Recovering from a tailspin.

• Author: Kammer, Jack
• Position: The integration of women into the military

SECRETARY OF THE NAVY JOHN DALTON was right--although for the wrong reasons--when he alleged in October that Admiral Frank Kelso was culpable for a "failure of leadership" in the Tailhook mess. Defense Secretary Les Aspin was right--also for the wrong reasons--to reject Dalton's recommendation that the chief of naval operations be fired for his shortcomings. Kelso's main failure was not in allowing Tailhook to happen, as Dalton charged, but in allowing it--and the entire future of the Navy--to be spun out of his control.

The scandal surrounding Navy pilots' Tailhook Association convention in 1991, particularly the sexual abuse charges made by Lt. Paula Coughlin, is typically reported as a clear-cut example of what's wrong with the military regarding the expanding role of women: The old-boy network just doesn't get it and sanctions misogyny as a semi-official policy.

But when the events are examined from a perspective less distorted by feminist aims and ideology, that black-and-white view fades to battleship gray. The picture that emerges is one of people whose commitment to military preparedness is dubious but whose fixation on sexual politics is unquestionable. Criticism of "male culture" and calls for male sensitivity training mask more complex issues about integrating women fully into the military and instituting universal standards of performance and behavior.

Tailhook wasn't the first time a complicated military issue was reduced to a simple morality play of bad men oppressing virtuous women. On May 28, 1990, the National Organization for Women picketed in Annapolis to register its unhappiness over reports that upperclassmen at the Naval Academy had chained a female first-year student named Gwen Dreyer to a urinal. But the protesters were countered by a group of female midshipmen, one of whom said that the incident was "not a matter of gender, it's a part of lite here."

This woman told the Baltimore Sun, in reports published the next day, that she had participated in the hazing of females and that before the 1989 Army-Navy football game, she had "helped to strip, tar and feather a West Point cadet." She also said that female midshipmen were involved in handcuffing Dreyer to the urinal. Another female middle told the picketers, "There is no way you have of knowing the truth....you don't know what the norm is....you are doing a lot of damage." A third academy woman, possibly referring to the Annapolis newspaper's banner headline...