Dyke to dyke

Ritual reproduction at a U.S. men's military college

ABIGAIL E. ADAMS

Photos taken by the author on 1 March 1993.

The U.S. military now trains women combat pilots (and even closeted homosexuals), but two military colleges are in court to defend their right as state institutions to accept only heterosexual men. This article examines the resistance to enrol women at one of these colleges, which I will refer to as 'South East Military Institute' (SEMI), by analysing the institution's rituals known as the 'Ratline' and 'Break Out'.

SEMI is one of two remaining state-supported men's colleges in the United States, both of which are Southern 'military' schools, although not official U.S. armed service academies (which have been coeducational since 1976). SEMI and its state's government were ordered by U.S. federal courts to either admit women, cut state funding, or create a SEMI-style program elsewhere in the state. The U.S. Supreme Court refused in May to consider SEMI's appeal, and SEMI's governing board this Fall will announce the plan that complies with federal courts - but keeps women from enrolling (Associated Press, 8 August 1993).

SEMI had won an initial 1991 case against the U.S. Department of Justice when a district federal judge accepted SEMI's argument that it provides valuable diversity for the state's higher education: 'Excluding women is substantially related to this mission ... [SEMI] has set its eye on the goal of the citizen-soldier, ... and I will permit it to continue to do so'.

The decision was an innovative application of political correctness, but was condemned by SEMI's opponents as the work of an 'anachronistic' yet 'powerful old boys' network' (Goodman, 1991), devoted to keeping women out of business, politics and the military. Yet the issue was not about excluding women generally--just excluding them from SEMI. One cadet (student) wrote me, ‘Why do women want to open all doors closed to them? ... Women belong in the military but not at "SEMI" '.

'The very thing that women are seeking would no longer be there' if women were admitted, said SEMI's 1992 senior class president. Alum were more adamant: 'The first moment any woman enters [SEMI], she will be fooling herself - because SEMI will cease to exist'.

I stumbled into SEMI's controversy while teaching anthropology at a nearby women's college. My students mentioned SEMI when we studied Melanesian rites of passage. SEMI's Commandant of Students sent our class a videotape of SEMI's freshman or 'Rat' year, and later visited as our guest informant. I found he shared 'the anthropological romance with initiation rites' (Herdt, 1982:xvi). SEMI had won its first case the day before, and both the Commandant and I were intrigued by what ritual analysis would reveal about SEMI's 'uniqueness'. The Commandant asked me to lecture on ritual process at SEMI, and to attend SEMI's major ritual, Break Out. I welcomed the opportunity to leave the armchair - as far as my gender would permit - and study this ineffable 'thing' that women would destroy at SEMI.

SEMI's opponents and supporters have also focused on SEMI's famous regime of 'bizarre psychological and physical ordeals', as distinctive as the cadets' crisp uniforms and buzz cuts (Yoder, 1991). As I watched Break Out in 1993, the ritual seemed less of a 'bizarre ordeal' than a metaphorical birth, an impression which the SEMI cadets corroborated when we analysed the ritual later. I was further struck, not by the intensity of 'hazing', but by the tenderness of the seniors, who are called 'dykes'. Why, at a school dedicated to heterosexual men, would its major ritual recall childbirth and its central role, female homosexuality?

Men's rituals: here, there but not everywhere

My students were right: SEMI's 'Ratline', Break Out, and 'dyke' system fit perfectly with Van Gennep's tripartite scheme of separation, liminality and re-aggregation (1960). SEMI's method for creating the 'citizen--soldier' includes three missions of military discipline, academics and athletics, but at its heart is the Ratline. In SEMI parlance, the Ratline is 'the longest distance between two points', exaggerated routes around campus that freshmen had to follow, but in general it refers to the seven months of initiation they must endure to become cadets.

The question of why men need and participate in initiation rituals has re-emerged along with the 'men's movement'. Previously, arguments centred on the psychoanalytic, such as the thesis that these rites break boys from identifying with and depending on mothers (Whiting et al., 1967), or Bettelheim's idea that men express and resolve 'womb envy' by culturally creating ritual analogies of what women do 'naturally': create people (1954).

Why then don't all societies have male cults? Robert Bly (1990) suggests that U.S. men particularly need initiation rituals in post-World War 2 society, because as fathers left the home for work, boys lost their male role model.

