Hiring beautiful women for the saloon, inviting attractive young women to closely watched dances, spreading seductive propaganda, arresting allegedly promiscuous girls to keep them from being with soldiers, or pressuring troops to write letters to their wives.
These are just some of the tactics imposed by the United States government to sexually stimulate its military during World War I and then frustrate them to be more aggressive on the battlefields scattered throughout Europe in 1917 and 1918.
The US Congress did not approve US participation in the conflict until April 6, 1917. And then preparations began. One of the most surprising, revealed by Cambridge University historian Eric Wycoff Rogers, shows how the US War Department wanted to harness repressed sexual energy to motivate its soldiers.
At the heart of this experiment, Rogers explains in an article published in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, was the Commission on Boot Camp Activities (CTCA). If something had characterized this organization, it was its interest in controlling the sexual life of soldiers and women. The argument used: prevent venereal infections and protect social morality in the United States.
But the Cambridge expert says that what this agency was really interested in was using human sexuality as a weapon to motivate troops to fight more ferociously. Almost 53,000 American soldiers died during the Great War and more than 202,000 were wounded.
President Woodrow Wilson had worked hard to keep his country neutral for two years. But everything began to change when a German submarine sank the ocean liner RMS Lusitania in 1915 and when it was revealed that the German imperial government was trying to get Mexico to attack the United States and retake the territories of Texas, Arizona and New Mexico.
"The war was not seen as relevant to young Americans as it was to Europeans," explains Rogers. "But with Wilson's sudden change of heart, the government had to work hard to convince civilians to support entry into the conflict," she adds.
That change of opinion was not, according to the historian, anything simple. And many of the American soldiers ended up being recruited against their will. "In this context, the War Department actively exploited sexuality to psychologically manipulate US soldiers into fighting," he says.
The first thing that was done was to impose sexual abstinence in the barracks. But at the same time, militias were exposed to carefully controlled forms of sexual stimulation. The War Department believed that sexually satisfied men could not be easily motivated, so they sought to generate unsatisfied sexual desire.
The CTCA was established in April 1917 to control the sexual behavior of soldiers while they were training for combat. The Military Morale Section (MMS) was founded a year later, when the American Expeditionary Forces were deploying to Europe.
Led by Edward Lyman Munson, a high-ranking medical officer, the MMS took increasing control over the Boot Camp Activities Commission. Drawing on the records of the moral agency and the writings of the scholars and reformers who ran it, Rogers shows that these powerful figures believed that sexual climax wasted the energy that fueled a man's motivation.
Furthermore, they also believed that stimulating and then diverting a soldier's sex drive could increase his arousal. On the basis of this "parasexual logic", as the Cambridge historian calls it, a series of manipulative policies and activities were designed to regulate and incentivize soldiers.
Attractive female workers were strategically recruited to serve the troops in canteens on both sides of the Atlantic. The selected women, usually in their thirties (and all white), were chosen because they were considered young enough to be attractive but old enough to resist so-called "persimmon fever" and refrain from having sex with soldiers.
As Rogers points out, the moral agency motivational programs wanted these waitresses to provide a stimulating but not "dissipating" female presence. Balls were also organized in towns and cities near the training camps in the United States and in France.
The first thing this initiative sought was to prevent "licentious forms of dancing" and other overtly sexual behavior. But he was also concerned to look for women of the “right type”, a category that excluded almost all poor and non-white women. "Suddenly, the dances went from being a huge moral concern for CTCA investigators to becoming a crucial way to motivate soldiers," the historian said in a statement.
Black soldiers were excluded from these and other activities because white military leaders thought they could not be sexually motivated because they were supposedly "sexually licentious by nature." That is why most of these servicemen were assigned to non-combat units in World War I.
Through the Young Women's Christian Association, the CTCA indoctrinated women and youth from cities and towns near the training camps to advise them on how to 'protect' themselves from the troops. In addition, the allegedly most sexually active girls were removed from areas frequented by soldiers.
“By making sexual opportunities hard to find, the military was seeking to preserve men's fighting strength,” says Rogers. Thousands of women were arrested, tested under duress, and detained during America's brief involvement in the war.
"One of my key findings - the researcher points out - is that venereal diseases were mainly an excuse to monitor women and reduce the sexual opportunities of soldiers. Morality was also a pretext for these programs. However, the real purpose of these horrific measures was fundamentally to maintain the sexual frustration that kept members of the military motivated."
Edward Munson, head of the Morale Branch, acted on the conviction that "women have a powerful influence on military efficiency and morale." He wrote of the importance of "the girl behind the man behind the gun" and argued that "when women are goaded into patriotic sacrifice, men fear being lazy."
“Sexual denial, status anxiety, and perceived pressure from women—this was a powerful combination,” says Rogers. "By striving for women's approval, morale planners hoped that soldiers would do their duties without complaint, fight harder, and be willing to risk their lives."
The morale program was promoted by an elite group of military officers, civilian psychologists, and social reformers. Joining Munson were psychologist G. Stanley Hall, Harvard philosophy professor and war camp inspector William Ernest Hocking, and founder of the American Recreation and Parks Association Luther. H. Gulick.
Each of these men published books arguing that sexual control, along with the stimulation and diversion of sexual energy, was crucial to motivating soldiers. Unlike traditional moral reformers, they did not seek to suppress drive but to harness its energy to motivate male effort.
The sudden end of the war did not mark the end of these practices. morality or sexualized motivation. After the war, Munson and some. Campaigns to police women's sexual behavior continued for more than two decades, with police arresting thousands of women accused of being infected with STDs.
