Militaries regulate soldiers’ sex access by controlling women and their labor

Evidence

Hence, military leaders across the centuries have endeavored not just to provide troops with sex but also to control their access to it. Controlling access to sex has meant controlling women and their sexual labor: restricting them to particular areas, mandating health inspection cards, and so forth. In colonial India, Britain’s 1864 Cantonment Acts gave British commanders the power to bring Indian sex workers into military camps, license them as prostitutes, subject the women to medical exams, and house them in brothels called chaklas within view of soldiers’ barracks. The former Air Force officer and base expert Mark Gillem observes how this kept the women “conspicuously close” to the soldiers but “conveniently out of the barracks.” Just as in the camptowns of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the aim has ultimately been the control of men and men’s labor, which allows a military to function. To paraphrase the political scientist Cynthia Enloe, military leaders have made brothels as important to bases as their dry docks. — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 547

Categorization

• XREF: Pairs with the camptown-sex-economy material in earlier chapters; also resonates with the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ theme of regulating women’s bodies for male/state order.
• SHARE: Send to anyone studying military prostitution or British colonial governance — the 1864 Cantonment Acts as an early licensing system.