It was the early literature on the male cults of Melanesia and Amazonia that initially reminded my students of SEMI's rituals. These writings described these societies as having unilinear descent systems that emphasize sexual polarities, in which one sex forms the core of a local group, and the Other sex are the affines, aliens, spies, possibly enemies (Murphy, 1959; Allen, 1967). SEMI was conceived of in 1834, the beginning of the Victorian era, certainly a period of sexual polarities. The antebellum upperclassmen took pride in winnowing out the 'weak' and creating manhood for the survivors, claiming, 'Give us your boy and we'll send you a man'. They also invented some of the harshest hazing methods of the Ratline: the 'company room', a nightly session of corporal punishment and exercise; 'sweat parties', a company room conducted in a steam-filled shower room; 'straining' and 'finning out', which are taxing postures that Rats must hold; and 'ragging', or menially serving upperclassmen (Wise, 1978).

It was only after the World War 2 era that Break Out was created as a formal culmination to the Ratline experience. Originally it was called 'Bloody Sunday', and Rats had to run a gauntlet of the bodies and fists of upperclassmen, including seniors. Later classes of Rats 'ran the stoops', fighting their way up the barracks' flights of steps over mattresses, juniors and sophomores, but aided by seniors.

Today, by contrast with the Melanesian and the Victorian era SEMI cults, secrecy and cruelty are not so important (President Reagan starred in a 1938 Hollywood movie about SEMI, Brother Rat). Many of the techniques resemble Outward Bound, EST and other 'New Age' consciousness-raising programs. However, like other male cults, the predominating metaphors of SEMI's Ratline still emphasize and transform sexuality, childhood and family.

Separation: SEMI's unique method

From the first day 'in barracks', the entering class is separated from previous life, but also from SEMI as 'rats' (the epitome of a liminal animal), 'the lowest form of life ... but still higher than anything outside', stated a cadet. They enter an upside-down world of unpredictable rules, space and time. The Ratline is administered by the upperclassmen in the barracks: the four floors of unlocked, spartan dormitory rooms, organized in balconies, outside staircases and communal bathrooms around a central courtyard, which are ranked by class from the ground floor of the senior class to the fourth floor of entering class. This is 'home' for 1,300 cadets. Right away the new students find it is not like home:

When the class of 1980 arrived in August, it was greeted by veterans [who] were polite and friendly and put the new [students] to bed that night without introducing them to the rat system. But that same night they hauled them out of bed... (Wise, 1978).

The rats are stripped of young manhood and infantilized: put to bed, yelled at in baby talk, told how to eat, how to bathe, how to walk, how to talk. Like babies, their bodies are not their own. They are reduced to the 'sucklings' that Victor Turner described in The Ritual Process.

The 'suckling' imagery is used as well by SEMI cadets to subordinate. Classmates resist and insult each other and lowerclassmen with 'You suck' or 'Suck it in.' Another tradition is called the Rape of the First Sentinel. When the first rat marches 'guard detail', he is attacked by the seniors, who rip off parts of his clothing, spray him with shaving cream, and throw days-old food and used chewing tobacco on him. Said 1990's rat sentinel 'It sucked' (emphasis mine), successfully externalizing the 'rape'. His accosters reported, 'Pretty good rat. He took it like a man' (The Cadet 1990).

Before 'Break Out', some one-third of the entering class has left, either dropping out or not meeting the requirements. Those who remain have dissolved into the mass of 'good rats ... low profile, subservient, doesn't stand out'. This is the epitome of the highly valued 'Rat Unity', a bonding and levelling said to be essential for survival. But each also has a special Rat Daddy or 'dyke', a senior who serves as his mentor and advocate. The rat/aide helps his senior 'dyke (deck) out' or dress, and previously, did 'light ragging such as running a few errands', making the dyke's bed, shining his shoes. The rat receives advice and haven from his senior dyke, whom he had the privilege of visiting 'informally' (Wise, 1978: 298).

Liminality: break out

Break Out is announced during the last month of winter. After morning classes end, the upperclassmen 'resurrect' Rat discipline, and have one hour to 'purge' themselves using the harsher measures. Juniors and sophomores taunt the Rats, while the seniors encourage them: 'You'll make it'. The Rats are marched to an auditorium where the senior class president tells them to do well, because after graduation, 'all we leave behind is you'. Then they run to Break Out field, on the 'outskirts' (Nelson, 1993) of the campus, which the town's firetruck has sprayed to create a medium of mud.

The Rats crawl on their bellies through the mud some 50 yards to a first 10-foot high bank. As they crawl, upperclassmen of juniors and sophomores attack them, shout at them, push them to their bellies, sit on them, pull them back by their legs, fill their faces and clothes and 'all orifices' with the mud. By the time the Rats reach the first bank, their eyes and ears are filled with mud, and they can barely grope their way along. Many Rats have lost their pants. They cannot tell who is friend, fellow rat or foe. At the base of the bank, they scramble over each other towards the top, but are pushed down by sophomores and juniors. Some Rats ltry to help each other in an effort at 'Rat Unity'; however, it is largely their seniors who help them up. At the top of the first bank, the sophomores and juniors toss the Rats into a water ditch, pull them out and push them up another bank of brush.

