For the most part I didn’t serve with any women.
This isn’t to say that women weren’t in the Navy during the years I was in, but only that because of my rate and training I had almost no contact with female sailors.
I enlisted in 1989, and was discharged in 1994.
During that time I went to the Navy’s (at the time) only co-educational boot camp: NTC Orlando. For the most part male and female recruits were segregated, though there were some classes that would be given to more than one boot camp company. One of the few classes I remember vividly was a self-defense class, especially the section talking about sexual assault. I can’t swear I have it memorized still, but I seem to recall that the stat used in that class was that 33% of all women would be subject to some kind of sexual assault, and 5-10% of all men, that would be reported. It was discussed that the actual numbers were going to be higher, and that no one knew how much higher.
During my training, between NFAS and NNPS, there were about 20 female officers that were instructors. But saying I served with them is a bit of a stretch - there was no common experience to really base that on. It didn’t help that the majority of those women were LDOs, who would never serve in any position other than instructors at NNPS. As such, while there was no question about their technical ability in the subjects being taught, there was also a palpable difference between them and “real” officers. Which was identical to the attitudes towards male LDOs fulfilling the same roles.
After that, I don’t think I even saw a woman in uniform other than while I was in transit to or from my command. Until we got tapped to provide a platform for midshipman cruises for two groups of about 20 female ROTC cadets each. Before they embarked the whole command was very carefully reminded of the regulations about fraternization, and that any complaint directed by the cadets about a sailor’s behavior would not have the presumption of innocence for the sailor. We had no problems with the cadets for some reason. (And morale, which had been in the toilet for reasons I won’t get into here, actually got up to merely rotten. A huge improvement.)
Then, about this time, Tailhook happened. And I’d been thinking that the stats I’d heard in bootcamp must have been exaggerated, or something. Until one of the nicerchiefs on my ship made an aside comment to me on our way to one of the innumerable sexual harassment training sessions that came from Tailhook. He quite seriously said to me something along the lines of, ‘It’s a shame how those guys’ careers are being sunk because that stupid woman didn’t know where she shouldn’t go.’
I grant that this was fifteen years ago, now, so attitudes may have changed, but I reserve my right to remain skeptical that things are as rosy as flyboy88’s view suggests. Without a clear mandate from the mid-to-upper level supervisors, enlisted as well as comissioned, I don’t think that the institutional attitudes are going to change all that quickly. Certainly most of the officers and senior enlisted I knew on my ship handed out the sexual harassment training because it was mandated from above, not from conviction on their part.
Of course, change might have come more quickly than I am anticipating. As I stated, my service was almost exclusively male-only. Women weren’t, at the time, allowed to serve on combatant vessels, and that restriction meant that there weren’t any women Nucs. That’s changed, now, so there may be a bit less of the them/us dichotomy. But I’d have to be convinced of it.
I haven’t looked at the Salon.com article, yet. But I doubt it’s making up anything out of whole cloth. There may be some exaggeration, or statistical adjustments that not everyone would agree with. But I’m sure sexual assault still does happen in the military. The suggested reasons for it may be all over the place, from men are evil, to military social codes that often seem to reach consensus at a lowest common denomenator. I can only hope that the incident rates really are going down.