate neglect of the essentials of self-preservation.” His phrase here is doubly apt.

Women contribute mightily to the national defense. It is proper that they should; equality must also mean equality of responsibility. But equality is not sameness, and the attempt to create a world in which everything is available to everybody all the time has less to do with responsibility than with madness. It is certainly military madness. In fact, a world was the special vision of one of history’s most notorious madmen, the Marquis de Sade. He considered it paradise. Of course, when he offered that definition, he was talking about access to other people’s bodies, about sex.

And so are we. Gender is not a social construct. It is one of the oldest categories in nature. Our species was male and female eons before it was human. Our species’ experiment with gendered humanness is barely underway: a few score millennia, at best. We’ve learned that license and repression, anything-goes and nothing’s-acceptable are, in their separate ways, equally unavailing and unworkable. Yet never before have they coexisted so bizarrely. Only in America could pandering pornography and pathological prudishness coexist. No civilization in history has ever debased sexuality twice-over in this way. None has ever deliberately neglected this aspect of its survival in this way. No civilization in history has ever — to put it plainly — made such a mess of its sex life.

And here again, the military is metaphor. Rampant sexuality and Inquisitorial repression produce a hideous dissonance. Rules bear no relationship to realities, or punishments to transgressions. Blatant copulations go unremarked; the pregnant come and go as they please; dumb jokes destroy careers. All anyone really knows is that issues of gender now dominate institutions’ life and consciousness, and warp its purposes. And no one prospers, save those who created this abusive situation, and those who find in codependence a way to advance their careers.

It didn’t, of course, really begin the day the U.S. Army decided to start joining individuals, instead of the other way around. Nor will it end any time soon, even if the entire defense establishment were properly sensitized, diversified, quoted, neutered, and neutered. The problem cannot even be addressed until the American people realize that the national obsession with rights, with sexuality, and with whim, has brought this about. Then, and only then, will it be possible to start defending the defenders — male and female — and end this abusive relationship forever.