Integration: dyke to dyke

Only when they have gotten to the top of the second bank is the ordeal over. The seniors rush to greet them, tenderly wash the mud out of their eyes and ears, and wrap them in their own blankets. At this point, dykes embrace each other, take photos and pose for the professional video cameraman. The rats run back to the rear of barracks, where their dykes hose them down en masse, and give them dry clothes. According to my cadet informants, the moment when the seniors wash away the Rats' mud is their 'incorporation' into the corps of cadets.

Several alumni and parents anxiously wait on the path returning from Break Out field, although they are urged not to attend. 'Go get 'em, Killer!' shouts one. Upperclassmen lead them in cheers and exercise chants about impregnating local women. As night falls, the entire 'corps of cadets' assembles in the barracks' courtyard. Each class gives their cheer, including the freshmen. They are no longer called Rats, except Brother Rat by classmates. They are 'part of the SEMI corps of cadets', but not until graduation will they become 'SEMI men'.

Engenderings: monstrous mothers and dyke fathers

Break Out struck me as a birth from which the newborn emerges blinded and covered by birth fluids, to be cleaned up and blanketed. One observer commented how the rats in their belly-scramble across the mud field resemble the cartoon Sperms in the old health class movies, competing to overcome the vagina's obstacles, penetrate the egg and conceive life. Given the metaphor of the ritual as birth rather than conception, one could almost see the ritual as a Super-birth, in which all the sperms have won and all the babies are born. The Super-birth has an accelerated gestation of seven months and delivery of one to two hours. In the Superwomb of SEMI (always referred to as 'She'), the Super-foetuses are actively conditioned and will 'labour' their way to their daddies, after 'breaking the water' of the ditch.

Break Out also transforms the Ratline's gender benders in which the Rats are sterile, effeminate, and subordinate: babies, dyke 'wives', and 'passive' homosexuals. Immediately aher their birth, they become virile, active, even 'Killers', whose first feeding will be a special steak dinner from their Rat Daddies.

If the seniors are the fathers, who are the mothers? The mud identifies them: the juniors and sophomores who become one with the womb/field, as their bright yellow sweats become caked with the medium created by the phallic fire-engine spray that the seniors have arranged. I suggest that the Rat 'line' symbolizes ties with mothers, or at SEMI, with the juniors and sophomores, who deliver most of the hazing. It is the umbilical cord connected to monstrous mothers, who rule over a childhood of rules one doesn't write, punishment one doesn't deserve, and a hierarchical enmeshment that one can't break.

The upperclassmen also use the imagery of rapists: sexual, sterile, but powerful. Ethnographers have documented how the threat of homosexual rape sets hierarchies in all-male settings like prisons and fraternities (Sanday, 1990; Blake, 1971). But juniors and sophomores lose their power in Break Out, their ability like mothers or rapists to hold 'the corps'/the body from manhood. They will only regain power by becoming 'dykes' as seniors.

'Dyke' refers to SEMI's dress uniform, and to the rat himself. 'A rat often takes on the traits of his dyke', (Wise, 1978). For Break Out, many rats shave into their buzz cuts their class year and the year of their senior dykes. The term 'dyke', then, is a clear example of teknonymy (1), in which the reciprocal term denotes how the Rat and the Senior create each other.

' "It is the first classman's most important relationship", stated a former Commandant of Students, "until they are married and have children of their own" ' (Wise, 1978). In fact, a senior told the SEMI counsellor that being a dyke 'is like having my own child'. 'They feel a paternal instinct towards them', the counsellor concluded. In 1990, when a group of rats attacked a rival school's mascot at an off-campus football game and broke several spectators' bones, the senior class took full responsibility like parents for minor children (The Cadet, 1990).

The parenting may be paternity, but it is also ambiguous. Rat Daddy is in fact 'a combination of your mother, father, and older brother' (The Bullet, 1990). The Rat Daddies' role in Break Out is both the doctor's work of delivery, and the nurses' 'dirty' work of washing and eventually feeding the newborn (Ortner, 1974).

The role's ambiguity is highlighted by the term, 'dyke', which since the 1920s commonly refers to homosexual women (Mills, 1989). In fact, this current usage may derive from the military term, and the domestic nature of the military officer's aide. One may argue that the word doesn't carry the modern - and negative - connotation within SEMI's tradition-laden world of meanings. But a 'dyke' may also be seen as someone who can bear and nurture children, participates in same-sex relations, and does not have subordinate or subordinating sexual relations with men.

