Militaries have depended on unacknowledged women’s labor including sex work to function
Evidence
Women’s labor, though often unacknowledged and overlooked, has long been essential to the workings of the U.S. military, as with most militaries across time and place. This has been true with women who wash the laundry, cook the food, and nurse injured soldiers back to health. This has been true with soldiers’ wives, who are expected to perform an outsized share of the childrearing and to create feelings of community on military bases. And it has also been true with sex. Throughout history, women’s sex work has been used to help make male troops happy—or at least happy enough to keep working for the military. — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 477
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s sacrifice article theme — women’s labor and sex work as a hidden cost of military readiness, echoing militarized sacrifice dynamics.
Related
- About 95 percent of military spouses abroad are female (similarity 0.84)
- Providing paid commercial sex keeps troops financially dependent and enlisted (similarity 0.82)
- Military leaders feared sex because relationships could compete with their monopoly on troops’ loyalty (similarity 0.82)
- Militaries use paid access to sex to deepen troops’ dependence on military salaries (similarity 0.81)
- In absolute numbers, more men than women are sexually victimized in the military. (similarity 0.80)
- Base community life depends on unpaid spouse labor under subtle coercion (similarity 0.79)
- Military tolerance of prostitution is limited by its threat to troop loyalty (similarity 0.78)
- Training soldiers to kill requires dehumanization that extends to women and ethnic others (similarity 0.78)