Perhaps the seniors are best seen as 'dyke midwives' in the ritual, mediating between and transforming three parallel series of sexual roles: infant/mother/father; cocksucker/homosexual rapist/dyke; wife/mother/midwife. The dyke midwife is the powerful mediating point, who creates 'mothers' out of wives, and their own redeeming 'dyke' paternity. SEMI cadets 'matriculate' into wifehood and motherhood and graduate into 'SEMI manhood' and grandpaternity.

Ritual reproduction and unilinear descent

The question still remains: why can't women attend SEMI? SEMI does socialize its cadets to be 'gentlemen' with explicit instructions on how to treat 'ladies'. Cadets are taught to set women apart, rather than to mentor, lead or work with women. This paternalism infuriates those who view SEMI as a patriarchal institution. In fact, given SEMI's emphasis on creating mentors out of teen-agers, women might do quite well, given their head start in relational skills.

The most informative statement was from the thoughtful cadet who stopped telling me what women could or couldn't endure and said simply 'I could never do "it" [the hazing?] to a woman'. At SEMI, a 'gentleman does not so much as lay a finger on a lady', states the Rat Bible. Instead, SEMI's procreation is monosexual, establishing a patrilineal descent kinline through an inversion of childbirth, in which the foetus and father can take control of the generating body. Women are peripheral to SEMI and have no maternal rights. although they are necessary to establish the cadet’ heterosexuality. In Ring Figure, the formal dance when the juniors receive their class rings, the cadets and their dates (no one attends 'stag', alone) create the 'figure' of their class year on the dance floor.

I propose that the fight is not over keeping women out of men's domains; there is a 'woman' (in fact several) in SEMI's body/corps (cf. Martin, 1987) and rituals. SEMI has created a unilinear descent system of fictitious kin through its alliance with the state. But now SEMI's men are fighting for their reproductive rights and family welfare, even after being turned down by the Supreme Court in 1993. In an interesting twist, SEMI and the old boys have joined the pro-choice battle.

1. Teknonymy: the custom of identifying a person with a name which marks him/her as parent of a child.

I would like to thank SEMI's Commandant of Students, the professors of its Behavioral Science and Leadership Department, and its corps of cadets, particularly the juniors and seniors. They invited me to attend Break Out, freely shared their insights on the ritual and the court case, and critiqued my initial ritual analysis. Nancie S. Gonzalez urged me to write up the SEMI ritual analysis. Thanks also to Susan McKinnon, Fred Damon, and Sandra Bamford at the University of Virginia, Belle Edson of Hollins College, and the Hollins and University of Virginia students of my Symbol and Ritual courses.

I owe special thanks to 'fellow' graduate student Anna Lawson and husband Tom Lawson. Without their combined expertise in anthropology, SEMI and editing, this process would have been a lot less interesting.

REFERENCES CITED:

Allen, Michael.1967. Male Cults and Secret Initiations in Melanesia. Melbourne: Melbourne U.P.

Bettelheim, Bruno. 1954. Symbolic Wounds: Puberty rites and the envious male. New York: Collier.

Blake, James.1971. The Joint. New York:

Bly, Robert. 1990. Iron John: A book about men. Reading: Addison-Wesley.

The Bullet. 1989.'South East Military Institute.'

Goodman, Ellen. 1991. Washington Post, 22 June.

Herdt, Gilbert H., ed. 1982. Rituals of Manhood: Male initiation in Papua New Guinea. Berkeley: U. of California P.

Kiser, Judge Jackson L. 1991. 17 June decision.

Martin, Emily. 1987. The Woman in the Body: A cultural analysis of reproduction. Boston: Beacon.

Mills, Jane. 1989. Womanwords: A dictionary of words about women. New York: Free Press.

Murphy, Robert F. 1959. Social structure and sex antagonism. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 15(2):89-98.

Nelson, Diane. 1993. 'Rigoberta Menchu Jokes', Paper presented at 13th International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, Mexico City.

Ortner, Sherry. 1974. 'Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?' in Woman, Culture and Society, ed. M.Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere. Stanford: Stanford U. P.

Sanday, Peggy Reeves. 1990. Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, brotherhood, and privilege on campus. New York: New York U.P.

Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process. Chicago: Aldine.

Van Gennep, Arnold. 1909 (1960). The Rites of Passage. Chicago: Chicago U.P.

Whiting, John et al. 1967. 'The function of male initiation ceremonies at puberty', in Personality and Social Life. R. Endelman, ed, New York: Random House.

Wise, Henry A. 1978. Drawing Out the Man. Charlottesville: U. of Virginia.

Yoder, Edwin. 1991. Washington Post. 2 June.